Granted, it is a loaded premise and one that could take us down a convoluted road full of off-ramps into logical cul-de-sacs, but bear with me. Even if we were to limit this thought experiment to the events that transpired on Monday, January 11, it might crystalize for the nation’s pundits and political prognosticators just how terribly Hillary Clinton is performing as a presidential candidate.
This inauspicious day began with a typically gender-centric appeal to center-left female voters, as do most days on the trail with Clinton. The venue for this familiar supplication was the daytime talk show “Ellen.” We should probably ignore Clinton’s pandering to younger voters with her offer of tips on how to take the perfect “selfie.” We would be equally well-advised to look past the limp-wristed gesticulation in which she engaged when asked to play “air guitar,” a display that was more evocative of Tiny Tim than Tony Iommi. No respectable political analyst would dare call into question Clinton’s authenticity or her ability to communicate youthful sophistication to the demographics she so desperately needs in November, but they would if she were a Republican.
From this lofty perch, Barack Obama’s heir apparent traveled to her party’s first intramural debate of the new year, broadcast on what the Democratic National Committee surely believed was the appropriately sub rosa television network Fusion. Except it wasn’t a debate at all, but a “forum.” There, the former senator from New York made a series of unforced errors that, but for her presumed acumen as a political operator, would lead rational observers to question Clinton’s judgment.
For the former secretary of state, there is perhaps no better foil for her campaign than Donald Trump. Despite the celebrity candidate’s vaunted appeal to potentially aisle-crossing white, working-class Democrats in the north and southeast, Trump’s unique ability to turn off women, minorities, and younger voters would virtually ensure the integrity of Barack Obama’s winning coalition in November. That’s why it made so little sense for Clinton to undercut his position in the Republican primary by calling out Trump for being a Democrat.
“He was basically a Democrat before he was a Republican,” Clinton said of Trump while defending her decision to attend his most recent nuptials. “He was, you know, somebody we all knew in New York, and he was supportive of Democrats and supportive of a lot of causes I care about and people I knew cared about.” It would be political malpractice for Trump’s Republican opponents to fail to strip that comment of context and deploy it in attack ads, which leads one to wonder what Clinton was thinking. She didn’t have to defend Trump’s erstwhile Democratic bona fides. It was an honest, extemporaneous thought, but one that didn’t need to be expressed. It will only likely come back to haunt her.
This is perhaps the most innocuous of potentially long-lived misstatements Clinton made on Monday night. Twice, in ham-fisted attempts to ingratiate herself to the Democratic Party’s far-left flank, Clinton committed the sin of being honest. If she were a conservative, these assertions would register as obvious gaffes to the pundit class.
“Yes,” Clinton exclaimed when asked if she, as president, would pursue repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which limits federal funding for abortion providers. Clinton added that she believed it has become “hard to justify” the maintenance of such bans. It is unclear to whom this position appeals save for a particularly rabid cohort of feminists for whom unfettered access to abortion at no personal cost is the sine qua non for liberated womanhood.
It has been some time since the public was asked for their thoughts on the Hyde Amendment specifically, but a 2009 CNN/ORC survey found 61 percent of the public favored banning the use of public funds to support abortion services. A Marist University survey sponsored by the Knights of Columbus in January of 2015 revealed that two-thirds of all respondents oppose the use of federal funding to sponsor abortions. Democrats will surely point to survey data that suggests Americans also oppose stripping Planned Parenthood of taxpayer subsidies, but a few honest center-left publications concede that Americans’ favorable opinion of that organization cannot be divorced from their perception of it as a health-care provider. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in August confirmed that respondents are far less likely to support public funding for generic abortion-providing organizations than they are for Planned Parenthood specifically. “[I]n a way, that makes sense,” wrote Vox.com’s health care correspondent Sarah Kliff. “Even though Planned Parenthood is the country’s largest abortion provider, most of its services aren’t abortions.”
If a Republican had struck such an absolutist position on abortion, one that was so obviously out of step with the general public consensus, the nation’s pundit class would commence a harmonized chorus of scolding the aberrant candidate. When Clinton strikes out on a similarly ill-advised course, the commentariat is silent.
The capstone to Clinton’s poorly conceived escapades on Monday came when the issue of immigration was raised. In an effort to forge a path to the left of President Barack Obama on the matter (itself a decision that boggles the mind), Clinton came out in opposition to deportations facilitated as a result of law enforcement raids. That’s right: The president, who is so disinclined to enforce immigration laws that the courts have had to compel him to perform that constitutionally delineated duty, is, for modern Democrats, unduly draconian.
“I do not think raids are an appropriate tool to enforce immigration laws,” Clinton said. “In fact, I think they [are] divisive.” This was no spontaneous expression of anxiety with a president that pro-illegal immigration organizations have dubbed America’s “deporter-in-chief.” Clinton’s campaign released a statement following this assertion in which the candidate asserted that “we shouldn’t have armed federal officers showing up at peoples’ homes, taking women and children out of their beds in the middle of the night.”
The commentary class correctly gauges public antipathy toward unworkable proposals such as those that seek to identify, round up, and deport over 11 million illegal immigrants over a period so short that it presumably dispenses with their right to due process. They instinctively assess that such a policy position is tantamount to throat-clearing aimed at a particularly narrow segment of the electorate. Yet the impracticality of that policy’s mirror image – an unfeasible and constitutionally negligent determination to ignore the enforcement of any existing immigration law – fails to elicit similar condemnations.
The pundit class is doing Hillary Clinton no favors by failing to provide an accurate assessment of the damage she is doing to her political prospects amid an unexpectedly contentious Democratic primary. If she were a Republican, the political caste would be condemning Clinton for winning the primary race at the expense of the general election, but such admonitions are reserved exclusively for conservatives. As a result of the punditocracy’s tepid refusal to maintain a single standard of acceptable conduct for presidential aspirants across the political spectrum, it’s wise to expect many more Mondays like Clinton’s last.
