Hillary's Unelectability

Jacob Weisburg writes in Slate about the problem Hillary has in her run for president. With considerable right-bashing, Weisburg dismisses the conventional arguments: too liberal, too much married to Bill, too divisive, and ends up with this:

You may admire and respect her. But it's hard not to find Hillary a bit inhuman. Whatever she may be like in private, her public persona is calculating, clenched, relentless—and a little robotic.

With the American electorate so closely divided, it would be foolish to say that Hillary, or any other potential nominee, couldn't win. And a case can be made that the first woman who gets elected president will need to, as Hillary does, radiate more toughness than warmth. But in American elections, affection matters. Democrats lost in 2000 and 2004 with candidates Main Street regarded as elitist and aloof, to a candidate voters related to personally. Hillary isn't as obnoxious as Gore or as off-putting as Kerry. But she's got the same damn problem, and it can't be fixed.

Hillary does indeed suffer profoundly from that weakness, but a more damning weakness politically is her transparent pandering. All pols play the audience and tweak their speeches accordingly, but Hillary harps louder, covers less effectively, and votes more deceitfully than most.

The Left still doesn't get it. Like Weisburg, they can see the likeability issue, but they completely miss the larger believability issue. And it's the problem that is rotting the Dems to their core. As they become more extreme, more out of step with mainstream American values, they must become less believable in order to sound better. And while they may think Americans are too dim to figure that out, they're wrong.

h/t Real Clear Politics