Depending on your age, you may know Pat Caddell as George McGovern’s wunderkind pollster or you may know him from the 2004 election as a disgruntled and angry political commentator on MSNBC. Caddell basically invented the modern poll tested political campaign. He got his start doing a school project during the 1968 election in Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville was George Wallace country. Yet, as Caddell went around asking people about their political preferences he was shocked at how many people expressed support for Robert Kennedy. So, Caddell began drilling down to understand why people supported Wallace, and why they supported Kennedy. After all, Wallace and Kennedy had gone to war over the desegregation of the University of Alabama and they had opposing views on the Vietnam War. Joe Klein explains in his book Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You’re Stupid.
The answers came in blunt, simple sentences:
“They’re tough guys.”
“They’ll protect the little guy.”
“You can believe them.”
Which gets straight to the problem with so many Democratic nominees. Was Michael Dukakis a tough guy? Could you believe Bill Clinton? Which Al Gore was going to show up to which debate? Where did John Kerry stand on the war? As Terence Samuel notes, this is not the kind of image that we need in our next nominee.
Clinton’s fumbles in the last Democratic debate — on immigration and her seeming inability to give a straight answer — threw into sharp relief the fact that the GOP nominee will have a fair amount of Democratic vulnerability to work with if she is the nominee.
The last debate raised a fair number of uncomfortable questions for Democrats, not all of them about Clinton. It was a nightmarishly familiar scene: the equivocating, tap-dancing candidate unable, at the critical moment, to say exactly what she believed — think Al Gore on guns or John Kerry on abortion and the $87 million that he voted for before he voted against. It undermined the growing sense that Clinton had been remade into a tougher, more solid candidate, who, whatever her other issues, was going to come ready to beat the Republicans at their own game.
Hillary has worked hard to project an image of toughness, but she hasn’t mastered it at all, the art of creating trust. She’s polished. She’s eloquent. She’s sharp on the issues. She’s qualified. But she isn’t really all that tough and, more importantly, she isn’t trustworthy. She doesn’t project trustworthiness.
Ironically, (considering prior gaffes) it’s Joe Biden that projects toughness and straightforwardness. The rest of the field seems too prone to caution, afraid someone, somewhere, might get offended by something they say. They try to have it both ways on too many issues. None of them are worse than Clinton.
Look at this:
After a tour, the candidate took questions from the crowd.
She called on a young woman. “As a young person,” said the well-spoken Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, “I’m worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change?”
“Well, you should be worried,” Clinton replied. “You know, I find as I travel around Iowa that it’s usually young people that ask me about global warming.”
There’s a good reason for that, too. The question was a plant, totally rigged in advance, like a late-night infomercial. Just before the public forum a Clinton staffer had chosen the young woman, a student at Grinnell College, and asked her to ask that specific question.
We accused Clinton of using a plant at Yearly Kos, too, although Peter Daou denied it and I accepted his word. Regardless, we don’t need this kind of candidacy. Do we really want more of this?
Do we want the Kathleen Willeys of the world to come crawling out of the woodwork accusing the Clintons of murdering their cats?
Say no to the Clinton campaign. Her nomination will put everything at risk and make us all want to throw up every single day.
