It’s probably not easy for a paper like the Omaha World-Herald to endorse Hillary Clinton. The former First Lady is polling about fifteen points behind Trump in Nebraska and 538 gives her 4.6% chance of winning the state. Of course, Nebraska is one of only two states (along with Maine) to allocate its Electoral College votes by congressional district, and Clinton has a better chance of winning Omaha’s seat than the state as a whole. Still, I am sure the mail the World-Herald gets after this endorsement will be heavily negative.
You don’t have to go too far into the past to find Democrats winning statewide in Nebraska, but former senators Bob Kerrey and Ben Nelson always had to walk a careful line in what is a fairly conservative state. Maybe that’s why the editorial board admonishes Clinton that “Americans will need her to be a uniting president, working from the center, and not advancing an agenda that will further alienate moderates and conservatives.”
I’d be more impressed with this if I had the foggiest idea how it could be accomplished. If Merrick Garland isn’t confirmed by the Senate in the lame duck session of Congress, Clinton’s first order of business will be to push through his (or her alternative’s) nomination, and that will give the Supreme Court its first true liberal majority since 1971. What will follow are a series of rulings that will surely “alienate” conservatives.
But at least that change in our political landscape and fortunes has merit as something that ought to discomfort Republicans. The problem is that pretty much everything Hillary Clinton does will be called divisive even if its deliberately designed to be the opposite.
If we’re going to give lectures, here, I don’t think we should start with Clinton. We should start with the opposition party because we saw how they reacted to President Bill Clinton and we saw how they reacted to Barack Obama. They nominated a Birther, for chrissakes, and that was after resolving before Obama could even be sworn in that they would use every tool in the box to obstruct his agenda.
How about a lecture about giving President Hillary Clinton some benefit of the doubt and working with her on infrastructure spending, national security, criminal justice and tax reform, and immigration?
That would be more appropriate, in my opinion.