Hillary Clinton testifying to Benghazi Investigation committee Thursday 22 October 2015. (Source: abcnews.go.com AP/Evan Vucci. Cropped.)
I was just going to do this post about the hamster (below), but Hillary Clinton is such an obvious candidate for Winner of the Week this week, I couldn’t really ignore her. After a tough few months, it’s all looking pretty good for both her and the Democratic Party:
- The polls all say she performed best in the debate. In the latest CNN/ORC poll (see page 12 of poll results) for example, 62% said she did the best, compared to 35% for Bernie Sanders. O’Malley and Webb got 1% each, and Chafee didn’t register at all.
- Jim Webb pulled out of the race on Tuesday. There’s some suggestion he may run as an independent candidate. That’s actually good news for the Democratic Party, as he’s more attractive to centrist Republicans than Democrats so he’ll pull more votes from the right-wing candidates looking likely to win the GOP nomination than from a Clinton or Sanders ticket.
- Lincoln Chafee pulled out of the race on Friday. Articles are now being run with headlines like: Why Did Chafee Even Run?
- Joe Biden announced on Wednesday than he wasn’t joining the race for the Democratic nomination for president. Polls that have included Biden in recent months showed that he pulled votes from Clinton more than any other candidate. Now that he is out, they show she has overwhelming support amongst Democrats.
- Last week, probable next speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) announced that the Benghazi hearing was designed to damage Clinton’s presidential bid. To make things worse, other Republicans came out and said the same thing. Much as they tried to do some damage control, there wasn’t any way to spin McCarthy’s words to make them mean anything else. Congressman Trey Gowdy (R- South Carolina), the head of the committee, actually seemed to be making a genuine effort to do a proper investigation initially, but he was always on a hiding to nothing. His attempts to take the moral high ground were scuttled by his own party.
- Clinton nailed it in her performance at the hearing. She had the smarts to insist on her testimony being public. She knew she could handle herself, alone against a whole committee, a majority of whom were trying to damage her. There could be no words put in her mouth by others when she’s on public view, which was bound to happen following a closed hearing. Rolling Stone has gone so far as to entitle their piece on the subject Trey Gowdy Just Elected Hillary Clinton President. Rolling Stone always favours the Democratic Party, but I’m not sure they’re wrong. From the article:
These morons in Gowdy’s committee were so bent on proving that Hillary is an unfeeling, ambition-crazed schemer bent on riding gleefully to the White House on the corpses of Benghazi victims that they ended up making her look like the one thing she really isn’t, at least not very often: a regular person.
And:
Having to face down that absurd accusation will humanize Hillary anew with a Democratic electorate that had begun to wonder what she really stood for. Now she’s not an aristocrat who takes money from Goldman and Citi, she’s a symbol of a majority demographic that is officially tired of being told it isn’t American enough. You can’t put a price on the ad the Republicans gave Hillary Thursday. I think they won her the White House.
- The Clinton campaign reports that in the hour after the Benghazi hearing they received more donations than in any hour since the campaign started. They have also reached the milestone of 500,000 individual donors. That’s a lot of support.
All in all, Clinton’s campaign is looking in much better shape than it has for a long time. Add that to the current lack of a credible Republican candidate, the changing demographics, majority views of the national electorate, it’s looking very positive for a Democratic Party win in the November 2016 election.
I Think this Hamster is Broken
But this is better than all that. This hamster has learnt to do back flips!
https://youtu.be/V-eoKRZ3r2Q
So, the important question is: “Is the hamster broken, or is it just having fun?” Maybe it just likes Hillary Clinton and is celebrating in the best way it knows! I think it’s just enjoying itself. 🙂
Absolutely a great week for Hillary, particularly Biden’s announcement, but the Benghazi hearings too. I’m not one of her fans, but love that she showed up those hapless Republicans.
Yeah. I seriously can’t believe how bad the Republicans are.
Good analysis of the hearings. I agree. It looks like a democratic presidential victory. Thank Gawd. I hope they regain she Senate. The insurmountable problem in the House is gerrymandering at the state level. I think the house will remain a republican bastion for a very long time to come.
The gerrymandering is a disgrace. Many of us (e.g. Aussie and NZ) have our electoral boundaries drawn by independent electoral commissions so this sort of this doesn’t happen. It’s one of the more obvious forms of corruption that would actually be easy to fix.
Gowdy sure was sweaty…powder anyone? He looked exactly like they wanted Hillary to look: sweaty, sleazy, irrelevant and guilty. What a backfire. I started watching at about hour 9, after hearing the highlights of the first 9 hours. FOX stopped airing it which is a sign of defeat. I found it riveting and discombobulated (to be clear, the Republicans were very discombobulated…no unified tactics of questioning). I was surprised that I enjoyed it so much…seeing the Republicans being trounced by logic and knowledge of the situation and Hillary’s complete poise was too gratifying. Conspiracy theories don’t work well when confronted by facts, especially when delivered by someone of the caliber of Hillary. She is on a roll. Republicans are on a sandwich roll, ready to be eaten.
As an aside: If Hillary wins the nomination, Cummings for VP I say!
I agree. I think Gowdy was looking for this to power his future in the GOP. I bet he was having fantasies about being lauded for saving the party from Hillary – instead he did the opposite, scoring several own goals.