At first, she was this: The First Woman.
Neither she nor her supporters admit that Hillary was initially running solely because she is the First Woman. Instead, she was running on her supposed wealth of experience and competence, her selfless, lifelong public service, but those reasons don't hold up particularly well under close scrutiny.
She accomplished nothing of note as Secretary of State -- no important treaties, no high-profile peace agreements, no ground-breaking negotiated settlements, nothing. There's not one single world hotspot or American adversarial relationship that is unequivocally better today as a direct result of her actions as Secretary.
Our relations with Israel -- our best friend in the region? Weaker, strained, tenuous.
The so-called "Russian reset?" A joke. Putin acts with impunity, taking liberties (literally as well as figuratively) as he pleases.
China? North Korea? Syria? Libya? Iran? Mexico?All worse. Nuclear weapons abound, trade imbalances/currency manipulations run wild, illegal immigration/drug running remains unchecked, dictators butcher their own populations without pause, and to cite the oft-used but completely accurate phrase du jour, "Our friends no longer trust us and our enemies no longer fear us."
No, it's not all her "fault." Not by a long shot. Obama's overall weakness and apparent lack of caring or concern (some say outright intention) about seeing the U.S. slip into "also-ran" status as a player/influencer on the world stage has much to do with our current position.
However, if that slippage was contrary to her deeply-held convictions, then her high-profile experience, reputation and personal persuasive skills would certainly have come to the fore and been a major factor in not allowing it to happen. While it's very tempting to say she simply wanted to check the "Served as Important Cabinet Member" box on her résumé, rather than actually do anything important or memorable, it's even scarier to think she actively wanted markedly different results but wasn't able to bring them about.
According to all the polls, she's a very untrustworthy individual, a supremely negative character trait, because of four major reasons:
1) Her e-mail server situation appears to be close to out of control. Fortunately for her, the specifics and technical legalities of it seem far too arcane for the average casually-attentive voter to be concerned with. A recent poll of Democratic voters found 71% would vote for Hillary even if she were indicted. Trying to compare her e-mail situation to that of General Petraeus ("Who?") or any other past administration official is an exercise in futility for the eternally communications-challenged Republican opposition, who wouldn't be able to formulate a cogent, pithy, impactful statement explaining "Why it really matters" if their political lives depended on it. Which, to a great extent, they do.
Her private e-mail server, the legal negligence she showed in maintaining it, the 100s -- if not 1000s -- of classified communications that went through that unsecured server (regardless of any 'marking' at the time), everything has long since passed the threshold of technically "illegal, actionable" behavior. We're now deep into the realm of the FBI essentially trying to find a certifiably un-Photoshopped picture of her standing over the body holding the dripping knife, knowing full well that Obama's Justice Department will derisively dismiss with contempt and inaction anything less. This is the best example of the direct impact of a complicit liberally-biased media so far in this campaign. The liberal media walk a very fine line: they report on her e-mail doings just enough to be able to say to their critics, "See? We're covering it," but not anywhere near doggedly enough to actually have any tangible influence on the Great Unwashed. There is no pressure on the mainstream news organizations to press the matter. No one in the mainstream of liberal political thought wants to discover what the so-called "truth" may be, quite unlike if the situation and parties were reversed.
2) Her trustworthiness also takes a hit on the Benghazi Libya terror attack on September 11, 2012 that killed U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. This is either a major or minor hit to Ms. Clinton, depending on the extent of awareness of the incident on the part of the voter. In another stark example of over-the-top liberal media bias that works to her favor, the predominant theme of the coverage after her Congressional Benghazi hearings some months back was "Clinton emerges from 11 hours of Benghazi hearings unscathed."
Which, of course, was the exact factual opposite of what transpired at those hearings. The exact opposite. During the course of the hearings, Clinton admitted that before Susan Rice went out on her now infamous Five-Sunday-Show Lying Tour (where the fairy tale of the "attack was a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim internet video" was first put forth), she (Clinton) had told both Egypt and her daughter Chelsea the night before Rice appeared on TV that the attack was unquestionably a preplanned terror attack. That was brand new information, gleaned at the hearing, and it proved Clinton had willingly lied to protect a political narrative.
The liberal media never reported this finding from those hearings. Clinton's supporters continue to believe to this day that the hearings accomplished "nothing," that they were all for show. It's as if the Tigers beat the Red Sox in the actual game 4-2, but the TV reported that the Sox won and everyone simply accepted it. Still, her character has suffered a bit, if only because she is on videotape telling the victims' families that they died from a violent reaction to an anti-Muslim video. Some voters have heard the deeper story and doubt about Clinton's character remains an issue to that small slice of the electorate.
3) Influence peddling at the Clinton Foundation while also serving as secretary of state? Cutting deals and passing favors to foreign entities in exchange for donations to their pure-as-the-driven-snow charitable Foundation? There are about 20 layers of plausible deniability and unpinnable implication between any supposed wrongdoing and the Clintons. It just doesn't smell good to anyone paying attention, but that's a self-defining statement. Any voters at the edges who might negatively impact her candidacy are not paying close attention. This one's an amorphous dead end. You know it's there, she knows you know it's there and she smiles, because she knows it'll never happen.
4) Finally, there's the Women's Issues issue. "Any woman who accuses a man of sexual assault deserves to be believed." Except, of course, any woman who accuses Bill Clinton, because that's old news, "different," and came from the well-known Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Her behavior as Enabler-in-Chief during the '90s was one of the most remarkable performances in service to an overriding political agenda ever witnessed in American history. Forgetting for just the briefest of moments the quaint notion in the American justice system of a presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, is the liberal mainstream media so far in the tank for Ms. Clinton that they won't even mention the rank hypocrisy of her outlandish current position in light of her past actions? The answer is 'yes.'
So what exactly, besides her Democratic femaleness, is her candidacy based on? Hard to say. She has no real, tangible accomplishments to point to, either as secretary of state or NY senator. There are no Clinton Acts. There are no Clinton Accords. She has no military service, no heroism under fire, no great business and/or managerial accomplishments, no outright high-level expertise in any technical or economic or social or scientific field. She's never started a business or run anything or managed a great number of people or made difficult, fast-paced life-or-death decisions. She gives every impression of being situationally dishonest, opportunistic, loyal only to her self-advancement.
But in spite of that, over the last few months she has been carefully crafting and refining a new rationale for her candidacy, one that her sycophants enthusiastically endorse, an approach that has real potential to appeal to Undecideds and Crossovers.
Hillary's New Campaign Rationale: "I'm not Trump."
That alone could make her the odds-on favorite to win.
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