Does Hillary Still Believe?
There is also the more mature person we saw during her husband’s political ascent, who was more certain than she seems now about where the country was headed and how people’s position could be improved.
.. There is a quiet conflation of success with virtue in these kitchen-table stories, and perhaps there is a hint there of a person who might not think about other successful people (donors to her husband’s foundation, maybe, or partners at Goldman Sachs) as critically as she should.
.. None takes the more radical position, so alive in this election, that the country needs to be rescued from itself.
.. I don’t think the problem is fun. (Can you tell me what Bernie Sanders does for fun?) I’m not even sure it has to do with likability. But there is a problem.
.. “People are attracted to him because Trump is a free man,” the conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote perceptively last summer. By “free” he meant that Trump can be seen as free from financial influence, free from the microtargeted pettiness of partisan politics, and most of all free to say and do what he pleases.
.. The romance of the free individual is a good way to think about the enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders’s candidacy, too.
.. Obama did not create Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, but he showed them a model of how a politician might operate in a time of doubt. Sanders offers the idea of his own integrity, Trump the idea of his own talent. They offer themselves.
.. There is another way to put this, which is that the trouble for Hillary Clinton is not only that voters do not trust her. That only deepens and complicates her essential problem, which is that Americans do not trust.