- BitsBlog - https://bitsblog.com -

The Chink in the Armor

Peg Noonan at the Wall Street Journal [1]

(Yes, owned by him who must not be named…)

….has come up withwhat has to be the line of the week, as regards Hillary Clinton’s deer in the headlights dance, the other night:

I spent a day going over the transcripts so I could quote at length, but her exchanges are all over, it’s a real Google-fest. Here, boiled down, is what she said.

hillary39.jpg [2]Giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses makes sense because it makes sense, but she may not be for it, but undocumented workers should come out of the shadows, and it makes sense. Maybe she will increase the payroll tax on Social Security beyond its current $97,500 limit, to $200,000. Maybe not. Everybody knows what the possibilities are. She may or may not back a 4% federal surcharge on singles making $150,000 a year and couples making $200,000. She suggested she backed it, said she didn’t back it, she then called it a good start, or rather “I support and admire” the person proposing such a tax for his “willingness to take this on.”

She has been accused of doubletalk and she has denied it. And she is right. It was triple talk, quadruple talk, Olympic level nonresponsiveness. And it was, even for her, rather heavy and smug. Her husband would have had the sense to look embarrassed as he bobbed and weaved. It was part of his charm. But he was light on his feet. She turns every dance into the polka. And it is that amazing thing, a grim polka.

My freinds, it’s an interesting thing, when the conclusions I draw, particularly the ones I make public, are confirmed by so talented a writer.

One more comment:

What Mrs. Clinton revealed the other night was more than an unfortunate persona. What I think she revealed was that her baseline thinking has perhaps not changed that much since the 1990s, when she was a headband wearing, power suited, leftist-who-hadn’t-been-wounded-yet. It seemed to me she made it quite possible to assume you know who she’ll be making war on. And this–much more than the latest scandal, the Chinatown funny money and the bundling–could, and I think would, engender real opposition down the road. The big chink in her armor is not stylistic, it is about policy. It is about the great baseline question in all political life: Whose ox is being gored?

Hmmm. It’s a sad state of affairs when political support is decided by the the answer to the statement “As long as you’re not taking MY money to pay for everyone’s healthcare.” Still, Peg’s correct; that’s the kind of atmosphere engendered by redistributionist policies that Hillary has so well associated herself with.

Go RTWT.