Slapping lipstick on a pig

Hillary Clinton has a tough row to hoe, and rightly so. As the co-architect of the dreamboat 90s, where we all imagined that government could make our lives better just having the smiling faces of the Clintons every night on the news, she was also there when the shades fell our eyes in the waning days of that experience.

When an over-hyped stock market fell about our ears, when tax hikes dug deeper into our lives, when storm troopers broke into a private hoime and snatched a child from freedom and sent him packing back to the island prison from whence he came. She was there for all of it – not to mention the scandals and corruption that arose from those years, and finally the pilfering of the White House artifacts that belonged to the people and the payoffs in the form of pardons to political donors.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza writes about some the problems she has to overcome in the weeks ahead;

As always when a group of Democrats are gathered, the conversation was dominated by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and revealed the problems and potential Clinton has in Iowa and beyond.

Asked to say whatever first came to mind when Clinton’s name was mentioned, the group offered a fascinating panoply of descriptions. “Can’t be trusted,” said one. “I just got a glimpse that she’s got an evil side to her,” said another. A third offered a backhanded compliment of sorts: “Very good at saying what she thinks we want to hear.” 

The Washington Time’s Stephen Dinan writes about a recent Fox 5/Rassmussen/WashTimes poll that indicates her negatives are high among voters;

Forty percent of Americans say they would vote to keep Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton from winning the presidency, more than twice the total for their No. 2 “anti-” pick, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

In a new Fox 5-The Washington Times-Rasmussen Reports survey, 64 percent of Republicans, 42 percent of third-party or independent voters, and 17 percent of Democrats said the candidate they most want to keep from the White House is Mrs. Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton is better known than any [other] presidential candidate on either side. She has a lot of people who love her and a lot of people who hate her,” said Scott Rasmussen, who conducted the poll.

While Mrs. Clinton performed poorly among most demographics, younger male voters were particularly cold. More than half of the adult men younger than 40 said they would use their vote to keep Mrs. Clinton from returning to the White House.

“If you look at the age breakdowns, younger people are more likely to put Clinton at the top of the list than older” people, Mr. Rasmussen said.

But the WaPo article tells us she’s trying to overcome those negatives;

In the first, footage is shown of the three generations of Clinton women — taken from a recent campaign stop. The candidate says: “As I travel around I see so many families who share the same values I was brought up with. …I’m proud to live by those values. But what I am most proud of is knowing who I’ve passed them onto.”

The second ad features Dorothy Rodham extolling her daughter’s lack of envy and her empathy. “She has empathy for other people’s unfortunate circumstances. I’ve always admired that because it isn’t always true of people,” Rodham adds. “I think she ought to be elected even if she weren’t my daughter.”

The images in both ads are all soft corners and heart-warming. Nary a word of policy is mentioned in either.

Well, why should she include any substance in her ads – those dreamboat 90s I mentioned were absolutely empty of substance as well. The stock market ballooned to unsustainable levels on a few words from Clinton – that he’d freed the market from downturned business cycles (more intriguing is that real market traders believed it). He’d been touted as the first “Black President” merely because he’d formed a committee to study racism – he didn’t actually do anything to rid us of racism, but he formed a committee.

The American people were gullible enough to re-elect Clinton even after he’d lied in our faces about countless policies he’d promised in 1993 campaign that he never enacted. He never got more than 49% of the popular vote, yet he called it a mandate from voters. Voters looked the other way while foreign money pored into the Clinton campaign in 1996, and voters have to look away while his wife is embroiled in the same types of scandals today.

Gerald Seib writes in the Wall Street Journal that Hillary thinks of herself as an agent of change;

And on the Democratic side, the goal of Hillary Clinton’s campaign is to show that she is a change agent as much as Sen. Obama is. Its message: There would be no bigger change than electing a woman president. And some experience working within the system, which she has, makes it easier to change that system.

Yeah, the system in which she has experience isn’t a system that most Americans would like to see returned to the White House. 

Newsbusters busts CNN on their puff-piece about Hillary’s new The Hillary I Know website.

Michele Malkin calls it “Operation Rescue Hillary“, Gateway Pundit writes that Bill Clinton has promised that he and George HW Bush will repair the damage that George W Bush ahs done to our “image”. Mathew Balan at Newsbusters writes that Hillary still talks about the 90 economy as if none of us were alive at the time. Fausta wants to know whay all of sudden we need to be told that she’s likable.

Category: Politics