"How Hillary Could Win the Election—and Lose the Country | She’d be a status-quo president at a time

[Attorney in Texas]

"How Hillary Could Win the Election—and Lose the Country | She’d be a status-quo president at a time when both left and right are desperate for change" -- excerpt:

...Clinton lacks a big, new animating idea in a year when voters in both parties are so discontented they have embraced some pretty bad ones. Like them or loathe them, Donald Trump's and Bernie Sanders’ messages are crystal clear and call for dramatic change, while Clinton’s remains spread softly all over the map. And her agenda promises less change than continuation—of the centrist Democratic Party policies that her husband pursued and which Barack Obama has largely followed. It’s no surprise that one of Clinton’s biggest campaign themes is to praise both her predecessor Democratic presidents—the one she married and the one she went to work for—effusively.... so many voters in the opposition party—and her own—will be nursing bitter disappointments from Day One. She’s already in danger of pre-alienating the Democratic base, with many Sanders supporters vowing never to support her.... Clinton contends that Trump’s and Sanders’ various protectionist prescriptions for rescuing the middle class range from unrealistic to unAmerican. But she has not made a compelling case for how she herself would address the dislocations and anxiety that are partially the byproduct of the economic globalization that Bill Clinton and Obama both embraced wholeheartedly.

“It is a real challenge, particularly on the economy,” says veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “In many places, her more pragmatic approach is very appealing, especially on national security and homeland security, where new ideas can be very dangerous. But on the economy, people—particularly blue-collar workers of all races—are looking for a more fundamental change. She’s going to have to articulate a bigger economic policy.”....“Her commanding rationale is what it’s always been: ‘It’s my time and the country is ready for a female president, and it ought to be me,’” Conway says. “And a combination of running for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s third terms. That in itself gives you a messaging headache, because those were two different presidencies and two different Democratic parties, but she can’t afford to alienate either one, because both of those presidencies were beloved by the Democratic base and acceptable to general election voters.”

Running to fill the third term that Ronald Reagan was barred from seeking was enough to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, but not enough to sustain him when his lack of the “vision thing” left him vulnerable to Bill Clinton four years later. Hillary Clinton now faces a similar challenge.... True, she has the worst unfavorable ratings of any would-be Democratic nominee in modern times, hovering steadily around 55 percent.... But it is entirely possible to be the winner and still not get much of a mandate—to enter office as a kind of default president who gets in because no other candidate is electable but who doesn’t have the faith and loyalty of a large portion of the nation. Clinton is selling “realism” to a electorate that is, judging from the polls, deeply unhappy with its current reality. Her steady-as-she-goes brand of politics, and her “one from column A and two from column B” ideas are out of sync with the mood of the electorate in this three-sheets-to-the-wind age. To invert the columnist Murray Kempton’s famous maxim about Mayor John Lindsay of New York, she is tired and everyone else is fresh.... But a president’s greatest power is persuasion—and successful persuasion first requires an inspirational vision. John Kennedy pledged to “begin anew,” saying “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” of which he was the exemplar. Ronald Reagan declared it was “morning in America” after the twilight years of the 1970s, a period of big government spending, stagflation and a draining hostage crisis, saying, “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Bill Clinton vowed to embrace “change versus more of the same.” Barack Obama promised “change we can believe in,” and pledged to create an army of devotees to carry it out.

Nothing in what pollster Conway calls Clinton’s “knitting together of scattershot sound-bites” comes close to distilling her worldview so succinctly. Indeed, in her victory speech in Brooklyn, she even resorted to borrowing one of her husband’s less than compelling generalities, “There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be cured by what’s right with America.” ... “There is something going on out there, and nobody’s quite sure what it is, and what a principled leader can do about it,” says Jeff Shesol, who was a White House speechwriter for Bill Clinton.... Sanders’ liberal insurgency—and Trump’s nativist challenge from the right—have posed challenges for Clinton because at a time when two-thirds of voters are dissatisfied with the economy, both candidates have “an economic narrative,” as Celinda Lake puts it. “They have an origins story. They tell us how we got here, and who’s to blame—in Sanders’ case, Wall Street; in Trump’s, immigrants. If you can’t tell us how we got here, and who the villains are, how are we going to get out of it?”... There is also every reason to expect a President Hillary Clinton would face intransigence from congressional Republicans equal to or greater than that Obama has faced since taking office, especially if they were licking their wounds in the aftermath of a massive Trump defeat. She would be all but guaranteed to face a bruising Supreme Court confirmation battle right out of the box—whether over Obama’s centrist nominee Merrick Garland or a more reliably liberal choice her supporters might impel her to nominate. And she would face the wrath of the dead-end supporters of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who would see her as selling out Democratic values.... Democratic media strategist Steve McMahon says Clinton’s campaign contention that she’s a pragmatist who can get things done “is not a very powerful message in the Democratic primary. Democrats are ideologues.” ... Yet there is a reason Clinton has twice struggled to win her own party’s nomination, first against a charismatic young African-American who promised a historic breakthrough that she herself could have bid fair to match, and now against a rumpled septuagenarian who has emerged as the unlikely avatar of the millennial generation. ... At the heart of the problem is her enduring difficulty in explaining—clearly and cleanly—what she actually aspires to do as president. And that’s a problem that seems likely to get worse before it gets better.

[NurseJackie]

1. How clever ... combining multiple paragraphs with ellipses to appear as single paragraphs,

... in order to circumvent the 4-paragraph rule? (I guess that's one way to do it, at the expense of being readable.)



Too bad for you guys that none of this is going to make any difference now.

[Attorney in Texas]

2. Ellipses are used to show where material was cut out of the original article.

[NurseJackie]

3. Yes, I know.

And using them to join sections from distinctly different paragraphs makes a huge mess that's impossible to read. So it's unlikely that you actually WANT the post to be a visual mess, so in my opinion, only one other rational option remains.