Dissing the Electorate
In today's Financial Times, Christopher Caldwell bemoans Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire turnaround as an ominous descent into the Politics of the Personal.
Leave it to a Weekly Standard stalwart to speak with certainty when everyone else -- all the titanic media egos across the political spectrum -- is tentative.
Hillary Clinton's New Hampshire victory in the wake of polls showing her an average of eight points down is one of the great mysteries in recent political history -- a delightful reminder that the future remains opaque to polls, pundits and betting markets. Clinton's internal life is equally a riddle wrapped in an enigma. But Caldwell is blithely certain that Hillary planned her tear-up and won because of it, and that this electoral melting, triggered by mass identification with the soul-baring would-be monarch, is a sign of mass "servility."
Never mind that exit polls show that Clinton's margin among people who made up their minds in the final days was nearly identical to her overall margin. Never mind that speaking in "elegant parallelisms" after a year of nonstop campaigning is more likely a reflex as a sign of premeditation. Never mind that Clinton remains almost terminally unhistrionic as she opens herself up to voter q-and-a (after Iowa) and buries her interlocutors in a mass of wonkish policy detail.
I'll take a 'servile' electorate over a certain pundit any day.