He again talks about how unpopular Hillary is. This is one of the Beltway's favorite subjects.
"Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the two most disliked candidates ever to run for president of the United States."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-kass-0421-20160420-column.html
Just because something is 'widely considered' doesn't make it true. The world was once widely considered flat and the sun was once widely considered to revolve around the earth. Neither were true.
If she is considered to be a liar, this is probably because empty suits like Kass keep falsely calling her a liar.
And you have to say, Kass' example just shows how shabby the media is. She lied about packing hot sauce in her purse? How does Kass know with photographic knowledge the contents of her purse?
Why are pundits like him so obsessed with anecdotes like this? It reminds you of 2000 when the media spent all their time brooding over why Al Gore said he invented the Internet-which he never said-and why Gore made an ad that looked like he was paddling a boat in deeper water than he really was.
What the Jeff Kasses of the world didn't consider important at the time was George W. Bush's deeply dishonest and destructive budget and tax cut scheme. That was boring. Better to demand to know why Al Gore went to a Buddhist temple.
The sort of 'lies' that Kass and friends focus on, is so often just totally trivial. This says something about them.
When pundits wonder how Trump happened, they ought to look in the mirror.
As for whether Hillary is dishonest, the answer is no. The idea is actually the dishonest narrative of Kass and other pundits like him.
"One basic test of a politician’s honesty is whether that person tells the truth when on the campaign trail, and by that standard Clinton does well. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site, calculates that of the Clinton statements it has examined, 50 percent are either true or mostly true."
"That compares to 49 percent for Bernie Sanders’s, 9 percent for Trump’s, 22 percent for Ted Cruz’s and 52 percent for John Kasich’s. Here we have a rare metric of integrity among candidates, and it suggests that contrary to popular impressions, Clinton is relatively honest — by politician standards."
"Jill Abramson, who spent decades as a journalist either investigating Clinton or overseeing investigations of her, and who certainly isn’t soft on the Clintons, concluded in The Guardian: “Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/is-hillary-clinton-dishonest.html?_r=1
"Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the two most disliked candidates ever to run for president of the United States."
"I don't mean perhaps. I mean really. And if they win their party nominations, it will only get worse."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-kass-0421-20160420-column.html
This is a tired meme. On the issue of likability or favorability, a few stipulations:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-kass-0421-20160420-column.html
This is a tired meme. On the issue of likability or favorability, a few stipulations:
1. In general we are living in such a hyper partisan era that not many actual politicians have positive favorability. When Kass gloats about Hillary's 'unlikability' the question begs: compares with who, exactly?
Today no matter who you are, you're going to have about a third of the public hate you for purely partisan reasons. At best, hopefully your own partisans love you to make up for it. Then there are the independents who seem mostly interested in proving how nonpartisan they are.
So if they see you hated by the other side then many of them will conclude this is with good reason. For this reason, simply getting to 50 percent is a major accomplishment for a partisan figure.
2. As for Hillary Clinton, herself, she's been in national public life for 25 years. She's had many peaks and valleys. She was very unpopular in Bill Clinton's first term but then the public started liking her out of sympathy after Monica Lewinsky.
In 2008, despite how testy the primary with Obama got, her approval rating never got beneath 48 percent. Again, even this was a slightly less partisan time than now. In the Obama years, partisanship has simply gone through the roof-which is ironic as he ran as the first post partisan Presidential candidate.
3. Even Kass' history may well be suspect. In 1992, Bill Clinton had some very tough favorables as well. In June he was at 14 percent-with 40 percent unfavorable.
4. When Hillary was Secretary of State, her numbers were considerably higher than Obama's: she was at 64 percent.
Many thought that she had to distance herself from him. This is not how it turned out. Now he is more popular than she is again. Why? In large part because now she is the partisan figure, whereas he's the lame duck President who gets to be where he is happiest: above the fray.
As Maureen Dowd puts it: Obama loves to be above the fray, but politics is the fray.
In this primary what is interesting is that it's the losing candidates-John Kasich and Bernie Sanders who have the better favorability. This is no accident. Neither has been attacked by the other party, which makes the independents reason that they're a-ok.
Trump is right about Kasich. If Democrats attacked him, his numbers would sink like a stone. No way does he beat Hillary by 7 points.
Kass is the classic kind of Beltway hack, who you can't despise enough:
"She's widely considered to be a liar, and a bad one. He's considered to be vulgar and crude. She's the American political establishment's Madame Iron PantsSuits pretending to be a progressive, with that Wall Street cash and packs of hot sauce in her purse if she's on black radio and needs to pander."http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-kass-0421-20160420-column.html
Just because something is 'widely considered' doesn't make it true. The world was once widely considered flat and the sun was once widely considered to revolve around the earth. Neither were true.
If she is considered to be a liar, this is probably because empty suits like Kass keep falsely calling her a liar.
And you have to say, Kass' example just shows how shabby the media is. She lied about packing hot sauce in her purse? How does Kass know with photographic knowledge the contents of her purse?
Why are pundits like him so obsessed with anecdotes like this? It reminds you of 2000 when the media spent all their time brooding over why Al Gore said he invented the Internet-which he never said-and why Gore made an ad that looked like he was paddling a boat in deeper water than he really was.
What the Jeff Kasses of the world didn't consider important at the time was George W. Bush's deeply dishonest and destructive budget and tax cut scheme. That was boring. Better to demand to know why Al Gore went to a Buddhist temple.
The sort of 'lies' that Kass and friends focus on, is so often just totally trivial. This says something about them.
When pundits wonder how Trump happened, they ought to look in the mirror.
As for whether Hillary is dishonest, the answer is no. The idea is actually the dishonest narrative of Kass and other pundits like him.
"One basic test of a politician’s honesty is whether that person tells the truth when on the campaign trail, and by that standard Clinton does well. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site, calculates that of the Clinton statements it has examined, 50 percent are either true or mostly true."
"That compares to 49 percent for Bernie Sanders’s, 9 percent for Trump’s, 22 percent for Ted Cruz’s and 52 percent for John Kasich’s. Here we have a rare metric of integrity among candidates, and it suggests that contrary to popular impressions, Clinton is relatively honest — by politician standards."
"Jill Abramson, who spent decades as a journalist either investigating Clinton or overseeing investigations of her, and who certainly isn’t soft on the Clintons, concluded in The Guardian: “Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/is-hillary-clinton-dishonest.html?_r=1
Turns out the dishonest ones are those calling her a liar.
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