Hillary Takes a Strong Offensive with Trump and Is Unparalleled
Time has the transcript of Hillary’s Clinton foreign policy speech and essentially her argument against Trump. Ramesh Ponnaru does a good job of highlighting how devastating a speech it was to Trump.
Hillary’s Trump Strategy
It truly was a brilliant speech that had exactly the right tone. Trump should be ridiculed with his own words the way Hillary did. She had the same mocking tone that Obama had in his speech the day before that was also effective in undressing Trump. No Republican primary candidate has been as effective as either the current Democratic President of the United States and the eventual Democratic nominee for president in attacking Trump substantively.
Hillary’s Trump strategy is that he’s unfit for the presidency because he is impulsive, reckless, ignorant, unserious and bigoted. I believe this is a much more effective than portraying Trump as a con man or a right-wing extremist. It’s the same tact that Elizabeth Warren is taking as well, with success.
Hillary’s Trump strategy is counter to conventional presidential politics of the nominee saying that his or her rival would be a bad president or already was a bad president. We’ve never seen a nominee invested this heavily in making the case that the rival was unqualified to be president. She’s essentially saying Trump does not even pass the threshold test to be president.
Republicans and Bernie-or-Busters
Because it contains a lot of truth, there aren’t a lot of people defending Trump from it. Conservatives are concentrating their fire on the portions of the speech where Clinton made the case for her own record. They’re not, by-and-large, arguing that Trump has consistently advocated a sensible approach to foreign policy that he can be trusted to pursue competently.
Hillary’s Trump strategy is not particularly ideological, and it seeks to appeal to people who lean to the right as well as to those who don’t. It’s not surprising that her speech was not very ideological either. She even hit Trump for his attacks on Ronald Reagan during the 1980s.
Hillary’s Trump Strategy appeals to soccer moms, and “good government” independents. However, it’ll not make Bernie nor his supporters happy. One does not have to be a Clinton supporter to acknowledge an effective speech. Partisanship doesn’t allow for such things as ever seeing the other side doing something effective. It hobbles analytic ability.
The fact Trump isn’t beating her in polls while he is the presumptive nominee and she remains mired in a contentious primary with Bernie does not bode well for him. After Bernie endorses her and delivers a raging speech against Trump at the Democratic convention, the inevitability of her candidacy will settle in for many even before President Obama endorses her.
