I want to like, Hillary Clinton. I really do.
She’s an accomplished and well-regarded senator, and she’s the only First Lady in my lifetime who tried to make a meaningful contribution during her tenure in the white house.
I want to like her, but she’s making it really hard.
In her presidential campaign, she could choose to focus on her strengths and her many accomplishments. Instead, she keeps inventing stories, revising history, taking cheap shots and insulting our intelligence.
In the last two weeks alone…
- She invented details about her Bosnia visit and then insulted our intelligence by claiming she simply misspoke (um… misspoke dozens of times?)
- She’s taken great pains to make the case that she’s always opposed NAFTA, despite copious evidence to the contrary.
- Responding to calls for her to drop out of the race, she charged that Obama doesn’t want to give Pennsylvanians their chance to vote. It doesn’t rise to the level of the “plagiarism” allegation, but it’s still a cheap shot, considering no such calls have come from Obama or anyone on his staff.
- Finally, when a reporter asked for her to comment on the recent gains Obama has made in the superdelegate count, she feigned ignorance, claiming she doesn’t pay attention to those numbers.
Even if you take her at her word, is this the kind of leader we want? I don’t know about the rest of America, but I’m done with cheap shots. I can’t take any more sniping. And I know it was just one of those obligatory remarks, but if Hillary isn’t paying attention to the superdelegate count, then there’s something seriously wrong with her. The superdelegates are crucial to the outcome of the most important contest of her life. We want her to be paying attention to that.
The narrative the media has painted about Hillary is that she will do anything, absolutely anything, to win the nomination, that she doesn’t have the capacity to put the party or the country ahead of her own ambitions. This is probably unfair, but she hasn’t done a whole lot to dispel this impression.
As a result, she has completely alienated young voters – a constituency that has always favored Obama, but I have to imagine there was a time when they might have warmed to her. At this point, however, judging by the Digg crowd (a skewed lens, I admit), they are passionately anti-Hillary. This is a pretty powerful segment of potential voters, and it’s unfortunate that she has failed so badly with them.