1. My view on Hillary Clinton is that while she might have personal policy preferences on abortion or Afghanistan or whatever else, she is ultimately an opportunistic power seeker. Given the condition of the national Democratic party, that is probably the best that we can reasonably hope for. A Democratic opportunist would get things right out of self-interest that a more principled Democrat would get wrong because of ideology. It is doubtful that Clinton would have adopted Obama’s combination of passivity and malice related to the current border crisis. It isn’t that she is somehow a better person than Obama. The short-term public relations hit from the border crisis would not have been worth the heighten the contradictions/maximize any future amnesty political benefits that might come after she was done being president. So there is that, but I don’t think that she can be a modern Scoop Jackson or any kind of conviction politician.

2. I share some of Peter Lawler’s pessimism, but for a different reason. I think that if you read between the lines of this survey of young voters, you can see the space for a kind of social conservative agenda combined with a kind of economic conservative agenda. It doesn’t look like Rick Santorum’s nostalgia and it doesn’t look like Kimberly Strassel’s nostalgia, but it is there. A huge problem is that the electoral institutions of the right are designed to mobilize the voting cohorts of 1984 and 1994. Creating (or reforming) right-leaning institutions that can pick the ground that would appeal to persuadable voters that have been added to the electorate since 1994, and reaching those voters in a language that they would find comprehensible, is maybe the most important challenge for conservatives to regain the political initiative. It starts with recognizing that the problem has changed from one of mobilization to one of persuasion.