Friday, February 19, 2016

Incoherent Campaign

Hillary Clinton now trails Bernie Sanders by 47% to 44% in a national poll. Before reading too much into that, it should be noted that it is a Fox News poll and that, like the general election, popular vote doesn’t really matter. A candidate has to garner delegates, and Hillary still has a significant advantage in that metric, if for no other reason than the superdelegates who do not care what voters think and are unanimously pledged to Hillary.

Still, it does show that her campaign message of “I am the reason you can’t have nice things” is not going over very well against the Sanders message of “vote for me if you want nice things.”

Hillary’s message, an effort to counter the Sanders liberalism and loudly applauded by Paul Krugman, is that candidates for office should not make promises on which they cannot deliver. I don’t know where she got that idea, since candidates of all political parties have been doing it for more than two centuries. In fact, she is doing it quite a bit of it herself in this campaign, but I won’t get into that.

Her argument is that Democrats shouldn’t try to do good things because the Republicans will stop them. She uses as an example how Republicans blocked Obama, and then claims she is “running for a third Obama term” and doesn’t seem to think that is just a little bit incoherent.

Which leads me to believe that if she occupies the White House we will have another president saying things like, “We are denying them space in which to plan their attacks.”

1 comment:

  1. bruce9:12 AM

    "..do not care what the voter thinks and are unanimously pledged to.." bothers me, just like the chair of the DNC doing stuff to favor HRC her favored candidate. The process is rigged, rigged I tell you!

    Actually, it often seems that way, but Obama turned that on it's head in 2008, and handed HRC her ass. Well, it might have been a wee bit different, but it showed that she was not the anointed one and shouldn't take for granted. I devoutly hope the same is playing out here. "running for a third Obama term" is not a strategy I would use, she is not he, he is not he after 8 years and look how that helped AL Gore..

    I don't think either candidate has a chance in heck of passing what they want through a republican congress, but at least Bernie is thinking big.

    And yes, Obama should put forth a SCOTUS candidate and the Rubs are wrong for trying to stop /block /delay him.

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