Thread: Hillary Clinton’s real opponent in the election is herself

Hillary Clinton’s real opponent in the election is herself

Published: July 25, 2016 11:12 a.m. ET

Hubris might undermine her candidacy, leading to a President Trump


Hillary Clinton is so confident that opposition to Donald Trump will carry her into the White House, she did not hesitate to snub the
millions of progressives who voted for Bernie Sanders by picking a milquetoast “centrist” as her running mate.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — It’s too late for Hillary Clinton to tell the truth about her email server. And the consequences of her lies and cover-ups are multiplying.

As Democrats begin their historic convention to make her the first woman nominated for president by a major party, Clinton’s favorability and trustworthiness ratings are well below 50% and falling.

Election polls show her in a dead heat nationally and in many swing states with a Republican rival branded by the Washington Post and others as a “threat to American democracy,” with signs that Donald Trump is pulling ahead.

The presumptive Democratic nominee has little choice now but to pretend that the email controversy is not an issue. It certainly won’t be mentioned from the podium during the four-day convention in Philadelphia starting Monday.

Instead, there will be much talk about extending the legacy of President Barack Obama and the historical precedent of electing a woman president. Oh, and there may be a certain amount of bad-mouthing the Republican nominee as a bigot, a racist, a megalomaniac, yada, yada, yada.

But the confidence displayed by the Clinton campaign, the Democratic Party and the lapdog liberal press that all this is sufficient to win by a landslide in November is not only a classic display of hubris, but borders on the delusional.

Snubbing Sanders’ supporters

Clinton is apparently so confident that opposition to Trump will carry her into the White House, she did not hesitate to snub the millions of progressives who voted for Bernie Sanders by picking a milquetoast “centrist” as her running mate.

Not only does the choice pass over progressive candidates like Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, but actually kicks sand in the eyes of the progressives by picking someone diametrically opposed to Sanders’ stance on trade accords and banking regulation.

Tim Kaine’s consistent support for trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and his pro-Wall Street stance in recent letters to bank regulators urging them to ease up, puts the lie to Clinton’s own flip-flops on those issues.

Now both of them can campaign across the country that they will stop trade agreements and break up banks, but who in their right mind would believe them?
There is already a significant backlash to the VP pick among Sanders’ supporters. Even if party leaders manage to squelch any actual disruptions at the convention, there is a lot of bad blood.

The spin from the Clinton campaign on the choice of Kaine, eagerly parroted by the mainstream media, is that the presidential candidate doesn’t need a political choice to help win the election — she’s got that in the bag — and so was free to choose Kaine because the pragmatic Virginia senator will be a big help in governing after she wins.

This line of thinking betrays a staggering hubris even if you think the fear-mongering about Trump will drive voters to the Democrats.

DNC shenanigans

On top of everything else, a new trove of leaked emails now proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Democratic National Committee members up to chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz were in the tank for Clinton from the beginning. They were willing to do anything to undermine Sanders’ candidacy, including use of his putative atheism and Jewish heritage against him.

The controversy has already destroyed any illusion of party unity, forcing Wasserman Schultz to announce her resignation and emboldening hundreds of Sanders’ supporters in their protests in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, Trump is going out of his way to woo Sanders’ supporters. His speech accepting the Republican nomination referred several times to the “rigged” system, one of Sanders’ signature issues, and he sees overlap in their opposition to multilateral trade pacts.

But Clinton’s real opponent in the race is herself, and the trail of deceptions she has left behind her.

Email untruths

Her attempts to mislead the public about the use of a private email server are just the most recent and most blatant, so they will continue to get the most attention from Trump and his surrogates as the general election campaign gets under way.

The verdict from FBI Director James Comey in a press conference earlier this month that Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information was bad enough, but the litany of untruths he laid at her feet in his subsequent congressional testimony was even more damaging.

Republicans asked Comey about Clinton’s claim that she had neither sent nor received any items marked classified. “That is not true,” Comey said.

Was Clinton right in saying she had never emailed classified material on her email? “No, there was classified material emailed.”

Was it true, as Clinton claimed, that she used only one device for emails? “She used multiple devices during the four years of her term as secretary of state.”

Did she return all work-related emails to the State Department, as she claimed? “No, we found work-related emails, thousands that were not returned.”

Was Clinton’s claim true that neither she nor her staff deleted work-related emails from her personal account? “There is no doubt that work-related emails were removed electronically from the email system.”

Did Clinton’s lawyers read every one of her emails before deleting “personal” ones, as she claimed? “No.”

The July 7 testimony was largely overlooked in the wake of the holiday, with the connivance of media eager to downplay evidence of systematic deception on Clinton’s part.

As it filters through into the public consciousness, however, this unimpeachable evidence will further depress Clinton’s already parlous numbers on trustworthiness.

There has been much ink spilled about the historic mistake of the Republican Party in nominating such a controversial candidate as Donald Trump. But the Democrats are not far behind, and the election result is anything but certain.

Darrell Delamaide covers politics for MarketWatch.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hil...MW_latest_news

Americans need to wake up and smell the crap. Our nation doesn't need a "mother". It needs a President. Republicans ended slavery, not Democrats. If some slaves worked on the White House, it was only a few and in only a few areas. Skilled workers built the White House. Lying about slavery is not going to win the White House. Moaning over what children see and hear when you run the worst of the worst out of context all day and all night during prime time is a shallow and hypocritical as it gets.

The only way to help the young people of our nation is to help their parents get jobs that sustain their families, and there's only 1 person in this race who gets that and has gotten it his entire life, and that is Donald J Trump. I heard him talking about this jobs and trade issue in 1987 and I said to myself "Oh my God, that man needs to run for President".

Well, finally, he couldn't take it any more and decided to dive in. He's the only person in decades we can trust to fix this outrageous disaster called the United States. We're broke, we're bankrupt, 94 million working age Americans are out of the work force, our borders are wide open, Congress is tingling all over with the prospects of more trade agreements that suck our jobs and industry out of the country, and things could not be worse. The only hint of sunlight, the only whiff of fresh air, the only wave of hope are in one candidate, Donald J Trump.

Support him. Campaign for him. Donate to his effort. Vote for him.

The future is still there for US, we can turn this around, if we all do the right thing in November and vote for Donald Trump.