Natives get restless RE Hillary Clinton!

THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2014

Collins and Chozick start up: We’ll admit it. We can’t quite believe that Hillary Clinton could win in 2016.

We’re not saying she can’t win, since she certainly can. We’re saying we have our nagging doubts.

If you watch MSNBC, you’re being propagandized differently. A few weeks ago, the children filled your heads with sugarplums about how far Clinton is ahead of leading Republicans.

Joy Reid pleasured us rubes while guest hosting at Hardball. We were struck by how small Clinton’s margins were:
REID (4/16/14): We’ve got new polling on possible presidential matchups for 2016. Let’s check the Hardball scoreboard.

According to a new McClatchy/Marist poll, Hillary Clinton leads Paul Ryan nationally by 8 points. It’s Clinton 51, Ryan 44. No other Republican is even within single digits. New Jersey governor Chris Christie trails by 11 points. It’s Clinton 53, Christie 42.
Other GOP hopefuls were farther behind.

Despite the cheerful propaganda, those margins didn’t look huge to us. In the spring of 1999, Gore trailed Bush in national polls by as many as twenty points. He ended up winning the popular vote. Early margins can change.

We’re not saying Clinton can’t win, since she certainly can. On the other hand, the natives may be getting restless. We noticed two examples today.

First, Gail Collins enjoyed some standard snark in the New York Times:
COLLINS (5/1/14): A million dollars will get you Jeb Bush’s advice. Also, it will buy a visit from Hillary Clinton. Four, in fact—she gets around $250,000 per appearance. When someone in the audience threw a shoe at her recently, she was speaking at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.

Hillary dodged the stiletto with quite a bit of dexterity and grace. But you had to ask: Why is this woman giving a paid talk to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries? The Clintons came out of the White House with very little cash, but there’s got to be a point when you stop making up for lost time.
Collins indulged two favorite themes: (1) snobbishness about her lessers, including the déclassé types in the (gasp) scrap recycling trade. (Don't miss her typical closing line about pols who hail from “East Cupcake.”)

(2) She also pushed the pleasing notion that Bill and Hillary are shameless money-grubbers.

Our view? The pundits could return to their Clinton-hating in roughly no seconds flat. And please understand—they’re happy to invent fictional themes around which they build our elections.

We were reminded of this impulse when we read the Times front page, where Amy Chozick was playing the snide about the way Clinton and Clinton are famous tools of big money.

Alas! These people have invented so many silly tales down through the years that they may have trouble keeping them straight. Late in her piece, Chozick offered this recollection:
CHOZICK (5/1/14): If she runs in 2016, Mrs. Clinton would confront the inequality issue from a very different place than her husband did in 1992, when he made $35,000 a year as governor of Arkansas. Back then, Mr. Clinton seemed to have a natural connection to people of modest means while his opponent, the elder President George Bush, struggled to say how much a gallon of milk cost.
Snarking nicely, Chozick remembered the way President Bush was the out-of-touch royal back then, much the way Hillary Clinton might be this time around.

In 1992, President Bush wasn’t even sure how much a gallon of milk cost! Chozick pleasured Times readers with the recollection.

That said, did it actually happen?

Journalists love to torment selected pols with the old price-of-milk-and-eggs question. Candidates Tsongas and Quayle were hit with the question from voters in early 1992. Candidate Clinton handled the question in October 1992.

In 1996, the question and its crazed aftermath may have cost Lamar Alexander the GOP nomination. For a recollection, click here.

It’s just that we can’t remember Candidate Bush being hit with the famous old price-of-milk question in 1992. Nor do the Nexis archives seem to record such an incident.

(We do find this BBC piece saying that Bush was hit with this question during one of that year’s debates. But we find no sign in the transcripts that this actually happened.)

Whatever! The mainstream “press corps” simply loves these utterly silly frameworks. They love to invent and employ such frameworks to advance their own dimwitted views of our election choices.

We know of no election where they misbehaved as much as they did during Campaign 2000, when they spent two years inventing “lies” by Candidate Gore. But if you think these petulant beings couldn’t turn against Hillary Clinton again, we think you’re out of touch with life as it’s lived on this planet.

Lady Collins was snarking today about the Clintons’ love of big bucks. Offering a slightly dark warning, Chozick remembered something which may or may not have occurred.

These hopeless life forms are charter members in the world’s most irresponsible guild. We’re giving Reid and her channel’s propaganda machine this early emergency warning.

9 comments:

  1. Another example of the equal pay for equal work issue. Jeb gets $1 million for the same speech Hillary gets $250K. She was First Lady, Secretary of State and Senator while Jeb was Gov of Florida. How is that fair pay? How is that money grubbing? She is letting herself be underpaid. And Jeb is supposedly running for Pres in 2016 too, so the exposure is the same for both.

    I think the positive comments about Hillary now are to demonstrate that when they nominate someone else it will not be because of sexism but for other reasons. Further, I think the Obama people have a sense that they owe her something for being a team player in 2008 (and after), whereas the press does not.

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    1. When you're beholden to the corporate greedheads sometimes life just isn't fair.

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  2. I think the press will bear down harder on Hillary Clinton then perhaps even the worst of the bad old days. As with both Bubba and Obama, this will only help. The only time the scandal mongering hurt Clinton was when he was dumb enough to actually give Monica a squeeze.
    it won't be for the faint of heart, but for many obvious reasons, Hillary will win handily. Better numbers than Obama. You heard it here first.

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    1. Hillary will win all of Obama's votes, plus add some white working-class votes to the mix. Hence, yes, win big. Also, the landscape is totally different from the 1990s and Campaign 2000 --- demographics, the increasing insanity of the GOP, etc. Plus, the Clintons are just in a totally different league politically than Gore, or for that matter, Kerry were.

      And yes: the more the media piles on, the better the Clintons do. Just remember: Bill's approval ratings peaked *during impeachment* --- 70%. And for all of the bashing and trashing, his average approval rating throughout his presidency was higher than Saint Ronnie's.

      Sure, Hillary lost to Obama in 08, but that probably had more to do with her Iraq vote (which cost her Iowa, which propelled Obama) than anything else. That, and O's people completely outmaneuvered Hil's in the caucus states.

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    2. Geoff, you will never get into the Bob Tribe by saying such nonsense as Clinton's Iraq vote played a role in the 2008 primary, and also Obama's incredible organization in the caucus states was also a big factor.

      Such heresy! Don't you know that the only reason Hillary isn't President Clinton is because of the mean things Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann said about her on MSNBC?

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    3. Clinton and Obama voted identically on Iraq. Obama was not in the Senate for the authorizing vote and his only claim to a different policy rests on a speech that no one recorded, unverifiable and in the past. Obama however, skipped more votes than Clinton, just as he skipped votes in his other offices. Liberals who wished to support Obama used Clinton's supposed vote as an excuse. Clinton's stated policies on both the wars and on closing Guantanamo were stronger than Obama's. Given his subsequent actions, I believe she would have followed through on her promises and ended the wars sooner and closed Guantanamo, unlike Obama. Because Clinton has tended to keep her promises.

      Some people refer to Obama's "incredible organization in the caucus states" as election fraud.

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    4. The last sentence is right out of Fox's "some people say".

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    5. Clinton voted for the Iraqi invasion. She didn't put up much fuss over it either. They both voted for continued funding with the military waist deep. I'm no apologist for Obama but that narrative just isn't a good one to move forward with.

      As far as the theme of the post itself, I think the relationship between politicians and "big money", including the Clintons is VERY important. Nobody can tell me that Hillary's $250,000 pep talk isn't an investment, and probably a tax write off at that. Who's fooling who.

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  3. Joseph Cannon is writing a book documenting that fraud -- from the left.

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