By Dave Andrusko
Pro-abortion Hillary Clinton
It’s easy to tell that a reporter has hit a hot button when in less than a day there are over 7,000 online responses to his or her story.
Enter the Washington Post’s Anne Gearan and “Can Hillary Clinton overcome her trust problem?”
Talk about a perfect hook. On Saturday the pro-abortion former Secretary of State sat down with the FBI for over three hours “as part of a Justice Department investigation into the privately owned email system she operated off the books when she was secretary of state,” Gearan writes. “Hillary Clinton’s weekend interview with the FBI stands as a perfect symbol of what is probably her biggest liability heading into the fall election: A lot of people say they don’t trust her.”
What about the impact of the FBI sit-down?
That the interview at FBI headquarters was voluntary does not expunge the whiff of suspicion surrounding the entire email affair that, for many voters, confirms a long-held view that Clinton shades the truth or plays by her own rules.
To Gearan’s credit, she is not buying into the Clinton’s standard line: she is just an innocent victim of various and sundry plots.
In opinion polls and focus groups, even many people who say they plan to vote for Clinton say they think she has lied or has something to hide. Her poor marks for trustworthiness have much to do with her long and sometimes messy public life, and very little to do with Republican opponent Donald Trump. Both front-runners are deeply unpopular with voters, but Clinton elicits a more visceral mistrust.
The amusing part, however, was in what I supposed was to be understood as even-handedness, Gearan writes, “As she has before, Clinton blamed smears by her political opponents for setting the tone, but she also acknowledged her own mistakes.” But there is only a passing reference or two from a speech Clinton gave last week to a “friendly audience” about her own culpability and lots of ham-fisted attacks: “You know, you hear 25 years worth of wild accusations, anyone could start to wonder.”
We then read about how Clinton and/or the Super PACs allied to her campaign are saturating the airways less with attacks on Trump than with stories showing her better profile. And Vice President Joe Biden is “vouching” for her.
Gearan then finishes with the slight wrinkle on here’s-why-she’s-in-trouble-but…
In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in late June, 69 percent of respondents said they were concerned that Clinton has a record or reputation as untrustworthy. A CBS News poll in June found 62 percent saying Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, while 33 percent said she is. Her ratings on this were similar to Trump’s (63 percent not honest, 32 percent honest). But on a separate measure of being forthcoming, 33 percent of registered voters said Clinton says what she believes while 62 percent said she does not. By contrast, 56 percent said Trump says what he believes.”
“For Hillary Clinton it’s all personal and about values,” said pollster Peter D. Hart, who oversaw the latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll. “It’s, ‘Can I trust her? Do I feel comfortable with her?’ ”
But that’s nothing new for the former First Lady and Senator from New York, we’re told. She overcame doubts to win two terms in the Senate. In a word, Gearan tells us, the Clinton camp sees “an opportunity now to reset voter opinions about Clinton.”
Good luck with that.