From the midweek Morning Jolt:
Hillary’s Campaign Strategy of Avoidance
So what’s the strategy behind Hillary’s van, speeding away from reporters? Why is she attempting the world’s first covert campaign by an overwhelming favorite?
Talk about “runaway frontrunner.”
The Des Moines Register puts it, “Hillary Clinton’s van has rolled up to a few Iowa destinations on the down low.”
After about an hour at the Jones St. Java House, Clinton exited the building and went toward a black vehicle, brushing off shouted questions about her candidacy.
“We’ll have lots of time to talk later,” she said.
Clinton then went to LeClaire’s downtown, where she took a walk with Mayor Bob Scannell, greeting onlookers and stopping into one shop.
In her first remarks of the campaign, she addressed the pressing issues of hedge fund managers paying insufficient tax rates and the salaries of CEOS. Clearly, those CEOs don’t earn their pay the way she does with her $300,000 per speech speaking fees or her $14 million book advance.
(According to salary.com, the median expected annual pay for a typical Chief Executive Officer in the United States is $681,798 so 50 percent of the people who perform the job of Chief Executive Officer in the United Sates are expected to make less than $681,798. For perspective, Bill Clinton made $17 million in public speaking fees in one year and $106 million from 2001 to 2013. The CEO making that median salary would have to work about 25 years to make what Bill Clinton made in speaking fees in that year; a CEO making that median salary would have to work 155 years to equal Bill Clinton’s speaking fee total over that twelve year period.)
We established in a previous Jolt that what worries us conservatives doesn’t worry progressives, and vice versa: “By and large, the Republicans are worried about the right problems – the big problems: crazy people who want to kill us, a skyrocketing debt, a growing culture of dependency, an avalanche of red tape strangling the entrepreneurial lifeblood of the economy and an unsecure border.”
Both conservatives and progressives look at America and see problems, but they see completely different problems. They dismiss with a shrug the problems that worry us most.
What’s the Democratic solution to the national debt? It’s not really a problem. What’s the Democratic solution to Putin’s aggression? It’s not really a problem.
What’s the Democratic solution to ISIS? It’s not really a problem, we’re handling it fine through air strikes.
What’s the Democratic solution to illegal immigration and an insecure border? It’s not really a problem, let’s pass an amnesty.
What’s the Democratic solution to children being raised without fathers? To the extent they address this, they insist it reflects low wages and economic factors.
Meanwhile, they turn to us and ask, what’s your plan for dealing with the temperature rising a century from now? Why aren’t you concerned about micro-aggressions? What’s your plan to ensure every woman in America has access to affordable birth control? What are you going to do to stop people from being able to buy guns?
Sometimes Democrats get really creative in finding new problems. Not so long ago, Hillary Clinton lamented the “fun deficit” in America and suggested the solution was sending adults to camps.
If Hillary sits down and does tough interviews – well, you’ll probably see something like the press conference about he private e-mail server. So the Hillary camp is going to keep her in front of small groups, handing softball questions.
We can expect Team Hillary to make a huge deal out of any perceived insult, something that they can claim represents sexism, woman-hating or that tired perennial, “the war on women.”
Vast swaths of our public debate revolve around metronomic “Can you believe what this person said?” outrages. Any ill-tempered comment from any little-known “GOP lawmaker” anywhere in the country can set off a couple news cycles of ritualistic denunciation. Driving the guy at Mozilla out of his job is relatively easy. Making a figure so controversial that they’re metaphorically radioactive is easy.
Considering what liberals claim to care about, they have every reason to focus their fury upon militant Islam… but they don’t. Liberals claim to care about underprivileged children and the importance of education, so they have every reason to lash out at status-quo-defending teacher’s unions and demand public school choice for every parent everywhere in the country… but most of them don’t. Liberals claim to care about low-income Americans, so they have every reason to oppose allowing more unskilled or low-skilled workers to enter the country illegally… but they don’t. Liberals claim they want to help the little guy, so they have every reason to want to reduce the amount of red tape and paperwork that a new small business faces… but they don’t. All of those tasks would require them doing something difficult – oftentimes, confronting a part of their own coalition for the status quo.