Monday night’s presidential town hall provided the best format and platform yet for the Democratic candidates. Each was able to play to his or her strengths without the back-and-forth conflict-baiting that debate moderators seem to demand.
Even so, Hillary Clinton stood out. Not only did she seem completely at ease in this environment, but she was also confident and wideranging in her answers, delivering many in an assertive tone that was one tick below yelling, and displaying a depth and breadth of knowledge that few can match. She was at the top of her game.
She had to be. Senator Bernie Sanders is breathing down her neck in Iowa with a message that’s increasingly popular among dissatisfied liberals and that she hasn’t been able to counter sufficiently. Furthermore, at the previous debate, she made a huge tactical error by attacking Sanders’s motives and integrity, a move that made her appear smaller, desperate and hostile.
At the town hall, Clinton’s back was against the wall, and she performed brilliantly. Indeed, that seems to be when she gives her best performances ? when her back is against the wall. But she is often in that position because of her own doing, her own lapses in judgment, her own miscalculations.
It is an odd, cyclical exercise to continue to praise her for climbing out of holes she digs for herself. There almost seems to be a self-destructive, self-defeating impulse at play, a need to be perpetually down so that she can perpetually fight her way back up, a sort of crisis dependency.
It is hard to see how this seesawing can produce a winning campaign or a successful presidency, should she win it. She’s going to have to stay at or near the top of her game for the duration. Then there is the strange reality that the ritual of her fighting her way back, even with strong showings like Monday’s, can take on air of disingenuousness in and of itself.
The cynical read is that these command performances are calculated, the maneuvering of a purely political being with a gift for guile. That assessment isn’t particularly fair, but it is quite real. I believe it happens in part because there can be an animatronic plasticity present in her comportment and conveyance that raises questions of ambition versus authenticity. She is hands down the most broadly qualified and experienced among the candidates. But there remains an intangible quality that eludes her: connectivity. Even many people who admire her simply don’t trust her.
This is the same problem that, to varying degrees, Mitt Romney, Al Gore and Bob Dole had. It’s not fixable. Indeed, attempts to fix it feel even more forced and phony. Another part of this problem stems from something far more tangible: the taint of scandal that has trailed her and her husband much of their lives. One of the questions she got Monday night cut to the quick of this issue for her.
A young man rose and asked the following: “It feels like there is a lot of young people like myself who are very passionate supporters of Bernie Sanders. And I just don’t see the same enthusiasm from younger people for you. In fact, I’ve heard from quite a fewpeople my age that they think you’re dishonest, but I’d like to hear from you on why you feel the enthusiasm isn’t there.” These are Clinton’s biggest weaknesses: people’s sense of her trustworthiness, and the relative lack of excitement she engenders, particularly among young voters.
Perceptions of honesty and trustworthiness are bad and getting worse, even among Democrats. According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Wednesday, among Democrats and independents leaning that way: “Sanders now leads by 12 points, 48-36 percent, in being seen as more honest and trustworthy, vs. 6 points last month and an even split in October.”Then there is Clinton’s mounting younger-voter problem.
According to a USA TODAY/Rock the Vote poll conducted this month, Sanders leads Clinton among millennial Democrats and independents (those age 18 to 34) 46 percent to 35 percent. Among millennial Democratic and independent women, Sanders’s lead in the poll was even greater: 50 percent to Clinton’s 31 percent. Sanders’s strength, and Clinton’s weakness, is mostly driven by the youngest millennials. According to the paper:“Among both genders, Sanders has 57 percent backing in the 18-25 age group, according to the USA Today/Rock the Vote poll. That drops to 36 percent for those ages 26-34. For Clinton, the opposite is true. She gets 44 percent of those ages 26 to 34 and 25 percent of those 18-25.”
Sanders has become the cool uncle and Clinton has become the cold aunt.
Although many of Sanders’s plans appear on their face to be unworkable and, if they were workable, would cause a massive, possibly unprecedented, expansion of government in this country, I don’t think young people think about it that way. I believe that many of them see Sanders as someone committed to dismantling a broken system and its component broken institutions - financial, political and educational.
Millennials are notoriously distrusting of institutions. Sanders is anti-institution. The Clintons are an institution. Clinton answered the question at the town hall mostly by evading it, and turning her attention to the constant in her life: her enemies and their attacks on her. She said at one point: “You know, look, I’ve been around a long time. People have thrown all kinds of things at me. And you know I can’t keep up with it. I just keep going forward.” Survival doesn’t excite, and it’s not proof of moral rectitude. But it is evidence of a certain kind of I-willsurvive resilience and an I-know-how-to-survive savvy.
And that informs the choice Democrats have to make in choosing a nominee: Do they want to put forth a survivor in chief, of whom many are suspicious and about whom few are truly excited, or a dreamer in chief (in the candidacy of Sanders) who says all the things they want to hear but that they quietly know he’ll never be able to deliver?
<
CHARLES M. BLOW>
댓글 안에 당신의 성숙함도 담아 주세요.
'오늘의 한마디'는 기사에 대하여 자신의 생각을 말하고 남의 생각을 들으며 서로 다양한 의견을 나누는 공간입니다. 그러나 간혹 불건전한 내용을 올리시는 분들이 계셔서 건전한 인터넷문화 정착을 위해 아래와 같은 운영원칙을 적용합니다.
자체 모니터링을 통해 아래에 해당하는 내용이 포함된 댓글이 발견되면 예고없이 삭제 조치를 하겠습니다.
불건전한 댓글을 올리거나, 이름에 비속어 및 상대방의 불쾌감을 주는 단어를 사용, 유명인 또는 특정 일반인을 사칭하는 경우 이용에 대한 차단 제재를 받을 수 있습니다. 차단될 경우, 일주일간 댓글을 달수 없게 됩니다.
명예훼손, 개인정보 유출, 욕설 등 법률에 위반되는 댓글은 관계 법령에 의거 민형사상 처벌을 받을 수 있으니 이용에 주의를 부탁드립니다.
Close
x