Perfect opening for Hillary to attack Trump on this veterans scandal. Her remarks on the topic were tepid as usual. It's as if she's taking a fluffy pillow to a gun fight. Someone in her campaign needs to grow some balls and open a blunt attack on Trump. It doesn't necessarily always have to come directly from Hillary, but from now until November their campaign should never utter Trump's name without including some variation of the word liar/lies/lying. This needs to be hammered into people's skulls because apparently millions of our dumbshit fellow citizens seem to think that Trump is some sort of "straight talker". Attacking his lies is such a target rich environment. I mean it doesn't even always have to be factual. Lying 75% of the time is as good as lying 100% of the time. In fact getting bogged down in the details of what he lied about is not even the point. Trump is a POS lying con man and we need more Democrats who will cut to the chase and say it clearly without mincing words ...
That's what surrogates are for, to basically call your opponent every name in the book, while she appears "presidential." The main surrogate is, of course, the veep candidate. (Think of who used the word "malarkey" unironically during the 2012 campaign.) In other words, the problem isn't necessarily Hillary's response. It's that we don't have some cadre of surrogates doing the dirty work, outside of occasional appearances from Elizabeth Warren.
I thoroughly enjoyed Biden's line "this is a bunch of stuff" in that debate. It really was very funny.
So much for the concern that Hillary is too soft - "We don't need conspiracy theories and pathological self-congratulations,” Clinton said. “We need leadership.” "Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified to be president.” “Yesterday morning, just one day after the massacre, he went on TV and suggested President Obama is on the side of the terrorists,” Clinton said. “Just think about that for a second. Even in a time of divided politics, this is way beyond anything that should be said by someone running for president.” ""From my perspective, it matters what we do more than what we say," Clinton said on CNN's "New Day." "And it mattered we got bin Laden, not what name we called him." "What I won't do, because I think it is dangerous for our efforts to defeat this threat, is to demonize and demagogue and declare war on an entire religion," she said. "That plays right into ISIS' hands."Clinton hit Trump by name, saying, "I think that Donald Trump's rhetoric is quite dangerous to our country."
Agreed but she needs to quit saying this until after the convention. This just motivates those in the GOP who also agree to figure out a way to get him off the ticket.
I've been thinking about this question and as things progress I believe more and more that the Clinton campaign should adopt the exact same strategy that the Trump campaign has evidently adopted: Let Trump be Trump.
I think her plan is a bit more active than that. Poke Trump hard enough so that he becomes HyperTrump.
It's quite clear that one central strategy will be "steady hand". Which would be any non-meth head with a pulse in comparison to Teh Donald, but hey...
So Clinton should stop attacking Trump on the 1-2% chance they end up dethroning him at the coronation? Not to mention that if they do that, it essentially rips the party apart brutally and Clinton can start picking out furniture for the White House when she moves in.
I think they have him figured out... http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2...ppears-be-dncs-trump-opposition-research-file
Dems are saying it's an early version from December, well before Iowa and when nobody thought he'd be the nominee. An NBC article quoted a Dem donor saying that they have a lot more dirt now than they did then.
I guess I know what I'm reading tonight ... PDF: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2861555/1.pdf
It feels like a waste of assets to commission such a comprehensive document when Trump's weaknesses are so target-rich.
BTW, Trump's unfavorables rose to 70%. http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/15/politics/washington-post-abc-news-poll-unfavorable-ratings/index.html
Not sure what that matters. It was pretty well known during the primaries that Trump's GOP opponents had done very little opposition research on him. They thought he'd fizzle on his own. Indeed, when the lack of opposition research by his GOP opponents was a story, the Dems were chiming in saying they've got hundreds of pages on him already -- and that they think they've just scratched the surface. So I think there is a story here about the rest of the GOP field. They hadn't done their homework on Trump, and that's one reason why they lost to him. Even if, as @MatthausSammer suggests, Trump is a "target rich" environment of glaring weakness, you still have to catalogue all those weaknesses and have them at the ready to be deployed as needed. The GOP contenders didn't do that. The Dems will. -- In any case, I've been looking through this document. The Dems are saying it's actually an old draft and that they've got lots more on him that's not in this leaked document. I believe them. First, much of the document isn't really opposition research in the way that many think of that term. There's a lot of plain old, factual biography here. That's the low hanging, readily available background information that you compile first when putting together reports of this type. Then you dig into the dirt. Second, when you do get to the controversies, they're missing a lot of publicly available information that's surfaced in recent months. Third, I searched the quotes and could not find any from 2016. They are all from December 2015 or earlier. This is a draft, and a pretty old one at that. You can be sure they've found a ton more on him in the last 6 months.
100% agree with @Knave. I will only add that once you feel that certain message is fizzling, you have a rap sheet to choose from for the next attack. You never let your opponent get on the offensive, always make him play defense. That is how Obama went on Romney, how W went on Kerry, and how Hillary is going on Drumpf.