When Empty Words are Hurled, Expect to Lose Support in the Real World…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 12:40 PM Permalink

…by which I mean the empty or even outright false or dishonest words that are meant to injure another when there is no reason to do so.

Witness the most current poll regarding Hillary from the washingtonpost.com titled Poll Shows Erosion Of Trust in Clinton:

Lost in the Hillary Rodham Clinton campaign's aggressive attacks on Barack Obama in recent days is a deep and enduring problem that threatens to undercut any inroads Clinton has made in her struggle to overtake him in the Democratic presidential race: She has lost trust among voters, a majority of whom now view her as dishonest.

Her advisers' efforts to deal with the problem -- by having her acknowledge her mistakes and crack self-deprecating jokes -- do not seem to have succeeded. Privately, the aides admit that the recent controversy over her claim to have ducked sniper fire on a trip to Bosnia probably made things worse.

Clinton is viewed as "honest and trustworthy" by just 39 percent of Americans, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, compared with 52 percent in May 2006. Nearly six in 10 said in the new poll that she is not honest and trustworthy. And now, compared with Obama, Clinton has a deep trust deficit among Democrats, trailing him by 23 points as the more honest, an area on which she once led both Obama and John Edwards.

I know that no poll can ever give the definitive answer to any question as it is well known that a poll just represents,"…a snapshot in time," and only represents the current views, which are malleable, of the persons taking the poll. I do, however think that this poll reflects the self-inflicted damage of a candidate who will do or say anything to get elected and say the hell with her party and the fact that she is loading the Republicans up with plenty of ammunition to attack Obama.

So much so that she is sacrificing her integrity, honesty, and that, by implication, she is no better that the Republican candidate and that Obama is worse still.

Why the plummeting numbers? A few brief samples from this excellent article:

Among Democrats, 63 percent called her honest, down 18 points from 2006; among independents, her trust level has dropped 13 points, to 37 percent. Republicans held Clinton in low regard on this in the past (23 percent called her honest two years ago), but it is even lower now, at 16 percent. Majorities of men and women now say the phrase does not apply to Clinton[…]

Advisers argue that her positive ratings have dipped as she has been defined by her opponents… and that her honesty problem reflects the pounding she took from Republicans in the 1990s. But the Bosnia incident and the way the campaign handled it have left advisers divided over what a candidate can do after such a steep drop in trust.

Some of her aides believe that after Clinton told the Bosnia story -- of having run from her military aircraft into a hangar to avoid sniper fire -- when television images of the event showed otherwise, the campaign had no choice but to say she "misspoke."[…]

Other Clinton advisers thought that response did not come quickly enough -- and that when it did, without further explanation or talking points for surrogates to use, it only worsened the perception that she had lied.[…]

"Continuing to say it did happen when it didn't happen is not a strategy," one adviser said.[…]

Senior Clinton advisers argued that the Bosnia story would not have developed the way it did if it were not for a story line about Clinton that goes back to the 1990s, when scandals involving the first lady, including the firings in the White House travel office and her financial dealings, resulted in widespread doubts about her trustworthiness.[…]

The percentage calling Clinton honest has dropped steeply among whites with higher incomes and levels of education.[…]

The percentage of white Democrats without college degrees calling Clinton honest hardly budged in two years, while those with college degrees have dropped off significantly on the question (from 82 percent to 53 percent).[…]

Among whites, the percentage saying Clinton is honest and trustworthy has declined 10 points, compared with 26 points among nonwhites. That number has declined more sharply among liberals (down 30 points) than among moderates (down 13) or conservatives (down 4 points). Head to head with Obama on honesty among Democrats, Clinton faces a 23-point deficit overall, 17 points among whites and nearly 50 points among African Americans.

This drop in numbers for Hillary just reinforces my belief that if you lie simply to try and gain some nebulous advantage, even when the truth of the matter gives away the lie, people are naturally going to distrust the candidate.

When that candidate deliberately speaks out and ill of her follow party member candidates I believe she has made a fatal mistake: If we can't trust her to run a 'clean' campaign and instead have to watch clumsy errors and outright lies on an almost daily basis, it will cost that candidate dearly, and perhaps reflect even worse on her party.

Ronnie Raygun, with his eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican," made sense then and continues to make sense now. It makes no sense for the losing candidate (Hillary) to seek to deliberately make Obama such "damaged goods" that John McLame may beat him in the actual election.

IMHO, it is time for Hillary to hang her head in shame, turn her rhetoric towards the real opposition, McLame, and do everything in her power to insure that Senator Obama wins in '08. This country will not survive four to eight more years of Republican borrowing and spending us all into bankruptcy, pursuing illegal wars of aggression to steal the worlds oil supply, implementing ever greater and more intrusive surveillance of innocent people with reckless plans to turn our satellites on our own country, and establish a new DNA database that will surely never benefit the people of America.

It is now so that the Democratic Party has become the 'party of freedom' while Republicans have become agents for government secrecy, cronyism, incompetence, a demonstrated propensity to pass laws favoring corporations over people, and the bane of freedom everywhere.

Labels: 2008 election, corruption, cronyism, disinformation, economics, Economy, flip-flops, Hillary, hypocrisy, polls, propaganda