Tag: hillary clinton

Hi, news media! Hillary Clinton wants to kick you in the face again!

She apparently expects them to act like they act around Barack Obama.

Full story here: click through for a surprisingly (well, maybe not) unsympathetic bit of commentary on this from MSNBC.  The reporter took to time to point out that Hillary Clinton could have held this presser at a hotel, which honestly didn’t occur to me until it was mentioned. I guess that even the liberals in the media are getting tired. Or, more accurately, bored.

OK, I admit it. The mystery is killing me…

…why wasn’t Hillary Clinton at Selma?  Yes, yes, none of our likely Presidential candidates were at Selma, either – they were all off tap-dancing on the precipice over at that Big Corn thing in Iowa – but what does have to do with Clinton not being there?  You could almost taste the restrained frustration on Twitter today as people on the Left had to delicately tread around her non-appearance.  If Hillary Clinton had been there we would have heard about nothing else, all blipping day.

So why did she skip it? I am legitimately bemused by this. It seems such an obvious place for the presumptive Democratic Presidential candidate to be today.

Why Hillary Clinton lost.

Hi, researchers from 2030! You’re probably here as part of a project trying to figure out why Hillary Clinton could not manage to become President even though she spent more than a decade trying. To start out with: yes, she should have been nominated in 2008. The super-delegates decided to award the nomination to Barack Obama… oh, wait, he’s probably still alive in 2030, isn’t he? Ask him when he’s releasing his college transcripts: the ones with all the C+s on them. Trust me, Barry will get the joke.

Anyway, the reason why Hillary didn’t win in 2008 was because she couldn’t beat the peculiar messianic appeal of Barack Obama. And the reason why she won’t win in 2016 is because she can’t reproduce the peculiar messianic appeal of Barack Obama. Essentially, nobody really likes Hillary Clinton. They like what she can do for them, or they fear what she can do to them, or they just vote Democrat because they vote Democrat – but nobody’s ever going to go into flights of religious ecstasy when her campaign bus pulls into town. Which is normally not an insurmountable obstacle for a politician, but Hillary’s only hope in 2016 was to tap into the Obama phenomenon. And exceed it. Yeah, I know: crazy, huh? Continue reading Why Hillary Clinton lost.

The White House sort of admits that this Hillary Clinton email thing has legs.

(Via Hot Air) Oh, this is good. Short version: Jon Karl asked Josh Earnest, quite often, if the administration knew about Hillary Clinton’s habit of ignoring government rules by never using (or even having) her work email.  Hilarity ensued, if you’re into that sort of thing:

A free translation:

Continue reading The White House sort of admits that this Hillary Clinton email thing has legs.

Hillary Clinton STARTED OFF as the villain. How does she plan to become the hero?

Let us address the central paradox of the Hillary Clinton campaign.  To do that, though, we must first refresh our memories.  Specifically, this ad:

Remember it? It is, of course, an edited version of the iconic Apple 1984 ad which was altered to convert it from revolutionary agitprop praising a multinational corporation to revolutionary agitprop praising an undistinguished machine politician from Chicago. And, to be fair, it was successful agitprop. We will be arguing for decades about just how Hillary Clinton managed to lose that primary fight, but she did – and videos like this probably didn’t hurt. Continue reading Hillary Clinton STARTED OFF as the villain. How does she plan to become the hero?

WSJ: Hillary Clinton suddenly planning to start campaigning in April.

How interesting: “Hillary Clinton and her close advisers are telling Democratic donors that she will enter the presidential race sooner than expected, likely in April, a move that would allay uncertainties within her party and allow her to rev up fundraising.”  Not least because such a move implies that there were unexpected and unanticipated problems along those lines.  Which probably everyone reading this could have told the Clinton campaign ahead of time, assuming that the Clinton campaign had had the mother-wit to ask anyone for real feedback.

The rest of the WSJ article is probably going to be filled with things that you already know, but this passage is still of note: “Mrs. Clinton, according to some close associates, doesn’t relish the campaign trail…” Really? Really? I find that a little hard to believe; because the only way that a candidate can overcome a visceral dislike of campaigning is to be so good at it that it doesn’t matter.  And Hillary Clinton, is, sad to say, not a very good campaigner.

Oh, the fun we will have. Yeah, I know that I said that in 2008 and 2012, too.  I also said it in 2004, and the only reason I didn’t say it in 2000 was because I was a lot less political back then.  That’s the thing about eight year cycles: they, well, cycle.

Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng: actually, Hillary Clinton ultimately didn’t help me at all.

Well, this should be interesting:

Hillary Clinton’s account of one of her crowning moments as secretary of state has been flatly contradicted by a leading Chinese activist.

Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer who escaped house arrest and caused a diplomatic crisis between China and the United States by taking refuge in the American embassy in Beijing in 2012, accused the Obama administration and Clinton of “giving in” to Chinese negotiators.

Continue reading Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng: actually, Hillary Clinton ultimately didn’t help me at all.

You gotta say this for Karl Rove/American Crossroads: they’re Ready For Hillary, too.

Glenn Reynolds called this Master-level trolling from Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, and… yeah. Yeah, it is.

Using Elizabeth Warren’s voice to drive home that message is a lovely touch. She’ll either have to complain, thus alienating her biggest fans; or she’ll have to keep her mouth shut, thus alienating the Clinton campaign.  That’s a win either way: it’s always nice to see a professional at work, particularly when the work isn’t actually aimed at you. If American Crossroads just stays out of the primaries this time, that would be spiffy, thanks.  If they do that, we’ll shower attaboys on Karl Rove all day and even let him have the last brownie.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Notorious Democratic Big Data shop Catalist accused of violating election law.

Regretfully, I need to add an important caveat to this quote:

[It is alleged that – ML] [a]n influential demographic analysis firm founded and run by Democratic operatives with close ties to Hillary Clinton repeatedly violated federal law in 2014 by coordinating its work with dozens of congressional Democrats and the party’s three major national campaign committees.

The charge was described in a 29-page complaint filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission by the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a right-leaning nonprofit watchdog. Fifteen pages of the complaint were required to list all of the entities the accountability foundation alleged were involved in multiple violations of the Federal Elections Campaign Act of 1971.

…because while I think that of course Catalist vigorously broke the law here,  I happen to be a partisan Republican hack, remember? I’m not exactly what one might call objective, in other words. You could tell me that Catalist was sacrificing baby harp seals to Cthulhu, and my immediate response would be to solemnly call for a special prosecutor in order to get to the bottom of this.

Now, that being said… federal election law is not Byzantine. The Byzantines built bureaucracies that worked for almost a thousand years, thank you very much. No, federal election law is a hot mess that is pretty much designed to look like it’s doing something all reform-like, while still allowing political operatives to run merrily through the ramshackle edifice; while both picking up, and throwing away, money as they go. So, no, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that Catalist might be provably dirty. And neither does it surprise me that Catalist might have gotten sloppy, either.  This Thing Of Ours has a history rich in instructive stories about reasonably smart people who did some very stupid things over campaign contributions. Or with them. Continue reading Notorious Democratic Big Data shop Catalist accused of violating election law.

:raised eyebrow: Of course Hillary Clinton is the inevitable *Democratic* nominee.

I can sum up this NYT article on the subject in one sentence: Nobody credible has signed up to run against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and it’s getting to be too late for anybody to try.  That first part is particularly problematic for Democrats because they don’t have anybody really credible to run against her, either.  The crop of governors and senior Senators that might have hoped to run have retired, died, or been defeated in re-election bids; a couple are even sweating looming indictments. It is a measure of how poor the field is that Martin O’Malley almost shines in it; I assume that he’ll end up being the designated primary sacrifice, largely because the man is… remarkably optimistic and impressed with his own talents.

All of which means that the presumptive candidate on the Democratic side will probably be spending as much of the next year as possible hiding. She will have absolutely no practical reason to get out more, and Hillary Clinton doesn’t particularly like people much, so why complicate matters by displaying her personality to a wider world. …Yeah, it’s an exquisitely boring strategy that she’s come up with.  Your point?