Earlier this week, I asked, “Who Supports Hillary?” and I’ve been reading bits and pieces of related articles since then. How do her supporters respond to her “baggage”? It’s manufactured, they say.
Today, there was a Ross Douthat column in the Times, about her approach to this campaign.
His bottom line:
But on the evidence of her opening gambit [the video featuring her coalition/voting blocs more than HRC herself], her strategists’ first preference is to stick with the basic Obama gameplan and vision, and cover over some of Hillary’s weaknesses as a tribune by placing much more emphasis on the coalition than the candidate.
And the comments on the article tend to support this.
To her supporters, HRC’s qualifications are utterly beside the point. What matters is that she has aligned herself with the specific voting blocs she judges necessary to win. Heck, even specific policies aren’t as relevant as giving the impression that “I support whatever benefits my supporters.”
Now, it’s been said that Democrats are far more likely to dive into major policy changes of whatever kind, assuming that having the right intention will bring about success, and Republicans more likely to worry about unintended consequences of seemingly-right-thinking policies. Is that true? I don’t know. In the case of HRC, the fact that her supporters don’t care so much about past successes as demonstrations of qualifications as about having right intentions seems to make GOP protests about her lack of qualification (and baggage, generally) irrelevant, just as was the case for Barack Obama.
But let’s look in the mirror: are Republicans looking at resume, or speeches, in choosing their candidates?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In