Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Hillary Clinton Will Win the Democratic Nomination But Is an Awful Candidiate

The most telling moment of last night’s Democratic debate (full transcript here) came when the party’s presumptive candidate, Hillary Clinton, ambled back on the stage late from a commercial break. The moderator had already started to ask Bernie Sanders a question when the crowd erupted in applause upon her entrance, drowning out the query. Clinton offered up a master class in sorry-not sorry, yet again stealing the spotlight even when it’s trained on one of her rivals. Whether Clinton’s tardiness was accidental or on purpose doesn't really matter. Either way, it was pure showmanship.

Clearly scheduled by the party establishment to minimize their impact, the function of these debates isn’t to give Democratic primary voters (and non-Democrats interested in the country’s future) a sense of the range and depth of different candidates’s views and policies. The function is to provide Hillary Clinton the opportunity to workshop her candidacy, pretend to earn the nomination, reverse her high negative ratings, and finalize the exact compass points of her triangulation strategy in the general election.

Despite being in the national eye for nearly 25 years, Clinton has worked hard not just to “reintroduce” herself to voters via weird burrito runs at Chipotle, but to change and modify her positions to absorb the more popular aspects of Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong progressive insurgency.

https://reason.com/blog/2015/12/20/hillary-clinton-will-win-the-democratic

No comments: