Nothing To Say, Nothing At All

On Tuesday, after winning  few more primaries, Hillary Clinton went on (at least to the extent I could make myself listen to her) about "uniting" people, and "not building walls, but breaking down barriers" and that sort of thing.

I don't want to extract one part of her speeches and assume that's all there is, but again, to the extent that I could handle listening to her, it seems to be all there is.  And, like so many things that Democrats routinely say in campaigns, once you peel back the words and try to analyze the actual ideas and proposals, there simply doesn't seem to be anything there.

Her candidacy is generating an amazing lack of ... anything, other than managing to have locked up the super-delegates (what a scandal that is) and certainly getting little in the way of enthusiasm and actual voters.

For example, as I write this, 99% of the ballots in Ohio have been counted.  Ohio is a perfect state to use, since both parties are contested in the presidential primary and it is definitional "swing" state for the general election.  How many Democrats voted in the primary there on Tuesday? About 1,197,000 votes, probably still just short of 1.2 million by the time all are counted.

Want to guess how many voted in the Republican primary?  Over 2,040,000, meaning that almost 70% more Ohioans voted in the Republican primary than in the equally-contested Democrat one.  In case you think, as I did, that the "John Kasich favorite-son" kind of thing was the big difference there, we can look at Florida, which had a comparable situation as a swing state.

Total vote for Democrats in Florida was a bit short of 1.7 million.  Over on the Republican side, the total number of ballots cast was astonishingly higher -- 2,350,000 votes or 38% more Floridians voting in the Republican primary.  In fact, if you omit all of home-state senator Marco Rubio's votes, there were still more ballots cast for Republicans.  Yep, more votes were cast for just Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich in Florida than for all the Democrats combined.  And the Democrats' total was about 50,000 smaller than even its own last contested primary, in 2008.

So what's going on?

Well, I think we need to relate the two parties' response to the pulse of the nation.  That pulse, in case you hadn't noticed, is the one generally referred to in the media as "anger", meaning that the voters are not happy with Government right now.  They see an entrenched bureaucracy and an entrenched Congress with most members (Ted Cruz a rare exception) so devoted to their own reelection, that they feel it worthwhile -- or are at least content -- to let the bureaucracy grow.  And the people see high, high tax rates, a Gestapo IRS, and idiotic legislation like Obamacare whose content is totally unrelated to its stated purpose.

Does Hillary Clinton even come close to addressing that?  Well, heck no.   She's off on leftist garbage like "building bridges" and "breaking down barriers", tra la la la la la.  Might as well have a unicorn doing her simultaneous translation for the deaf.  Except, of course, that she is the one who is "deaf", as in not hearing the voice of the people.

Some 50-60 years ago, the Democrats and Republicans would have heard the same voice, and disagreed as to how to address it.  They would have debated strategy -- hotly, no doubt -- but they would have at least been trying to solve the same problems.

No longer.  While we are overtaxed, grossly underemployed, in debt up to our hairlines, no longer trusted by our friends and increasingly laughed at by our enemies, Hillary Clinton is talking about bridges and barriers.  And she wonders why the Democrats aren't getting anyone to the polls in the primaries?  Well, actually, I suspect she doesn't wonder that, being so smug that she just knows she will win in November, at least if she is not in prison by then (another area of denial).

If you want to know why the Republicans are outdrawing Democrats by a lot in states where you can actually compare the two, well, it's actually pretty easy.  Whatever you think of the Republican candidates, however you regard their solutions, at least they are seeing the right problems.

And those "problems" are the ones that we American voters confront daily.  They are not "income inequality"; they are not "barriers and walls."  They are not that America is over-sufficiently great.

Hillary Clinton does not see the problems, so she cannot begin to provide solutions.  You will see that in the eventual candidate debates, when she and the Republican candidate look like they are talking past each other -- and they will be.  Without looking like she knows what actually is on our minds, she will look like she is running to be president of some other country entirely.

So we see her as having nothing to say.  Nothing at all. 

 Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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