Cillizza agrees with Jon Stewart’s ‘brutal’ comments about Hillary
This past week Progreso Weekly posted a brief video of comedian and talk show host Jon Stewart discussing the Hillary Clinton candidacy with Democratic Party strategist and former Obama aide David Axelrod. In the video you hear Stewart refer to Hillary as “a bright woman without the courage of her convictions.”
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza on Thursday (May 12) in his blog, “The Fix”, writes that “Stewart perfectly diagnosed the problem with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.” As political pundit, Cillizza is influential. Not only does he write for the Post, but he’s a regular contributor to television’s MSNBC.
Here’s some of what Cillizza had to say:
Let’s stipulate this: Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic presidential nominee.
But Clinton’s path to that nomination has been far rockier than she or her supporters expected it to be when Bernie Sanders emerged as her main competition. (Don’t believe the Clinton spin that they always knew that the 74-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont was going to pose a major threat to her candidacy.)
Some of that rockiness has to do with Sanders, who has emerged as a sort of cause celebre to the liberal left. Even in Sanders’s surprising rise, however, are the seeds of Clinton’s broader problem in the race: People struggle to relate to her. She often comes across as inauthentic or lacking a basic core of beliefs. The idea of finding out who the “real” Hillary Clinton is seems far-fetched. Even many people who believe she should be president acknowledge, usually privately, that she is fundamentally unknowable.
Cillizza adds that Stewart’s comment is “a brutal assessment. But it’s not wrong.”
He continues by citing the actual comment and adds his own:
“Hillary is … a bright woman without the courage of her convictions, because I don’t know what they even are,” says Stewart — an assessment I have heard time and again in private conversations with Democratic strategists over the last few years.
While Clinton’s closest allies insist she is warm and funny in private, the candidate has never been able to translate those character traits into her public persona. People want Hillary Clinton, but all they ever get is “Hillary Clinton.”
Cillizza finishes with this:
In a political environment where a sizable chunk of voters have responded to the blunt realism of Donald Trump, that struggle to connect is a problem. Given Democrats’ clear electoral and demographic edges in the 2016 election, Clinton’s connectivity issues may not matter. But if her struggles to put away Sanders in the Democratic primary are any indication, then Stewart is really on to something.
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What follows is a brief portion of the Jon Stewart video and comment:
https://youtu.be/qp_gIWAaQVI
