Mat Bai on Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders

Clinton Biden Sanders

“Siri sounds more spontaneous when she’s finding me a gas station.” –Matt Bai on Hillary Clinton in an article at Yahoo! Politics entitled, Whether or not Biden runs, Clinton has a problem

He also wrote in comparing Clinton to Biden:

What Biden is, even to those who dismiss him as slightly doddering and in over his head, is as real and authentic as they come. The toll of tragedies etched into his face, the well of emotion he keeps so close to the surface, the once celebrated hair plugs — all of it makes him unusually and compellingly human.

With Biden, you get the politically incorrect verbal lapses, the “Veep”-like comedic value. But you also get warmth and authenticity and a handshake that means something.

Clinton’s pitch is pretty much the polar opposite. If there was any doubt about that, it was dispelled when Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s senior communications aide, told my Yahoo colleague Michael Isikoff this week that honesty and trustworthiness were, in Isikoff’s words, “beside the point.”

There followed this pretty remarkable quote from Palmieri: “That’s not the question voters have in their heads when they decide who to vote for. It’s who is fighting for me, and who has the solutions for the American people. She’s still the person who is most likely to be the next president.”

In other words, Clinton’s argument is, at its core, like Richard Nixon’s in 1968: You’re not hiring a friend or a babysitter. You just have to believe that I get what’s wrong, and I’m the only one with the competence to fix it.

There are just so many comparisons between Hillary Clinton and Richard Nixon, and that is not a good thing. The real characteristic Clinton shares with Nixon is dishonesty, not competence. Clinton has showed poor judgment and a lack of competence many times during her career. This includes how she botched heath car reform as First Lady. This includes her time in the Senate, when she made errors ranging from pushing for the Iraq war based upon false claims of a tie between Saddam and al Qaeda to pushing for measures such as making flag burning a felony and censoring video games. This also includes her time as Secretary of State when she pushed for greater military involvement abroad, and failed to follow rules designed to preserve transparency at home.

He concluded:

I don’t know what Clinton is supposed to do about this. I doubt there’s an easy way to recast the personality of a candidate who’s been in public life for 30-plus years, and who’s learned by this point to be guarded and calculating around anyone who isn’t an old friend or loyalist.

But I do know that, sooner or later, Clinton and her advisers are going to have to confront this trust issue head-on, rather than trying to change the subject with a bunch of jargon and vague policy goals. If Biden’s flirtation serves only to make that clear, he will have done her a favor.

I agree with much of what he said about Clinton but question his view on Bernie Sanders: “Sanders’s brand of leftist populism has a modest ceiling in a Democratic primary contest, and he’s not far from hitting it.” I would have believed that a few months ago, but looking at both Sanders and Trump suggests that the old conventional wisdom no longer holds. Voters do not want candidates of the status quo or party insiders.

Sanders transcends the old ideas of the linear left/right political spectrum. People care more about his authenticity than where he is placed on this spectrum. Perhaps his twenty-five years in Congress gives him more legitimacy than the mainstream media gives him credit for. Regardless of this, being viewed as an outsider is a plus for Sanders in the current political atmosphere.