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Thursday, September 8, 2016

Sounds Like a President

No matter what Trump says, it's clear who looks and sounds like a President and it's not him. Hillary gave her three presser this week.

To be sure, the media is extremely pedantic about what qualifies as a genuine 'press conference' and what doesn't. James Fallow's work on why Americans hate the media sure seems prescient in this race.

Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media's self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country's real problems."

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1996/02/why-americans-hate-the-media/305060/

There is the tendency of the media to equate being transparent with the public to talking to the Beltway aristocracy.

So if Hillary goes on a listening tour where she speaks directly to a struggling Iowan farmer, or a NH mother of an opiate addict, in the minds of Chris Cillizza's media, this is not 'transparency' as she hasn't spoken to Cillizza, Andrea Mitchell, or Maureen Dowd.

Anyway after answering 25 media questions the on Monday and Tuesday, she called their bluff by having a press conference equipped with the all important podium out on the runway.

Listening to her, I was impressed by how much like a President she sounds. She did everything from being personable to funny, to even telling Andrea Mtichell she admires her 'indefatigableness.'

She laughed out loud when someone mentioned Gary Johnson's not knowing about Aleppo, Syria. He also doesn't know who Harriet Tubman is but I digress.

If anything the fact that she didn't hold many pressers in this race if anything gives her pressers now extra drama in importance. She didn't need to say too much last month when Trump kept digging his own hole deeper and she had fundraising to do. Now it's campaign stretch time and she's right where she needs to be. Now it makes sense to do more pressers.

She also talked a bit about the idea that she's unemotional. She gives us some of the background.

"Delivering a rare personal message on Thursday afternoon, the Democratic presidential nominee opened up to the popular blog Humans of New York just one day after she delivered remarks about foreign policy and military preparation at a forum on Wednesday night."

"Clinton opened by recounting a jarring experience from her law school career. “I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on,’” she wrote.

“One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I'll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room.”

"Clinton, who currently holds a 54.8 percent “unfavorable” rating on the latest Real Clear Politics polling average, suggested that her coolness was a protection mechanism."

“I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off,” she wrote.

“And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/clinton-explains-unlikeability-227896#ixzz4JhbH77hx

That's a pretty powerful story. However, Politico irks me by making it seem as if this powerful testimony was her justifying herself to Reince Preibus' silly 'Smile, darling' moment last night.

"Clinton’s blog post followed criticism levied by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus that the former secretary of state didn’t smile during the NBC/MSNBC Commander-in-Chief Forum."

@HillaryClinton was angry + defensive the entire time - no smile and uncomfortable - upset that she was caught wrongly sending our secrets,” he tweeted.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/clinton-explains-unlikeability-227896#ixzz4Jhbe9DuH

She also had a nice takedown of Donald Trump:

“Let me be clear. Last night was yet another test, and Donald Trump failed yet again,” Clinton said, before taking a few questions. “We saw more evidence that he is temperamentally unfit and unqualified to be commander in chief. He trash talked American generals, saying they'd been, quote, 'reduced to rubble.' He suggested he would fire them and replace them with his handpicked generals.”

"Trump’s rubble remark came during NBC’s commander in chief forum, a sort of debate dry run that put the candidates on stage for back-to-back half hours, answering questions on national security from “Today” show host Matt Lauer. Trump, who followed Clinton, as usual refused to detail any part of his plan to combat the Islamic State, arguing that divulging military plans would put the U.S. at a strategic disadvantage."

"Clinton's campaign was eager to jump into the news Thursday morning after last night's forum, looking to have the last word on foreign policy by addressing reporters before taking off for a campaign stop in North Carolina."

“He attacked dozens of former flag officers by saying that, quote, ‘we've been losing for a long time,’” Clinton said at her press conference Thursday morning. “That's how he talks about distinguished men and women who have spent their lives serving our country, sacrificing for us. That's how he would act as commander in chief.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/clinton-trump-national-security-forum-fallout-227884#ixzz4JhbxaLkE

In other news, her campaign is fundraising off Mark Lauer.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/09/matt-lauer-clinton-trump-forum-227866



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