For years, I’ve been writing that the great myth about Hillary Clinton is the notion she shared even a fraction of her husband’s political skills. There is no transitive property to marriage. If Bill Clinton could play the xylophone, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have gained the skill when she said, “I do.” So it goes with politics. Bill Clinton would never dream of saying anything like this. Having risen in Arkansas politics — not an over-performing state GDP-wise — he understood how to talk to working-class voters in ways Hillary never learned in 40 years of standing next to him sagely nodding.
So, what’s wrong with what she said? Well, nearly everything, starting with the fact that she probably believes all of it. It shows that she really doesn’t like large swathes of the country. She has a Manichaean view that says people who voted against her are backward, racist, sexist, and kind of dumb. I didn’t love the slogan “Make America Great Again,” and Lord knows I didn’t like Trump’s campaign style. But for millions of decent Americans, Trump’s program was optimistic. “We’re gonna make America great again” may sound unequivocally racist to the race-obsessed, but that’s not how everyone who liked it heard it. How easy and comfortable it must be to think that anyone who voted against you is against “black people getting rights.”
At Ricochet, this week’s GLoP (short for Goldberg, Rob Long and John Podhoretz) podcast is titled “A Cheeseburger of Schadenfreude,” because Hillary’s Deplorables on Steroids speech vindicates what conservatives have been saying about her for decades. Near the end of the podcast, the guys riff on her Norma Desmond-ish tone and joke that somebody should make an “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille” parody video of her. But someone already did; Obama-supporting comedienne Lisa Nova – back in 2008. It speaks volumes about where the left was in 2016 that someone who they had rhetorically beaten like a bongo eight years prior in the rush to nominate The One ended up being their nominee. (Well that, and arguably rigging the race to avoid Bernie getting the nomination.)
h/t ED