Hillary Clinton is clobbering Bernie Sanders—and yet getting negative reviews from some of the pundits.
How is that possible? The Democratic race is
essentially over. President Obama is privately telling donors it’s time
to get on the Hillary train, the New York Times reports. A front-runner
who wins in state after state usually basks in a winner’s aura as the
party coalesces around her, and draws glowing profiles of how she and
her team did it.
Sure, Hillary was always expected to beat Bernie.
It’s also true that Clinton has never been beloved by the press, and the
feeling is mutual.
But the larger problem is the outlook as the commentary class looks ahead to the fall.
Until the last couple of weeks, the conventional
wisdom was that a Trump nomination would all but assure a second Clinton
presidency. After all, she’s the former senator and secretary of State
with an awesome political machine, and he’s the untested billionaire
with a penchant for divisive rhetoric. Plus, Democrats have an Electoral
College edge and have won the popular vote in five of the last six
campaigns.
But some commentators see troubling signs in
Clinton’s performance so far and wonder how she would withstand a Trump
onslaught. The Donald has high negatives, to be sure, but Hillary does
as well.
An unsparing assessment comes from Joe Klein, who has
known the Clintons for a quarter century and mostly written
sympathetically about them since his 1992 New York magazine cover story
on Bill Clinton.
Klein
agrees with Hillary’s self-assessment that she is not a natural politician, but goes much further in weighing a Trump matchup:
“Clinton seems particularly ill equipped for the
task. She is our very own quinoa and kale salad, nutritious but bland.
Worse, she’s the human embodiment of the Establishment that Trump has
been running against…
“Indeed, her real problem is that she’s too much of a
politician. She still speaks like politicians did 20 years ago, when
her husband was President. This year, the candidates who have seemed the
most appealing–Trump, Sanders, John Kasich–don’t use the oratorical
switchbacks that have been beaten to death since John F. Kennedy.”
It’s no secret that Sanders has pushed Clinton to the
left on trade, immigration, Wall Street and other issues. But Klein
says that is often viewed as dissembling:
“There is an odd new law of U.S. politics: You can
lie, as Trump does all the time, egregiously, but you can’t temporize.
You can’t avoid a position on the XL pipeline or the Trans-Pacific trade
deal, as Clinton tried to do in the campaign. You can’t try to please
too many people too much of the time. Raising your voice to make a
point–which Clinton does all the time, disastrously, because it seems
such a conscious act–won’t get you anywhere unless you’re really angry.
“In the end, I’m not at all certain that Clinton can beat Trump.”
A note about her speaking style: When Clinton won
five states on Tuesday night, I tweeted that she was shouting her speech
and that it would be more effective with the audience at home if she
was more conversational. I didn’t say she was shrill, I didn’t say she
should smile, and in the past I’ve criticized Sanders for shouting his
way through debates.
But I was hit with hundreds of tweets declaring me to
be a horrible, misogynistic sexist. Some of this was a wave powered by
what others had said about her speech. Maybe my quick take was wrong.
But I hope we’re not entering a period where any criticism of the
presumptive Democratic nominee is treated as sexism.
Other left-wing pundits, driven in part by ideology, fear the worst. This
Salon headline boils it down:
“Hillary Will Never Survive the Trump Onslaught: It’s Not Fair, But It Makes Her a Weak Nominee.”
Clinton’s largest problem, in my view, is her low
polling marks on honesty, a result of the email scandal and perhaps
decades of scars of accumulated accusations, some of them fair and some
exaggerated.
Veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield,
writing earlier in Politico, spells out three reasons why Clinton could prove to be a weak candidate:
“First, Hillary Clinton commands little trust among
an electorate that is driven today by mistrust. Second, her public
life—the posts she has held, the positions she has adopted (and
jettisoned)—define her as a creature of the ‘establishment’ at a time
when voters regard the very idea with deep antipathy. And finally,
however she wishes it were not so, however much she argues that she
represents the future as America’s first prospective female president,
Clinton still embodies the past, just as she did in
2008 when she lost to Barack Obama. The combination of those three
factors is already playing out in the Democratic primary, where younger
voters are turning away from her and embracing a geriatric, white-haired
alternative in droves.”
When Clinton recalibrates, says Greenfield, “she always embraces the politically popular stand.”
However lukewarm the Democratic base may be about
Hillary, she enjoys broad support within the party and most Bernie
backers should have no trouble shifting their allegiance to her. The
same can’t be said for Trump, who is weathering a Republican revolt
against the likelihood of his winning the nomination.
We’ll know Hillary is solving her enthusiasm problem when she starts getting better reviews from journalists on the left.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.