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So how’s the Hillary campaign you ask? We will spend some time looking at it today. Michael Barone is first up. He says her futures are not doing well.
Is the market in Hillary Clinton futures collapsing? Quite possibly so.
A year ago Clinton seemed likely to become the next president. Presumably she and her husband had not yet started to call themselves, Bush style, 42 and 45. But she had an overwhelming lead in the polls for the Democratic nomination and was getting 50 percent or more in most polls against possible Republican candidates in general election pairings.
Ratings of Clinton’s performance as secretary of state were positive. She seemed poised to hold and add onto Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 majorities.
Things look different now. Obama now gets negative marks on foreign policy, and some of the luster is off Clinton’s record as well. With the Islamic State ravaging much of Iraq and Syria, the decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq looks dubious. With Vladimir Putin’s Russia rampaging through much of Ukraine, Clinton’s reset button looks ludicrous.
Most Americans may have been content with a foreign policy of “leading from behind.” But as the world spins out of control, they don’t like the results. …
Roger Simon tries to make sense of her “empathy” remark.
When I first read that Hillary Clinton said we should have “empathy” for our enemies, my first thought was — is she senile? Who is she talking about? Empathy for Hitler? Pol Pot? Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? Surely if we only empathized with the ISIS leader a bit more, they wouldn’t be slicing off as many heads or placing as many women in sexual slavery, not to mention shooting large groups after having had them dig their own mass graves, Nazi-style. All that business about global jihad and caliphates and “see you in New York” would go away with a little sympathy. (Cue Mick Jagger.)
Yes, I know sympathy is often defined as “feeling for” someone and empathy “feeling into,” but let’s not get bogged down in minor distinctions. It’s hard for anyone with basic morality to have empathy or sympathy for ruthless transnational mass murderers motivated by extreme religious fanaticism. On Fox News Sunday, even Hillary’s normally complaisant supporter Jane Harman seemed repelled. George Will rose to her defense (sort of) by explaining Hillary’s peculiar word choice by saying Clinton employed “gaseous new-age rhetoric” about respect and empathy. True enough, and witty, but I suspect it’s more than that. Why would her mind even go in that direction?
Hillary, as most know now, is not a master of the English language in general. …
Jennifer Rubin doesn’t think bad polls will stop her.
Henry Enten at Five Thirty Eight asks what it would take for Hillary Clinton to decline to run for president. My first thought was: Embalming fluid. This is a woman who, since her days in Arkansas, has craved money and power — and now, thanks to her ludicrously excessive speaking fees and delayed presidential announcement, she has found a way to do both.
Enten earnestly looks at polls suggesting Hillary Clinton’s numbers are not all that impressive. (“The current environment suggests Clinton would need to be stronger than a generic Democratic candidate to be considered the favorite. Instead, her standing has deteriorated. …
Besides, Jennifer points out that Clinton, Inc. is a profitable enterprise.
Hillary Clinton’s greed knows no bounds. “Hillary Clinton is scheduled to deliver a paid speech in March 2015, a point on the calendar that raises questions about when she will announce her decision on running for president and whether she intends to leave the Democratic Party uncertain of her plans until next spring,” reports the Wall Street Journal. The report continues: “[I]it would seem unlikely that she would be an announced candidate for president and still be delivering paid speeches. Were she to do that, she would open herself to criticism that her interests are divided. She would also be vulnerable to criticism that private interests were trying to curry favor with a potential president of the U.S. by paying her speaking fees. Such considerations would suggest that she won’t announce her candidacy until at least the spring of 2015 — after she is done with her paid speeches.”
For starters, it is a little late to be worrying about private interests “trying to curry favor with a potential president of the U.S. by paying her speaking fees.” That has already happened, and she will have to explain, especially to the newly energized populist left, why she has taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from hedge funds, banks, car dealers and other big-business groups.
Mother Jones described the problem thusly: “Hillary’s for-profit speaking gigs raise a serious question for a possible presidential candidate: …
Jonathan Tobin wonders if the Dem left can get Liz Warren to challenge Hillary.
While conservatives eagerly seize on each new Hillary Clinton gaffe as proof that she is not the invincible presidential candidate Democrats believe her to be, the political left is looking at the former secretary of state’s struggles from a different perspective. Tired of being the doormat for their party’s establishment wing led by the Clintons and unhappy with the former first family’s level of comfort with Wall Street, the so-called progressive wing of the Democrats is ready to assert itself. That’s the dynamic that is driving both a new assertiveness on the part of congressional liberals as well as the decision of Moveon.org to try to derail Clinton’s coronation in 2016 by starting a movement to draft Senator Elizabeth Warren to run against her.
The Moveon.org effort may be nothing more than a stunt by a group that has struggled to maintain its once central role in pushing the liberal agenda in recent years. …
Bret Stephens closes out the Hillary items.
… Here’s another question: If Mrs. Clinton is at least prepared to attempt a show of empathy for the Putins and Khameneis of the world, why so little empathy for American allies? In March 2010 a minor Israeli official announced the approval of some additional construction in a Jerusalem neighborhood, mischaracterized as a “settlement,” when Vice President Joe Biden was in the country. It was an ordinary bureaucratic bungle by the Israeli government.
So what did Mrs. Clinton do? She called Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to yell at him. “I told the Prime Minister that President Obama had viewed the news about East Jerusalem as ‘a personal insult to him, the Vice President, and the United States,’ ” as she recounts in her memoir.
Such has been the pattern of the Obama administration, whose foreign policy record Mrs. Clinton cannot escape or finesse: misplaced understanding toward our adversaries, shrill lectures for our friends. The next president needs to make it the other way around.
The NY Times had an interesting picture essay of Detroit by Air in last Sunday’s edition.The pictures are intriguing. The first is a long shot of the downtown area but with enough foreground to show how the city’s homes are being disappeared. Close to downtown in the center of the shot is ComericaPark where the Tigers play and just to the left is Ford Field, the covered stadium for the Lions The writer/photographer is a typical liberal weenie. Here’s how he closes;
… I think that the inner ring of Detroit will win out in the long run, as cities are and will continue to be the greenest places to live on a per-capita basis. This is made only more striking when I fly over the suburbs and see the inefficiency of single-family homes. They are dependent on cars, for one thing, and are connected by miles of paved roads to single-use zones of office and retail developments. These areas will not fare well, if we begin to mitigate climate change through measures like a carbon tax.
Detroit’s rebound is just a matter of time. Someday, I believe, it will be comparable to the once rundown sections of New York, Boston, Minneapolis and San Francisco, cities that are now thriving.
Quelle horreur! A Harvard prof was overcharged $4 on a $50 Chinese take-out order and he makes a federal case of it. Power Line has the story.
Everyone remembers Bill Buckley’s famous axiom that he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty of HarvardUniversity. My great teacher Harry Jaffa had a corollary to the Buckley Theorem, which held that it would be better to be educated by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than the faculty of Harvard.
Either way, fresh evidence of the Buckley Theorem and Jaffa Corollary comes this week from Harvard Business School’s professor Ben Edelman, who, though a mere associate professor, is clearly striving for tenure as a full jerk. (This adds evidence, by the way, that business schools are succumbing to political correctness and intellectual triviality as much as any law or other graduate school.)
It seems the good Prof. Edelman recently ordered about $50 worth of food from a Chinese take out, and—sit down for this outrage—was overcharged $4 on his bill. Okay, so maybe this immigrant merchant, who suffers from not having a favored Hispanic surname*, cheated a little on the bill. Or maybe, just maybe, it was an honest mistake. Whatever the truth of the matter, the shriveled soul that is Prof. Edelman wants to make a federal case out of the $4, though I suspect Prof. Edelman’s salary at HBS is likely greater than the profits of this Chinese takeout joint, and I thought Harvard profs were all about sharing the wealth. …