More Self Inflicted Wounds
By: Joe Henderson – Columnist News Talk Florida
Hillary Clinton figured out a way to take the focus off her emails. All it took was waiting two days after she was diagnosed for her campaign to announce that, um, yeah …. Hillary has pneumonia.
Chances are no one outside the immediate circle would know about her condition now if she hadn’t nearly passed out after leaving a 9/11 ceremony early. But she did and it was caught on camera and, well, that’s that.
Now questions about her secrecy and trustworthiness have surfaced again, as they always seem to do with her. It’s how a candidate that is about 5,000 times more prepared to be president Donald Trump finds herself in an ever-tightening race.
Trump looks prophetic, sort of, for bringing up Clinton’s health a couple of weeks ago. He was even smart enough to let this episode pass, preferring to let the story be told by the image of Hillary almost collapsing onto her Secret Service agent.
Besides, Trump was presented another opportunity by Clinton that deserved his rebuttal. That’s the one where she said at a fund-raiser that half of Trump’s supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables.”
“To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” Clinton said at a fund-raiser. “Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.”
While Clinton later expressed “regret” at saying half of Trump’s supporters fit into that euphemistic basket, it also must be conceded that at least some of them do.
But there are a lot more people who sincerely believe Trump would be the better president because he is an outsider and not beholden to the Washington political machine.
Beyond that, though, who is Trump to complain about someone else’s insults? This is the man whose campaign began by defaming Mexican people as drug dealers and rapists except for the “some” he assumed that were good people.
We know what he has said about Muslims. We know what he says about immigrants.
He insulted John McCain. He insulted every Republican who opposed him for the nomination. He has called Clinton “Crooked Hillary” throughout the campaign. And yes, some of his followers have picked up on the theme with overtly racist actions. There is ample video proof. You can look it up.
So, spare me the crocodile tears, OK?
Still, stooping to Trump’s level was a significant blunder by Clinton.
I don’t think it will be as damaging as Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” line in 2012, or the time Barack Obama insulted conservatives by saying, “… they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…”
Where it did hurt Clinton, though, was by adding a couple of layers to her persona as an untrustworthy elitist insider. Her closest followers say that image isn’t fair.
But between all the fund-raisers she attends, the way she dismissed “half” of Trump’s followers with a wave, and now the lack of early candor about her health, Clinton isn’t doing much to prove them wrong.
