Hillary Clinton is walking into Donald Trump’s trap

WaPo ^ | 5 May 2016 | Danielle Allen

[mandaladon]

Donald Trump has set a big, fat trap for Hillary Clinton, and so far she has stepped right into it. He turned his attacks against women against her. She is, he argued, playing the “woman card.” And Clinton anted up, offering her supporters the chance to buy a “woman card.” From now until Nov. 8, Trump will surely continue to insult women. If Clinton routinely responds to those attacks, Trump will turn her into the “women’s candidate,” and she will lose. She is already perilously close to being that candidate.

Let’s be honest. Polling shows that Trump has a problem with women, but it also shows that Clinton has a problem with men. Thanks to Bernie Sanders’s pushing and prodding over the course of the primary, Clinton’s vision has expanded, but we all know its core: She is a battle-tested warrior for women and children.

Consider her slogan, “Fighting for us.” For many men, this slogan would have to be experienced as emasculating. A woman fighting for them? Rightly or wrongly, the slogan rubs the wrong way in relation to traditional notions of masculinity. Her slogan itself reveals a limited conception of who she seeks to represent. This is a potentially fatal flaw in Clinton’s campaign. The more that Clinton takes Trump’s bait around the issue of his denigration of women, the more powerfully this flaw in her own campaign will show itself.

Clinton needs to fix this problem, and fast. And she needs to avoid taking Trump’s bait.

here are important lessons to be learned from the many Republican candidates who rose to the bait and were decimated by Trump’s rhetoric. His monikers for them consistently had two effects: They pushed his foes off message and also forced them to fight on turf that Trump chose for them.

[meadsjn]

Trump does NOT have a problem with women. Hillary draws her primary support from a minority of sub-human, communist, sort-of women -- social workers, some public school teachers, some government union slugs.

Human women across the spectrum cannot stand the witch.

[headstamp 2]

The money quote

I could see a candidate Jeb folding up like an accordion at the mere sound of her voice.

[rfreedom4u]

I hope he’s studied Rules for Radicals as well.

[Ancesthntr]

I agree with all of what you said, except the part about the ‘92 campaign. My POV is that Perot would never have run without Bush being such a lying sack of shiite. Had he stayed reasonably true to his campaign promises, Perot would not have run and Bush would have been a 2-termer.

Oh, and Hillary Clinton would be the disbarred ex-con, ex-wife of the largely forgotten philandering ex-governor of a hick state who would be most famous as the answer to various trivia questions. So, in my view, George H.W. Bush is responsible for Hillary being the 2016 Dem nominee, and now he (and his family) clearly want her to win.