Is Hillary Clinton reading the electorate correctly by not being the instantiation of who the Republican Party says she is?
Hillary Clinton, The notorious H.R.C.
Bill Maher does what he does best with the advice that Hillary Clinton read the mood of the electorate and embrace an in-your-face attitude to her critics. There is a particular rationale to Bill’s suggestion.
Maher points out that Donald Trump is a known entity. He is a cheat. The Donald is a bankruptcy hound. Trump is a liar, and he has no sense of decorum. That reality seems to have no impact on an angry electorate which seems to want a brash no-nonsense ‘strong-person’ in the White House to kick some ass for them. Even evangelicals are twisting themselves into knots to justify voting for Donald Trump, a man anathema to everything they believe in.
So what gives. Hillary Clinton is promoting herself as a caring grandmother. She has a detail list of middle-class centric policies that became more middle-class and poor centric as Bernie Sanders made the election a necessarily populist election.
While Bill Maher’s notorious HRC advice is over the top, there is some merit to the spirit of the skit. Hillary needs to embrace the anger of a large segment of the electorate. She needs to articulate her policies in a manner that addresses the anger. Policy talk is laborious and dry.
Hillary Clinton already has the heart of most Democrats and those who like the policy thing. They are going nowhere. She now needs to talk to the angry as she makes Donald Trump an existential problem for them, a clear and present danger. It will do her well to listen to the sentiment within Bill Maher’s message. Sometimes progressive fail to understand that being right is never enough. Lying to one’s heart is what Republicans have done with an enormous success to their constituents. Clinton must speak the truth in a form the angry electorate is willing to accept.