In response to Hillary on Her Hard Knock Life After the White House:
This stuff about Hillary claiming to be “dead broke” is hilariously funny, but it’s also going to do some real political damage to her. She’s already scrambling to walk back her comments. “Let me just clarify that I fully appreciate how hard life is for so many Americans today,” she squeaked on Good Morning America. “Bill and I were obviously blessed. We worked hard for everything we got in our lives… so for me, it’s just a reality what we faced when he got out of the White house, it meant that we just had to keep working really hard.”
That’s not going to do her any favors, so I expect a clarification of the walkback tomorrow, and maybe a revision of the clarification of the walkback after that, followed by fervent hopes that everyone forgets she ever shot off her mouth about being “broke.” But they won’t, because – like it or not – the worst stigma that can attach to any politician these days is being “out of touch,” and Hillary just turned herself into a late-night comedy routine about an out-of-touch aristocrat stealing the language of middle-class life to put her “struggles” on the same plane as people who worry about paying for food.
She’s still doing it in her “clarification,” because she and Bill didn’t really “work hard” in any sense that an American working stiff would recognize. They took all-expenses-paid first-class trips to give speeches where they were paid four or five times as much as most people make in a year, and those speeches were mostly meaningless pabulum written by staffers, delivered to people who were primarily concerned about buying favor from Washington’s Number One power couple. Hillary could have delivered most of her speeches by tootling on a kazoo for twenty minutes, and it would have made little difference to her audience.
None of that will matter to the Democrat base, which has no difficulty receiving socialist rhetoric and blather about “income inequality” from people who live like French kings of old. They’re happy to hear endless criticism of hard-working executives and self-made entrepreneurs from people who get paid millions of dollars to write memoirs nobody reads. But the persuadable independents and soft-Democrat voters aren’t going to appreciate Hillary’s attempt to deposit her identity-politics rhetoric so mechanically and gracelessly.
Hillary also has strange ideas of what “responsibility” means, as she fared poorly against ABC’s Diane Sawyer in an interview the Washington Post forthrightly describes as Hillary’s “destruction.”
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“I take responsibility, but I was not making security decisions,” Clinton says, after Sawyer beats her up over Benghazi. That’s the Obama mindset in a nutshell: taking responsibility means saying the magic words “I take responsibility,” while continuing to insist that nothing was really your fault. You’re not very good at your job and don’t know what’s going on in your vast agency… and that’s why you should get an even bigger job in a government that never stops growing.
I think Americans are going to be extremely tired of that routine by the time Obama leaves office, and Hillary’s identity-politics appeal is too clumsy to help her sell it.
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