“Incessant Flailing”: GOP Peddles Hard The ‘Hillary Can’t Be Trusted’ Line
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is the runaway pick among voters when asked who among the presidential candidates is the most credible, honest and trustworthy, and even the most compassionate. Her rank on the voter trustworthy meter is far higher than that of Barack Obama and easily tops that of all other GOP presidential contenders. The problem with this is the AP-Ipsos poll that gave Hillary high marks on trustworthiness was taken in March, 2007.
The two big questions are: What happened in the eight years since that poll was taken and today to change voter’s attitudes on the trust issue toward Clinton? The other even bigger one is: Does this pose a real problem for Clinton’s campaign?
The trust issue and Hillary has been the sole fixation of the pollsters and they seem to crank out a new poll monthly hitting that theme. If one believes the barrage of polls, one comes away with the notion that voters, especially Democrats, simply don’t trust Hillary.
Playing up Clinton’s supposed free fall in integrity has been the one constant in the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign. The Republican National Committee early on put Hillary dead in its hit sights to do everything possible to render her candidacy stillborn even before it officially became a candidacy. It not so subtly recycled the old trumped up scandals of the past from Whitewater to the Lewinsky scandal. It then cranked out a sneering “poor Hillary” video that touted Hillary’s quip that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House. It then intimated that she shook down poor cash strapped universities for her alleged outrageous speaking fees.
There was little doubt that the first chance the GOP got it would seize on a real or manufactured Obama foreign policy flub and make Clinton their hard target. The Benghazi debacle seemed to be just the right flub. In August 2013, the Republican National Committee rammed the attack home with a half-minute clip of her Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony earlier that year on the Benghazi attack.
The aim as always was to embarrass and discredit her not because of her alleged missteps as Secretary of State, but as a 2016 presidential candidate. Republicans got what they wanted when their phony accusations against her of cover-up and incompetence got tons of media chatter and focus and raised the first shadow of public doubt. The GOP then tirelessly searched for something else that could ramp up more public doubt about Clinton’s honesty. It didn’t take long to find.
This time it got two for the price of one. Congressional Republicans jubilantly waved a fresh batch of Clinton emails to the media, claiming that it proved that she deliberately mislead Congressional investigators, and the public, on what she knew and how she handled or allegedly mishandled the Benghazi debacle. This ties in with the GOP’s and the media’s incessant flailing of Clinton for supposedly hiding, deleting or misusing her private emails for some sinister and nefarious reason during her stint as Secretary of State. There will be more to come on this rest assured.
Meanwhile, the GOP mockingly ridicules Clinton’s attempt to reimage her campaign and herself as a hands, on in the trenches with the people, caring, feeling candidate as just more of the Clinton con, and an ineffectual one to boot. The supposed proof of that is to finger point her plunging favorability numbers in the polls. Of course, what’s conveniently omitted from the Hillary smear is that every one of her GOP rivals is doing an even lousier job trying to convince voters that they are any more “trustworthy” than Clinton. In the case of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, and especially Jeb Bush, their integrity meter score with the public fall somewhere between Watergate Richard Nixon and that of a used car salesman.
There’s more. A USA Poll and an ABC-Washington Post poll found that not only does Clinton have solid numbers in terms of approval with voters, but bags big time general favorability numbers from Democrats. This is even more impressive given the spirited, and populist issues run that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is making at Hillary.
It’s certainly true that voters do want a president that they can trust to say and do the right thing both on the issues and in their dealing with the public. But they also want a president who is experienced, well-versed, thoughtful, and firm on dealing with the inevitable crises that will confront the country, here and abroad. There’s absolutely no hint in the polls or anywhere else that the general public has shut down on Clinton in this vital area of public policy. But this won’t stop the GOP and those in the media obsessed with depicting Hillary as two-faced from peddling that line.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Associate Editor of New America Media; The Blog, The Huffington Post, July 19,2015
“Thoughtful And Forward-Looking Policymaking”: Why The 2016 Candidates Ignore The Sharing Economy At Their Own Peril
Before Hillary Clinton gave her big economic speech on Monday, a rumor spread through the tech journalism world: Clinton was about to attack Uber! Based on a passing mention in a Politico article previewing the speech, tech sites played up the rhetorical blitzkrieg to come. “Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will blast contractor-fueled companies for repressing middle-class wage growth,” said Techcruch. Even after she delivered the speech and there was no actual attack on Uber, articles continued to describe her anodyne remarks about the rise of the sharing economy as a “blast,” a “diss,” and even a declaration of war.
As it happens, Clinton raises an issue that more presidential candidates ought to talk about. We don’t yet have much idea of what she would actually do about the transformations in the economy that are taking place, but we ought to press her and the other presidential candidates, Democratic and Republican, for more specifics.
For the record, here’s what Clinton actually said on this topic, in its entirety:
Meanwhile, many Americans are making extra money renting out a small room, designing websites, selling products they design themselves at home, or even driving their own car. This on-demand, or so-called gig economy is creating exciting economies and unleashing innovation. But it is also raising hard questions about workplace protections and what a good job will look like in the future.
Seldom have I witnessed a political attack of such merciless cruelty.
But here’s the point: In many ways, public policy on the workplace is organized around the way things used to be, when people hoped that they could stay with one employer for their entire career, and that employer would provide them a panoply of benefits including health insurance, paid vacations, and a pension. Today, more and more Americans are cobbling together a living from multiple sources. And even many who aren’t working for a technology-based company like Uber are doing hourly work that makes scheduling their lives exceedingly difficult and doesn’t come with any benefits at all.
Depending on what sort of situation you can put together, it’s possible for that kind of work to offer more rewards than the traditional 9-to-5 job. But for millions, the contemporary American workplace is characterized by insecurity: insecurity that they’ll have enough work this month to pay their bills, insecurity that they’ll be able to put anything away for retirement, insecurity that an illness or family crisis won’t send them into a financial tailspin from which they can’t recover.
So what can government do? Up until now, Democrats have been offering piecemeal proposals that try to ameliorate that insecurity from one angle or another, trying to get people better wages and treatment. All Democrats want to increase the minimum wage. The Obama administration is updating the rules on overtime so more workers can be paid adequately for the extra hours they work. The Affordable Care Act finally made health insurance at least somewhat portable, so that “job lock” — in which you can’t leave your job for fear that you won’t be able to get covered — is a thing of the past. They’re now pushing for mandatory paid sick leave. But most measures like these concern how traditional workers relate to traditional employers.
Republicans, on the other hand, generally look at the state of the workplace today and say, “What’s the problem?” They oppose raising the minimum wage, objected to updating the overtime rules, don’t want employers to have to offer paid sick leave, and of course find the ACA to be a Stalinist nightmare of oppression. They love to fetishize Uber because it fights with entrenched taxi unions (and because they hope it will make them seem young and hip), but don’t have any particular ideas to help workers adapt to the new world.
There are ideas out there; for instance, Nick Hanauer and David Rolf recently proposed that the government create a Shared Security Account that would work something like Social Security, but provide a means to pay for things like vacations and sick leave. Critically, it wouldn’t be at the whim (or under the control) of anyone’s employer, but would travel with workers whether they worked for General Motors, waited tables at the local diner, or did odd jobs for TaskRabbit (I interviewed Hanauer about it here).
That’s just one idea, and hopefully people will come up with others. But we deserve a debate on how as a country we can adapt to the evolution of work in ways that both maximize the benefits of the changes that are taking place and minimize the number of people getting steamrolled by them. The economy needs innovation and disruption, but it also needs thoughtful and forward-looking policymaking. That may be a lot to expect from presidential candidates. But it doesn’t hurt for us to ask.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, July 15, 2015
“Bomb-Bomb-Bomb Iran”: The GOP Is The Party Of Warmongers; What Its Insane Overreaction To Obama’s Iran Deal Really Shows
Whenever an election season rolls around, we too often hear from trolls, contrarians and cynics who wrongfully announce that both political parties are exactly the same.
Wrong.
One party thinks women should make their own reproductive choices; the other does not. One party thinks LGBT Americans should enjoy equal protection under the law; the other does not. One party thinks higher taxes on the rich and lower taxes for everyone else is good for the economy; the other does not. One party thinks the climate crisis is real, is happening now, and is caused by human activity; the other thinks it’s a hoax while insisting that severe weather events are caused by abortion and gay marriage.
We could do this all day. But the most salient contrast came on Tuesday with the announcement that the P5+1 nations finalized an agreement with Iran regarding its nuclear program. Going back to our party contrasts, one party is seeking at least 15 years of continued peace, while the other party wants to kill the deal, then perhaps, depending on their mood, proceed to “bomb-bomb-bomb” Iran, sparking a war not just between the U.S. and Iran, but involving the entire region, including Russia. Simply put: World War III. And that’s not just my forecast, it’s also the forecast of experts like former Bush-era CIA director Michael Hayden and Meir Dagan, the former head of the Israeli Mossad.
Possibly the most ludicrous reaction from the Republican field came from Lindsey Graham:
“If the initial reports regarding the details of this deal hold true, there’s no way as president of the United States I would honor this deal,” Graham told Bloomberg. “It’s incredibly dangerous for our national security, and it’s akin to declaring war on Sunni Arabs and Israel by the P5+1 because it ensures their primary antagonist Iran will become a nuclear power and allows them to rearm conventionally.”
Discontinuing Iran’s nuclear weapons program is like declaring war on Israel? The projection here is insane. Furthermore, I wonder how Israel would fare if we were to bomb Iran and deliberately collapse the region.
The second most ludicrous reaction came from Jeb Bush:
The nuclear agreement announced by the Obama Administration today is a dangerous, deeply flawed, and short sighted deal.
A comprehensive agreement should require Iran to verifiably abandon – not simply delay – its pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability. […] This isn’t diplomacy—it is appeasement.
That word—”appeasement”—keeps coming up, so let’s take a second to establish some basics. While it’s true that the deal doesn’t eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, as David E. Sanger writes in the New York Times, the deal “is a start,” and a necessary one.
Sanger reports:
Senior officials of two countries who barely spoke with each other for more than three decades have spent the past 20 months locked in hotel rooms, arguing about centrifuges but also learning how each perceives the other. Many who have jousted with Iran over the past decade see few better alternatives.
“The reality is that it is a painful agreement to make, but also necessary and wise,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who drafted the first sanctions against Iran, passed in the United Nations Security Council in 2006 and 2007, when he was undersecretary of state for policy. “And we might think of it as just the end of the beginning of a long struggle to contain Iran. There will be other dramas ahead.”
Negotiations necessarily require compromise, a fact that the Republican field would well consider before they spout off hardline bromides. (Also, perhaps Jeb should’ve double-checked the history of our effort to negotiate a settlement. If he did so, he’d discover that the U.S. first reached out to Iran in 2002 when his brother was president. Oops.)
By: Bob Cesca, Salon, July 15, 2015
“The Hypocrisy Is Really Just The Start”: Republicans Learn The Wrong Lessons From 2012
A few months ago, Politico published a piece about the Republican message machine settling on its preferred 2016 narrative. The headline said the GOP plan is to “turn Hillary into Mitt Romney.”
“A consensus is forming within the Republican Party that the plan of attack against Hillary Clinton should be of a more recent vintage, rooted in her accumulation of wealth and designed to frame her as removed from the concerns of average Americans,” the article explained.
Three months later, the New York Times reports that Republicans are spending “heavily” on focus groups, testing this message.
Inside an office park [in Orlando], about a dozen women gathered to watch a 30-second television spot that opened with Hillary Rodham Clinton looking well-coiffed and aristocratic, toasting champagne with her tuxedoed husband, the former president, against a golden-hued backdrop.
The ad then cut to Mrs. Clinton describing being “dead broke” when she and her husband left the White House, before a narrator intoned that Mrs. Clinton makes more money in a single speech, about $300,000, than an average family earns in five years.
The message hit a nerve. “She’s out of touch,” said one of the women, who works as a laundry attendant.
This gathering was organized by American Crossroads, a Republican super PAC created by Karl Rove, but the party broadly seems to have embraced this message.
And if Clinton is really lucky, they won’t change their minds.
As we talked about in April, there is a certain irony to the entire line of attack. In 2012, when Democrats rolled out the “out-of-touch plutocrat” message against Romney, Republicans spent months in fainting-couch apoplexy. Democrats are engaging in “class warfare,” they said. The divisive rhetoric was “un-American,” voters were told. How dare Democrats “condemn success”?
In 2015, those same Republicans have suddenly discovered they’re not so offended after all. Imagine that.
But the hypocrisy is really just the start. The real issue is the degree to which Republicans are confused about why the line of criticism against Romney was effective.
There’s an over-simplicity to the GOP’s thinking: Romney was rich; Democrats labeled him out of touch, voters believed it, so Romney lost. But that’s not what happened, at least not entirely. Once again, the problem was not that Romney was extremely wealthy; the problem was that Romney was extremely wealthy while pushing a policy agenda that would benefit people like him.
The Democratic pitch would have fallen flat if they’d simply mocked the candidate’s riches. It resonated, however, because Romney breathed life into the caricature – vowing to give tax breaks to the wealthy, promising to take health care and education benefits away from working families, and expressing contempt for the “47 percent” of Americans Romney saw as parasites.
When Democrats effectively told the American mainstream, “Romney isn’t on your side,” the GOP nominee made it easy for voters to believe it. The car elevators were simply gravy on top of an already effective narrative.
The point is, substance matters. Policy agendas matter. There’s a lengthy history of low-income voters in America voting for very wealthy candidates who are committed to fighting for those voters’ interests. Names like Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Rockefeller are familiar additions to the roster of politicians who’ve championed the needs of families far from their income bracket. Struggling voters didn’t reject them as “out of touch” because they couldn’t personally relate to poverty – rather, these voters rallied behind the wealthy candidates, without regard for their status, because of their policy agenda.
Indeed, as I type, Hillary Clinton is delivering a speech on her economic vision, much of which is focused on investing in working families as a recipe for economic growth.
Republicans are convinced what really matters isn’t the scope of Clinton’s policies, but rather, the size of her bank account. That’s ridiculous.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent talked to David Axelrod, a former top aide to President Obama, who said, “The Republicans may try and make a lifestyle case, but lifestyle is the least of it. It’s what you believe and where you propose to lead.”
It’s baffling that the GOP doesn’t understand this obvious and basic dynamic.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 13, 2015
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