Who's the Real Candidate of Change?
Making the case for his wife as the next president, Bill Clinton told Democratic convention delegates in Philadelphia that Hillary is "the best darn change maker I ever met in my entire life."
Lots of liberals are talking about change, about how Hillary is the agent of change who will fix what ails us.
With all the talk about Hillary Clinton being the “candidate of change” you’d think George W. Bush has been president for the past 8 years.
But imagine if W really were president and presided over the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression. He didn’t. Barack Obama did.
Imagine if W accumulated just about as much debt in just 8 years as the United States accumulated under every president since George Washington. Again, it was President Obama who did that.
Imagine if income inequality got worse under W’s leadership. Bush was in Texas when that happened. It got worse under O’s leadership.
Imagine if, despite all that, the Republicans at their convention were by and large painting a sunny picture of life in America in 2016.
Democrats would tell voters how out of touch those dumb, rich Republicans are. They would say. “Now you know why nearly 3 out of 4 Americans think we’re on the wrong track.” As for the media: They would have a field day exposing Republicans as incompetents and fools.
While we’re imagining, imagine if it were the Republicans who spent more time at their convention worrying about climate change than ISIS. Imagine if Republicans brought on stage the mother of a thug, a nearly 300-pound kid who roughed up a store owner before getting into a tussle with a cop, then tried to take the officer’s gun and was shot dead because the officer rightly thought his life was in danger.
Not that the liberal media would make a big deal of any of that anyway, but Donald Trump gave them the opportunity to focus on him instead. As the whole world knows by now, at a news conference in Florida, Trump sounded like he was encouraging the Russians to spy on America. He says he was joking when he said, “Russia, if you’re listening: I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” referring to Mrs. Clinton’s supposedly “private” emails she deleted before handing her server over to the FBI.
Let’s assume Donald wasn’t kidding. Let’s assume he was simply doing what comes naturally to him: putting his foot in his mouth and letting his opponent off the hook. If the emails really involved only private matters, what’s the big deal?
According to the Clinton campaign, the security of the United States is the big deal.
“This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent,” according to Jake Sullivan, Mrs. Clinton’s chief foreign policy adviser. “This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue.”
But if Mrs. Clinton was telling the truth – and the emails really were private, about yoga and her daughter’s wedding – how would that involve national security?
And wasn’t it even bigger news that if the Russians (or whoever actually did the hacking) were able to get into the DNC’s emails, there’s a good chance they also got into Hillary Clinton’s highly sensitive state department emails which were stored on a less secure server?
But Hillary has friends in the media who just love it when Donald Trump gives them ammo. They slobbered over Barack Obama because he was a historic candidate. Well, so is Hillary. They routinely put a thumb on the scale for liberal Democrats, because liberal Democrats share liberal journalists’ values. But this time, because they don’t simply favor the Democratic candidate, this time they viscerally detest the Republican candidate, they’re putting more than a thumb on the scale. They’re putting their liberal rear ends on the scale.
Hillary Clinton, in addition to a friendly media, has something else going for her: Donald Trump. But Donald Trump has something going for him, too: Hillary Clinton.
A big chunk of the American electorate doesn’t like or trust either of them. A lot of Americans will cast a vote against one of them -- not for one of them.
Americans are not optimistic. They know this isn’t Ronald Reagan’s morning in America or the Bill Clinton years when the economy was also booming. This time around they want change.
What we don't know in the summer of 2016 is if it will be Hillary’s version or Donald’s.