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No Answers Are Good Answers

In case you didn’t catch it on the home page, Dick Collins weekly column is out. He discusses Hillary’s tendency to give answers that sound good but later prove to be untrue or contradictory. Collins notes that Hillary’s response to moderator Tim Russert’s question on torture went over well but is an example of Hillary’s troubling relationship with the truth:

Her quick response to Russert’s surprise seemed to go over well with both the audience and with media pundits, but it once again highlights a less flattering trait than her sense of humor. Hillary is all too quick to respond with an answer that makes her look good at the expense of the truth.

Read the rest.

Bush, Clinton, Bush … Clinton?

Speaking of the Bush-Clinton dynasty issue, AP writer Nancy Benac tackles the issue today. She asks: “Forty percent of Americans have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. Anyone got a problem with that?”

According to polling some do:

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken over the summer found that fully one-quarter of all Americans said that the prospect of having at least 24 straight years of a President Clinton or Bush would be a consideration in their vote for president in 2008.

Even among Democrats, 17 percent said it would be a consideration. That compared with a third of all Republicans.

In a close election it could make a difference. Remember, Bill Clinton never won a majority of votes getting elected by a plurality both times.

Mo Rocca on the Bush-Clinton Dynasty

Tim Russert raised the issue at Wednesday’s debate and it has been raised by the media here and there, but none of Hillary’s opponents seem willing to tackle the issue directly. But I think the Clinton/Bush fatigue factor could play an important role in 2008. That remains to be seen, but here is a non-partisan and humorous exploration of the issue by Mo Rocca. Seems like a good YouTube for Friday:

The Dangers of Hillaryland

One of the many less than honest answers Hillary gave at Wednesday’s debate, was her assertion that she would seek out contrary views from a wide range of sources. The only problem with this rather banal promise is that there is no indication that Hillary has ever approached politics this way. In fact, she is famous for only surrounding herself with loyal staff who rarely question her judgment or decisions.

The idea that Hillary would seek out contrary views and listen to those who disagree with her is laughable given her history. The very term Hillaryland – used to describe her close friends and staff – expresses the idea of a close knit group of people who support and defend Hillary; whose loyalty is clear and unequivocal. In his recent largely favorable bio of Hillary, A Woman In charge, Carl Bernstein describes Hillaryland as “a full-blown culture in which Hillary surrounded herself with people who were loyal to her cause and would do her bidding.”

Bernstein also quotes one time Clinton legal adviser Mark Fabiani on Hillary’s protective bubble:

But the kind of people that were around here were yes people. She had never surrounded herself with people who could stand up to her, who were of a different mind . . . I always thought that was a real tragedy in that if she had had different people around her [who would challenge her] earlier, that maybe some of the things that happened might not have happened.

Hillary the disciplined campaigner knows what platitudes to mouth and what kind of promises to make. But her history fails to match the rhetoric or the professed ideals.

Hillary can be stopped

The inevitability of the Hillary campaign has been the theme for awhile now in the MSM, but a few people are willing to dispute this assertion. Adam Nagourney of the New York Times started the ball rolling:

Yet Mrs. Clinton may be a good example of why the front-runner designation is so ephemeral. Mr. Obama has arguably outpaced her in fund-raising and crowds. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards have held their own in winning endorsements.

Mrs. Clinton may have the lead in national polls and polls in New Hampshire. But most polls show a tight three-way race in Iowa, where many Democrats consider Mr. Edwards the, um, front-runner. Anyway, polls in Iowa and New Hampshire in the fall do not tell you very much about what is going to happen in January.

The truth is, there is no evidence that the Democratic primary voters have fallen head-over-heels for Mrs. Clinton. And any event that reminds Democratic voters of the lingering concerns about her could topple her from her perch.

The Real Clear Politics Blogs took up the issue and kicked it around. Jay Cost says Nagourney fails to realize that the media creates the front runner not voters:

This points to the methodological flaw of using polling data to analyze the state of the race. Polls are valuable to a point – but they really cannot be taken as independent evidence of the state of the race. This is how the media’s echo chamber is created. The media talks up one candidate over another. The polls echo this talking up back to the media. The media believes the polls offer independent evidence that justifies its talking up, and proceeds to talk up the particular candidate all the more.

This is why I refuse to ask the question that Dan Balz asked this week. The manner in which voters make a selection will change – because of all the money that candidates have. That’s when the real campaign begins, you know. It begins when the candidates start their advertising blitzes. That has only begun – and so the campaign has only begun. The fact that the media has nothing better to talk about in August than the “campaign” does not mean that there is a campaign to talk about.

Tom Bevan agrees and adds that a loss in Iowa could derail the Hillary campaign:

So it’s nuts to sit here in September and say Hillary can’t be stopped. We don’t know whether she can be stopped, and we won’t know whether she can be stopped until we get within a couple weeks of the caucuses and watch as voters start getting serious about making their choice.

[. . .]

Now consider how all of this could work against Hillary. She has massive leads in the national polls and in New Hampshire and Florida. But the one place where she’s in a real dog fight is Iowa. A win there would probably clinch the nomination. But if she enters as the national front runner and the prohibitive favorite and suffers an upset in Iowa – especially a bad one – it could cause her entire campaign to unravel. Especially if, as it looks now, the caucuses are held in very close proximity to the New Hampshire primary and she has no time to stanch the bleeding. So for all the talk of other candidates seeing Iowa as a “must win,” it may turn out that Hillary needs a win there most of all.

The doubts about Hillary will come. The question is whether anyone will position themselves to take advantage of those doubts and second guesses when the voting starts.

Hillary again wrong on Social Security

Hillary Clinton stubbornly refuses to admit reality on social security. At last nights Democratic debate she once again refused to give any indication of how she will respond to the growing entitlement crisis. She once again used faulty statistics to imply that everything was fine with social security when her husband left office only to be hampered by President Bush.

But this is simply not true as even moderator Tim Russert pointed out. She kept insisting that the magical term “fiscal responsibility” would somehow fix things. But the problem is demographics not the budget. The Baby Boomer’s are going to overwhelm the system and it won’t go away just because you balance the budget.

As I noted before, Ramesh Ponnuru has pointed out how Hillary is trying to spin this:

In recent weeks, she has claimed that when her husband left office, Social Security was projected to be solvent until 2055. She has added that the projection has been cut to 2041 because of President Bush’s fiscal mismanagement.

That’s not right. In 2000, Social Security’s trustees estimated that its trust fund would remain solvent until 2037. (As it happens, I don’t think this trust-fund solvency question is terribly important but for the sake of argument I’ll go with Hillary’s view that it does.) Now it is indeed estimated to be 2041. Under Bush, we’ve gained 4 years rather than lost 14.

Where did Clinton get the year 2055? In the last years of the Clinton administration, Clinton proposed to count the budget surplus toward Social Security and to have the government invest the Social Security funds in the stock market. It claimed that these moves would get us to 2055. Critics said the plan was based on accounting gimmicks that wouldn’t really make Social Security more secure. Whoever was right, the administration’s plan didn’t make it through Congress.

The other candidates flat out admitted that they would need to raise taxes if you take cost saving measures off the table. Having already pandered to the elderly and taken any cost cutting measures off the table now Hillary wants to pretend that she won’t have to raise taxes.

Trying to have it both ways, that is Hillary’s specialty.

Hillary Flip-Flops at debate

The New York Daily News has the details:

“It cannot be American policy, period,” Clinton (D-N.Y.) told debate moderator Tim Russert, who asked if there should be a presidential exemption to allow the torture of a terror chieftain if authorities knew a bomb was about to go off, but didn’t know where it was.

[. . .]

Last October, Clinton told the Daily News: “If we’re going to be preparing for the kind of improbable but possible eventuality, then it has to be done within the rule of law.”

She said then the “ticking time bomb” scenario represents a narrow exception to her opposition to torture as morally wrong, ineffective and dangerous to American soldiers.

“In the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans, then the decision to depart from standard international practices must be made by the President, and the President must be held accountable,” she said.

Typical Clinton, say what you think the audience wants to hear and reconcile it with your past statements later.

UPDATE: More from Ben Smith at the Politico

Runaround Hsu

Here is a little comic relief for your Wednesday afternoon:

From the fine folks at Hot Air.

Six Ways to Beat Hillary

John Dickerson at Slate offers Six Ways to Beat Hillary. I will post a longer discussion of this later today, but here are John’s six:

1) Start sucking up
2) Speak softly and build your Iowa ground game
3) Attack Clinton on policy
4) Attack Clinton as a captive of lobbyists
5) Sharpen the complaint that Clinton is too divisive
6) Attack her honesty