Hillary Clinton should win this election.
Okay, bare with me: I don’t like her. I didn’t support her in the primaries. I oppose a lot of things she’s either said or did both during the primaries or various statements made when she was First Lady on various issues. On paper, she has 14 years of holding both elected office and being a Secretary of State. That alone is experience anyone would want in a Commander-in-Chief, and considering she’s up against a man who wants such insane things as banning Muslims and building a wall that he thinks a foreign nation should pay for, she should win in a landslide.
Here’s the problem: She’s doing everything possible to fail.
Her approval rating is about 50%, and when people in her party are asked why they support her, it comes out to about 45% are doing it because they believe in her and 48% because they hate Trump. The numbers are about the same for Trump. When it comes to trust, her numbers are bad with only about 40% of people trusting her.
The biggest disservice she’s done is the way she handled the email story. I previously wrote about the FBI findings and the fact that there were issues with both how she handled it and the fact that she wasn’t, in fact, going to be punished. There’s also the fact that she lied about it. How could she had solved this issue? By admitting she messed up, admitting that there were issues, admitted that while the laws were okay what she was doing it still wasn’t what she should have done. In short, she should have gotten in front of the story.
Then there’s the entire campaign. She wound up “evolving” on the minimum wage and going from $12 to $15 after a ton of prodding. She kicked out a Black Lives Matter protester from a private fundraiser when they held up a sign with a quote she made in 1994 where she said black people are “super predators”. The Wall Street speeches, the Clinton Foundation possibly getting money from overseas donors to go into her election fund… The list goes on.
How can Hillary Clinton win? By being herself. Her REAL self.
At this point, I haven’t been happy with the way Hillary Clinton has run for office because she hasn’t been herself. A lot of people don’t trust her, and I think its because they’re catching onto that fact but can’t put it into words. She went from saying “I’m the most qualified” to “I’m the most qualified, but I’m also a woman! This is history in the making!” And, yes, that’s also, but its a benefit, not a feature. The thing I respect most about Obama is that he never wanted his race to be at the center of the campaign and did what he could to downplay it. Yes, it was awesome electing a black President, but it was more important, at least it seemed to me, that we elect someone who we felt was qualified for the job.
The other thing she’s focusing on is that she’s not Donald Trump. That’s great, but so are over 314 Million Americans. That said, there are only 3 other people running for President on a national level, and being “not Trump” isn’t helping Jill Stein or Gary Johnson right now.
The problem with both things is that she winds up pandering to those two bases: People who want to vote for her only because she’s a woman, or people who only want to vote for her because she’s not Trump. Both are good reasons to vote for her, but they’re not reasons to elect her President. More importantly, people see right through this and they see it as being fake and inauthentic.
Hillary Clinton is a policy wonk. She’s a political nerd. And you know what? Political nerds are AWESOME!
Americans want two things right now: Someone who they can believe in and someone who knows how to do it. They see two halves of a whole right now with Clinton and Trump, and the irony is that Clinton is actually both. She’s able to get things done, though not always the things we want or she wants, and she knows how to do things.
But that’s not what we’ve gotten. Her entire ad campaign at this point has been pointing out how terrible Trump is. It doesn’t make any sense! She’s a smart woman, a great candidate, and the entire campaign is going to be, “Donald Trump is an idiot, ha ha ha!”? Are you kidding me? That’s how you’re going to take down the biggest fascist to attempt to become President in the last 100 years? The man does that more than well enough himself, and an ad pointing out how horrible his statements are or how much of a dick he is only plays well to the base of the Democratic Party and to the people who already like you.
If you want the undecided voters, and people like me who much rather want a 3rd Party candidate, you need to play to your strength and tell us what you want to do as President!
Here’s my dream Hillary Clinton ad: Hillary Clinton is looking at the camera. She spends 1 minute explaining 3 key things about her policy and how they’ll approve my life and how she plans on doing it. That’s it. No cutaways, no stock footage, no mention of her gender, nothing about how horrible Trump is; just her looking at the camera and explaining what she would do as President. Run it for a week. Then do it again the next week with more platform positions. Keep doing it between now and the election.
Stop trying to make Trump look bad. Stop trying to be “relatable”, because, sadly, you’re not. You’re a rich woman who’s married to a former President with 14 years of public and elected officer experience. You’ve been doing this shit too long, and while you get along with your circle of friends, people in most of the country bore you to tears. That’s fine. But the reason so many people don’t trust you is because they know when someone is just pandering to them.
Be nerdy! Be a policy wonk! Be YOU! Don’t be the person you think we want you to be, just be you! Do that! That way I don’t have to complain about a bad campaign and instead focus on how hawkish you are about Syria.