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Hillary Clinton Really Shouldn’t Have Told Voters That Trump Wasn’t a Normal Republican
New York Magazine ^ | December 23, 2016 | Eric Levitz

Posted on 12/23/2016 1:42:11 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet

Hillary Clinton spent much of last summer arguing that Ronald Reagan would never vote for Donald Trump. At the Democratic National Convention, a series of speakers — including Barack Obama — argued that the patron saint of the conservative movement would recoil at Trump’s authoritarian ethos. At a September press conference, the Democratic nominee suggested that the Gipper would be incensed to see the Republican nominee praise Vladimir Putin while disparaging the American president. One of her super-PACs’ final campaign ads cast Reagan’s ghost as a Clinton surrogate.

The point of all this nostalgia for the man who killed off the New Deal consensus was to isolate the Republican nominee from his party’s upscale wing — and, thus, to engineer a landslide, bipartisan rebuke of the demagogue.

This same strategic logic shaped Clinton’s “alt-right” speech, which cast Trump as the champion of a reactionary online movement that defined itself in opposition to the mainstream conservatism. By the end of that address, Clinton had contrasted the hatefulness of Trump’s meme-savvy minions with the principled tolerance of such statesman as Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and House Speaker Paul Ryan.

At the time, it wasn’t hard to make a case for this gambit. After the DNC, polls showed Clinton with a solid grasp on the Democratic base and a comfortable lead in the states she’d need to win on November 8. Why not try to expand her coalition across the aisle, by assuring suburban Republicans that the vulgarian who’d commandeered their party wasn’t really one of them?

But that question was never as rhetorical as the Clinton campaign may have hoped. There was always a risk that in distancing Trump from the GOP, she would be doing him a service....

(Excerpt) Read more at nymag.com ...


TOPICS: Campaign News; Issues; Parties; Polls
KEYWORDS: 2016issues; abortion; clinton; democrats; fakenews; hillary; hillary2016; idiotnews; trump; trump2016; trumptransition
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To: OrioleFan

Hillary thought that she’s been around long enough that the people already knew who she was. Guess what? We did.


41 posted on 12/23/2016 5:22:31 PM PST by sheana
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To: definitelynotaliberal

Hillary will she run again in 2020?

She might but will not win the nomination again.

Hard to whip a dead horse enough to win a race.

Hillary’s political career is as dead as Sea-Biscuit.


42 posted on 12/23/2016 5:42:23 PM PST by urbanpovertylawcenter (the law and poverty collide in an urban setting and sparks fly)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I ask because Hillary claims to be Methodist. Of course, she’s no more a Christian than Soetoro or Biden or Kerry or the Cuomos.


43 posted on 12/23/2016 7:15:47 PM PST by Arthur McGowan (https://youtu.be/IYUYya6bPGw)
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To: Scram1; darkwing104; Old Sarge; hellinahandcart

Huh?


44 posted on 12/23/2016 8:44:02 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet (You cannot invade the mainland US. There'd be a rifle behind every blade of grass.)
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