The first wrong assumption is that it's all about the "D".
In other words, all I need is a (D) next to my name and the
Obama coalition will come together again. Well, not so fast according
to William Galston; and,
The country is ready for a woman after 44 guys. Again, not so
fast. It depends on the woman, specially if the woman under review owns a
terrible foreign policy and has a history of ethical problems.
In other words, Hillary Clinton is learning the hard way that
she actually has to run for president. She has to campaign, make speeches,
take questions and so on. Nobody is handing her the keys to the Oval Office,
as she apparently suspected.
A
concern for her campaign has to be Mrs. Clinton’s robotic delivery, as if she’s
never there in the moment but distanced from herself. As if she’s
thinking: I
don’t fully believe this, but more important, do I seem to believe it? She
seems to be overcoached by people who keep telling her to be natural. But why
would someone in public life for more than 30 years need to be instructed in
naturalness? I don’t understand her discomfort and wonder what it suggests or
portends. You can argue she’s a strong leader; she may be the next president,
she may be the acknowledged head of her party, but she is a poor campaigner—a
poor giver of interviews and speeches, which is now most of what campaigning is.
At the end of the day this will mean something.
THERE
WASN’T much new in Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s first major domestic policy speech in New
York on Monday — and we mean that in the nicest possible way. She repeated the
important but, by now, familiar point that the economy desperately needs growth
that is both faster and more widely shared than the sluggish, low-wage recovery
we have at present, calling this “the defining economic challenge of our time.”
And then she recited the list of traditional Democratic Party policy responses:
more progressive taxation, a higher minimum wage, an infrastructure bank, clean
energy “investments,” equal pay for women, universal “high-quality” preschool
and so on. On her most original point, that expanded profit-sharing could help
align the interests of business and workers, she promised more details in a
later speech.
I guess that we will all cautiously wait for
those details.
Hillary Clinton's biggest problem is that she
fell for the nonsense that 2016 was a done deal.
She'd campaign from the front porch, do an
interview with a friendly microphone at MSNBC and just let "demographics" and
the "gender factor" push her over the finish line.
It's not turning out that way at all, as any
Democrat will tell you in private.
