Let me start with what I know about Hillary from ten years of public and private, if episodic, contact. She’s smart, warm, engaged and decent. Let me tell you what I know from the current campaign: she’s dishonest, remote and humorless.
How did we get here? Some of this, a lot of it, is in fact a vast right-wing conspiracy that trades in lies, innuendo and character attack. The lies go back decades: Vince Foster, Benghazi, Whitewater. Even the legitimate criticisms are overblown. The email server was a bad mistake, but not a defining one by any fair measure. But the incessant repetitions inevitably take a toll and that they have done.
Some of it is her fault, like the email server and the Clinton Foundation. A woman as smart and sophisticated as Hillary knows how much appearances matter, and how the merger of private advantage and public life can be both unfair and toxic. There is a willful insensitivity and a willful merger of her private business with her public life that hurts.
But the campaign against Trump should be both a walk in the park and an opportunity to make her case. NOT!
“Nothing causes foot-in-mouth disease like bad polling numbers.”
What has emerged on the stump is a persona that is tight and a little mean and untrustworthy, and a campaign that is reactive and based on letting Trump self-destroy. This is what is ultimately behind the Trump mini-resurgence. He’s not wowing voters and changing minds. She’s exasperating people and losing ground.
The latest is her truly dopey attack on Trump voters as “deplorables.” I’m not even sure I know what it means but it’s certainly not what will allow her to recapture all the non-deplorables she needs to reach. It’s actually a little Trumpish and has nothing to do with what she needs to accomplish.
How does this happen if she’s so smart and focused? It’s likely sheer frustration, of the kind that has Bill out with a simultaneous, passionate, accurate and tactically inept defense of the Clinton Foundation. Nothing causes foot-in-mouth disease like bad polling numbers.
It may be time for an intervention, not from the existing insiders, but from folks who both wish her well and see what’s happening.
Try this, Hillary.
- It’s not about you. It’s about the people out there. Say nothing that raises you above them.
- Don’t attack the voters. Trump gives you ample and easy targets. Stay with them.
- Use your TV ads to re-establish your persona and character. It’s achievable and necessary.
- And finally, figure out how to control the debates, especially the first one. People will care less about positions, or attacks, than on figuring out who you are. Don’t whine, don’t explain, smile, show that you think before you answer.
