Is a Bored Media Missing the Fact that Clinton Is Connecting with Voters?

Admittedly, with Donald Trump serving as a nonstop carnival barker and reality TV entertainer for whom facts simply do not matter, most of the air is being sucked out of the coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign coverage.  And some are rightly criticizing the media for the failure to (i) challenge Trump on his lies and (ii) provide more coverage of other, less truth challenged and neo-fascist candidates. A piece in The Daily Beast suggests that the media is missing the fact that Hillary Clinton is slowly and relentlessly connecting with voters and setting the ground work for the general election.  Here are some article excerpts:

As we go into the New Year mesmerized by Donald Trump and his politically incorrect rants, it’s worth noting that among all the candidates in both parties, the one with the best odds of becoming the next president is Hillary Clinton. With the Iowa caucuses just weeks away, don’t you think it’s time we paid attention to the multitude of policies, proposals and programs she has rolled out over the last seven months?

They may not lead the nightly news or go viral on social media, but they are breaking through with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire. There are two-dozen in all, fleshed out with fact sheets according to a tally provided by the Clinton campaign, and they range from national security to quality of life issues.

It’s a liberal’s wish list, but the problems Clinton tackles are universal, and there’s something for conservatives too in taking on student debt, lowering the price of prescription drugs, providing a tax credit for care giving, and, in the midst of the holidays, announcing an ambitious $2 billion plan to find a cure for Alzheimer’s by 2025.

If you hate government, and think it’s too intrusive, Clinton’s probably not your candidate. But if you’re caring for one of the 5 million Alzheimer’s sufferers in the country, or you or someone you know has been affected by the disease in some way, then you’re with Newt Gingrich, who tweeted his approval of the Clinton plan.

Or if your family or someone you know has been affected by addiction, Clinton was the first of the candidates in either party to realize how big a problem heroin and prescription drug abuse has become in New Hampshire, claiming so many young lives. 

The Clinton campaign has released two new ads related to Alzheimer’s, one about a New Hampshire librarian who cares for his 84-year-old mother and must take her to work with him because he can’t afford day care. The other features an Iowa woman, mother of five, whose husband passed away in May at age 53, after suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. In the ad, Clinton is visibly moved as she embraces the woman, then says she spoke with the four leading researchers “who are untangling the neurodegenerative diseases” and their excitement about more money for research as opposed to “some additional military asset,” Clinton says. “Just think of the lives it would save.”

In an election cycle that has been anything but conventional, Clinton is running a textbook campaign, methodically laying out her proposals from what she would do about ISIS and terrorism, down to her views on GMO’s (genetically modified organisms in our food). Clinton was asked about GMO’s at a recent Baltimore fundraiser. 

It’s almost comical how prepared Clinton is, especially when compared to Trump, who offers very little in the way of conventional policies. “She has a different electorate than he does,” says Matt Bennett with Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. While the Republicans are focused on style and rhetoric, the race between Clinton and Sanders is much more substantive, “and she’s got to make clear what she stands for. And because she is the favorite to become president, she is acting like a president.”

he campaign isn’t about Trump’s latest volley, says Bennett, “It’s about the lives of the voters who wake up in the middle of the night worrying. Some of them have all three stressors [college debt, addiction, Alzheimer’s] and almost everyone has one at least or knows someone with one, it’s a very smart strategy.”

Carl Bernstein Savages McCain

Carl Bernstein , the former Washington Post reporter of Watergate fame, has a column that is nothing short of a brutal in his assessment of the craven, dishonorable figure John McCain has become. Not only are his campaign tactics worthy of a slimy used car salesman, but his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate becomes less defensible with every passing minute that she opens her mouth. Again, I am not anti-woman and have two extremely intelligent and capable daughters. From watching Palin's interviews and reading the transcripts, my 19 year old college student daughter is (a) more savvy (and more honest), and (2) knows a hell of a lot more about issues, both domestic and foreign.

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Palin calls herself a hockey mom. Candidly, she strikes me as a cold weather version of the mindless soccer moms of this area who worry about children's sports events and piss ant PTA fundraisers, yet are oblivious as to the larger issues in the state, nation and the world. And I reach that assessment without even having to factor in her lunatic religious beliefs. With Palin on the national ticket, no wonder there is talk of America's fading empire. We must look like absolute morons - what McCain and the GOP apparently are counting on - to those living in educated foreign countries. Here are highlights from Bernstein's column:

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Three weeks after the 2008 Republican convention, on the cusp (maybe) of the first presidential debate, it is time to confront an awkward but profound question: whether in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has committed -- by his own professed standards of duty and honor -- a singularly unpatriotic act.

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[W]hat does John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin -- the cavalier, last-minute process of her selection and careless vetting; and her over-briefed, fact-lite performance since -- reveal about this military man who has attested to us for years that he is guided by his personal code of honor?

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It does not take a near-death experience to know that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be commander in chief, or that -- in choosing her -- McCain has ignored his own oft-avowed code of conduct. "McCain made the most important command decision of his life when he chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee," noted David Ignatius in the Washington Post. "....No promotion board in history would have made such a decision."

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The conservative commentator George Will has been especially incisive of late about the "dismaying," "un-presidential temperament" of McCain and the sleazy tenor of his campaign. Karl Rove (!) has responded to the incessant lying of McCain's ads (one claims falsely that Obama has promoted "comprehensive" sex education for five-year-olds -- he had, in fact, endorsed legislation to insure that kindergartners were warned about sexual predators), by saying, yes, the McCain camp's mendacity has "gone one step too far."

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The issue of Palin's relative ignorance about international affairs and the larger world beyond America's shores (compared to previous vice presidential nominees), her attending arrogance in seeming to revel in it, and McCain's decision to subject the country to it in choosing a possible president -- is the biggest question in this election, or perhaps ought to be.

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Ultimately it is the choice of Palin, made in the moment when action speaks loudest, that may undermine a quarter-century of assertions by John McCain about the preeminence of duty, honor and country in his political schema.