Do you like Hillary Clinton?

[Warren DeMontague]

53. I've never met her in person.

Politically, I liked her a crapton more during the 90s, and the graph of that went down precipitously between the IWR vote, "marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman", proposing anti-1st Amendment laws against flag burning, hard line positions in support of mass incarceration of marijuana users, etc.

Her performance in 2008 didn't help, although to her credit she graciously came around to support the nominee (unlike some of her followers) by the time of the convention.

My esteem for her went down even further when her campaign this time around began, as I feared it would, with empty meaningless poll-tested platitudes, not to mention brain-breaking inanities like "I have ties to Wall St. because nineeleven" and "we shouldn't worry about 'free speech, etc' concerns keeping us from censoring the internet" and "we need a manhattan project on encryption".

When her people started talking, with no apparent sense of irony, about their plans to have her be more spontaneous, the deal descended rapidly into farce.

The fact that she's so closely affilated with Debbie "pot needs to stay illegal because heroin" Wasserman Schultz does not, similarly, help.

She COULD have run a better campaign- at least, I think she could have, assuming that underneath all the poll-testing and carefully crafted messaging and soft focus videos there's a person who has strong convictions and beliefs and is not afraid to take even potentially controversial positions and actually wants to effectively lead this country for reasons beyond simply wanting - and having wanted, for a VERY long time- to be POTUS.