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Human
Events
Hillary's
Rapist-Defense Problem
By:
John Hayward
6/20/2014
Earlier
this week, I ventured that Hillary Clinton’s remarkable series of
gaffes and tone-deaf statements, made through the launch of a book
with disappointing sales, did not augur well for the campaign she’s
trying to launch simultaneously. I thought some of the things she
said over the past couple of weeks would haunt her through 2016, or
at least give her a deep public-relations hole to dig her way out of.
The
contrary view was nicely presented by Allahpundit at Hot Air, who
noted that pundits have a tough time predicting which gaffes will
stick to a particular candidate:
My
hunch is that nothing Hillary’s said this week has reduced her
chances. It takes a biggaffe to register with average voters, and
that gaffe has to reveal some perceived “deeper truth” about the
candidate to have legs, I suspect. That’s why Romney’s “47
percent” comment outgrew the punditocracy and actually penetrated
the electorate. It seemed to confirm the sense of him as a
country-club Republican who looked down on the lower class. There’s
potential, I guess, for Hillary’s “dead broke” comment and her
stupid whining about how “brutal” American politics is to make
her seem “out of touch,” but never forget that she’s got Bill
around to give her a shot of blue-collar appeal when needed. If her
last name weren’t “Clinton,” you might have something in
drawing her as the consummate limousine liberal. As it is, I think
it’s a glancing blow, nothing more, especially if the GOP ends up
supporting the “out of touch” attack by, er, nominating a guy
named Bush. As for the gay-marriage interview, it’s hard for me to
believe liberals are going to give her too hard a time over any
heresy knowing how difficult it is for a party to win the White House
for three consecutive terms. Iraq is the perfect example. Her vote to
invade helped Obama pull the upset in 2008, but no one thinks it’ll
keep her from the nomination now. She’s clearly the strongest
candidate Democrats have in an extremely difficult political climate.
They’ll be prudent in deciding how severely to punish her for
deviations from orthodoxy.
I’d
say AP and I agree on the gaffe equation, but perhaps not on the
value of the variables being fed into the Hillary Clinton iteration
of it. He’s absolutely correct that Hillary’s meltdown over gay
marriage in an NPR interview isn’t going to hurt her – the
political alliance between the gay-marriage movement and the Left is
ironclad and absolute, and in the general election campaign, it won’t
matter at all how clumsy Hillary’s efforts to explain her shifting
positions are, or even if she’s so obviously flustered that she
blows her stack at an NPR reporter. But I think her “poor little
me” whining is going to achieve a powerful and lasting synthesis
with the perception of her as an out-of-touch limousine liberal. I’m
skeptical of Bill Clinton’s ability to paper all that over, in part
because I think Bill’s influence is over-estimated, at least with
regard to anyone beyond the rock-solid Democrat base.
Another
story that bubbled up last week is also plugging itself into
Hillary’s image as a ruthless political animal, and it won’t mix
well with the identity politics she relies so heavily upon. The
point of identity politics is that woman + Democrat = above
criticism. There will still be some juice in that formula if Hillary
runs against any male Republican, but the story of how she laughed
with giddy abandon when remembering how she won a reduced sentence
for a child rapist is going to hurt. You can tell her supporters
understand that, because they’ve been working hard to suppress the
story, and keep any more like it from being discovered.
Since
the Washington Free Beacon broke the story of the “Hillary Tapes,”
let’s have a summary from their Matthew Continetti...
Read
the rest of the article at Human Events
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