After losing seven out of the last eight states to Bernie Sanders, it looks like Hillary Clinton will continue reaching into her tired bag of tricks in order to throw doubt into the minds of undecided voters.
In 2008, when she was asked if Barack Obama was a Muslim, she nimbly perched on the fence, saying he wasn’t one as far as she knew. She went just far enough to use the negativity but did not actually say anything.
Now, according to CNN, she has “lost her patience” with Sanders and will start negatively attacking him. After losing the Wisconsin primary, she started trying to bring doubt to Sanders’ political history by telling people that he is not a real Democrat.
“He’s a Democrat,” she said. “In fact, I’m not even sure he is one. He’s running as one. So I don’t know quite how to characterize him.”
If that wasn’t enough, she railed against his stance on gun control Monday when she said that most of New York’s criminals get their guns from Vermont. However, like her gaffe with Greenpeace, people were able to look up the easily found data and prove her statement wrong. Gun control is the one issue that she can call herself more progressive about than Sanders, and this weak attack is more than likely her way to test the waters on just how negative she can go in her attacks.
The very idea that she would begin to play dirty because he dares to continue campaigning against her is quite telling of her campaign. In this age of crowd- sourced fact checking, Clinton’s tricks hold no clout anymore. She can make an attack and people find evidence to refute it near moments later.
“There is a persistent, organized effort to misrepresent my record, and I don’t appreciate that,” she said. “I feel sorry for a lot of the young people who are fed this list of misrepresentations.”
What the former secretary of state failed to realize is that, when viewed in any light, her record does not look good for most people considering a presidential candidate. If banks pay you to make speeches, and you turn around and tell people that you will break up those banks, what level of trust are you asking us to demonstrate?
It seems apparent that Clinton cares very little about the “young people” who support Sanders over her. It’s almost insulting that she would make such a statement in this age of data-driven journalism, in which more people are becoming involved in the details of the political process than ever before. In the end, all her complaining and finger wagging makes her look like someone upset that the opposition will not simply step aside and let her have her way.
