One reason may be that the last thing Hillary Clinton really wants to talk about is how the office of the inspector general functioned during her four-year tenure at State. Astonishingly, the department had no permanent inspector general during that period, the office being filled by an acting inspector, Harold Geisel. He had been an ambassador appointed by President Bill Clinton and also had close ties to the State Department’s leadership. Those ties would have barred him from seeking the job of permanent inspector general. “It’s a convenient way to prevent oversight,” says Michael Harris, a University of Maryland professor who is an expert on the role of inspectors general in government. Acting inspectors general are “in a position where they could be removed at any moment.”
.. That’s where Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren would come in. Biden would be sold as a steady hand who would energize President Obama’s supporters, and Warren would be pitched to delegates as someone who could keep Sanders progressives on board. “The implication would be that, at age 74, Biden might serve only one term and Warren would be a natural successor,’ a former Democratic congressman told me.
My Advice To Hillary: Embrace Your Inner Tammy Wynette
Clinton’s aides say they have settled on the big story they want to tell about Trump: He is a business fraud who has cheated working people for his own gain, and his ideas, temperament and moves to marginalize people by race, gender and creed make him simply unacceptable as commander in chief.
.. So who is she? What is the “best version” of Hillary Clinton, in terms of being able to connect to the public emotionally, establishing a strong and effective contrast with Donald Trump, and also being authentic to who she really is?.. For my money, Hillary Clinton’s single word is: LOYAL... Hey, who do you think she’s loyal to — Goldman Sachs?.. Who do I think she’s loyal to? I think she’s loyal to him
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.
Why Is Clinton Disliked?
It’s not the “what” that explains her unpopularity, it’s the “how” — the manner in which she has done it.
.. I would begin my explanation with this question: Can you tell me what Hillary Clinton does for fun? We know what Obama does for fun — golf, basketball, etc.
.. But then when the video cuts to a current interview with Clinton herself, the lighting is perfect, the setting is perfect, her costume is perfect. She looks less like a human being and more like an avatar from some corporate brand.
.. Clinton’s unpopularity is akin to the unpopularity of a workaholic.
.. This formal, career-oriented persona puts her in direct contrast with the mores of the social media age, which is intimate, personalist, revealing, trusting and vulnerable.
.. Even successful lives need these sanctuaries — in order to be a real person instead of just a productive one. It appears that we don’t really trust candidates who do not show us theirs.