Clinton Makes a Stance for Prose as She Distills Poetry Lessons from Cuomo, Nixon

[ProudToBeLiberal]

An old saying that politicians can campaign with poetry but must govern with prose has suddenly become fresh inspiration for Hillary Clinton as she looks to manage an enthusiasm gap with Bernie Sanders days before the Iowa caucuses.

Clinton invoked the expression twice during a town hall forum at Drake University on Monday that was moderated by CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, and on Tuesday, back on the campaign trail, she championed the merits of prose.

“This is really hard, slow, painful, political work, to get through the thicket of objections and special interests and powerful forces,” she said at a stop in Decorah, Iowa. Later in Cedar Falls, she said she is “not just shouting slogans. I am not just engaging in rhetoric. I have thought this through, I have a plan. I want you to understand because I don't think you can get what we need done in this election nor in the presidency unless you level with people, you tell them what you can do and then you let them respond to it.”

...

Clinton’s experience, intelligence, and knowledge of policy “sometimes could make her more cautious and her campaign more prose than poetry, but those are also her strengths,” Obama said in the interview, in which he never directly endorsed Clinton but praised her in a way that was viewed as promoting her readiness.

Axelrod recalled the Cuomo line to Solis Doyle and said of Clinton, “She doesn’t seem all that comfortable with the poetry,” to which Solis Doyle responded, “Sometimes that kid in class who always gets the As and is always prepared is not the most inspirational kid in the class, right? But, man, do you want her running the country? Absolutely.”

More at http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-01-27/clinton-makes-a-stance-for-prose-as-she-distills-poetry-lessons-from-cuomo-nixon

[frylock]

1. O', what a tangled web we weave...

[beam me up scottie]

2. I'm waiting for her to quote scripture again from her favourite book.

Pander baby!

[cali]

3. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Clash Over Poetry and Prose

Amy Davidson's piece in the New Yorker, is far better.


“Here’s the Senator’s ad,” Chris Cuomo, of CNN, said to hillary Clinton, who was standing with him on the stage for a Democratic town-hall meeting in Des Moines, Iowa. There was a sudden jolt of music—Simon and Garfunkel’s “America”—and scenes of Bernie Sanders speaking to large, happy crowds, with ecstatic young campaign workers high-fiving and embracing him, appeared on a large screen above them. Clinton, her smile shrinking, stood perfectly still, as if held in a tractor beam—or tractor Bern. When the clip finally ended, after a shot of Sanders waving his fist at a field of cheering supporters next to a bright blue lake, Cuomo turned to Clinton for a response.

“I think that’s great!” she said. And then, with more feeling, “I think that’s fabulous! I loved it.” The audience applauded, and Clinton quickly pivoted to what was, for her, the key point of the evening. “You know, look, you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. And we need a lot more poetry in this campaign and in our country. So, I applaud that! I love the feeling. I love the energy.” She would, she said, just be “the better person” for the job of President. After a couple of weeks of scattershot attacks on Sanders, including suggestions that he would destroy the health-care system, Clinton is now trying out a two-fold message. First, there is fond but dismissive indulgence: Sanders, the poet from the woods of Vermont, should go back there while she heads to the White House and gets on with it. And second, his poems all sound the same: he is a one-issue candidate who just keeps talking about billionaires, while she has lots of issues. (“Not only economic inequality: racial inequality, sexist inequality, homophobic inequality … education inequality, cultural inequality.”)


Sanders, though, didn’t quite coöperate on Monday night. He spoke first, followed by Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, who spoke earnestly enough, and then Clinton. (The candidates each had a half hour to answer questions from Cuomo and undecided or “leaning” voters.) Sanders talked in a more varied register than he often has in speeches and debates. The format called for the candidates to sit cozily with Cuomo, a setup that lasted only until Sanders got to see his opponent’s ad. “The world a President has to grapple with, sometimes you can’t even imagine. That’s the job. And she’s prepared for it like no other,” the narrator says. A montage follows of Clinton on darkened tarmacs and at foreign summits, and of protesters, gunmen, and what appeared to be an Asian stock-market board, resolving in the tag line, “Getting every part of the job done.”

“This calls for a standing up response!” Sanders said. (“Don’t leave! We have another fifteen minutes,” Cuomo said in mock sternness as he, too, got out of his chair.) “All right, let me shock everybody here. … I like Hillary Clinton and I respect Hillary Clinton.” But he had some problems with what could be called the Hillary Clinton experience, not all of which had to do directly with Wall Street. “Hillary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq.” (Sanders opposed it, “And it gives me no pleasure to tell you that much of what I feared, in fact, happened.”) “I led the effort against Wall Street deregulation. See where Hillary Clinton was on this issue.” (With the billionaires as he saw it, though she doesn’t.) “On day one, I said the Keystone Pipeline is a dumb idea.” (Clinton, who opposes it now, has, at least, wavered.) “I didn’t have to think hard about opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. It took Hillary Clinton a long time to come on board that.” (Similar to the pipeline.) “Experience is important, but it is not the only thing.” (There was a reference to Dick Cheney.)


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http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders-clash-over-poetry-and-prose