Clinton Finds an Effective Attack Against Trump
The new weapon she brought was the insight that Donald Trump’s anti-élite grievances contain a constant denigration of America, and of the vast, collaborative project of making it better. “He called our military a ‘disaster,’ “ Clinton said. “He said we are, and I quote, a ‘third-world country.’ “
.. The liberal line during the past week has been that Clinton ought to call Trump a fraud. Her attack, when it came, ran deeper. The real, devastating charge in Clinton’s San Diego speech was that Trump does not believe in America.
.. You could measure the depth of the hit in Trump’s response. Normally so gleeful on Twitter, he sneered at her for using a teleprompter, and that was about it. Then, in a transparent effort to steal the headlines, Trump resumed his attack on the federal judge presiding over one of the lawsuits against Trump University
.. Foreign policy is natural territory for Clinton, its substance and subtleties familiar, but it also has another helpful feature: it lets her mostly avoid the tensions within modern liberalism. She doesn’t have to talk about the nineteen-ninties.
.. in California, where the main political fault lines are not between conservatism and liberalism but within liberalism itself: between the vaulting meritocracy of Silicon Valley and the poverty it obscures, between middle-class progress and environmental conservation, between minority politics and expression in a place that no longer really has a majority.
.. in Santa Clara County, the center of Silicon Valley, which last year was reported to be the national leader in average wages but also had a double-digit poverty rate.
.. It is telling that Clinton, attacked relentlessly by Sanders for giving paid speeches for Goldman Sachs, never really defended her view of capital’s role in the economy
.. Either Clinton really believes that her husband’s Administration resolved the basic problems of social design or, more likely, she is enough of a partisan that she will not publicly describe where it went wrong. One way or the other, she has a blind spot.
.. That up-and-up-and-up-again cadence that she uses when she’s promising the new jobs and infrastructure bound to come in her Administration was gone entirely.
.. she seems to have acquired an idea of her opponent and, in turn, herself: that she is the patriot in the race, and the believer.