Questions Are Irrelevant

Don't believe the claims on my side of the blogosphere that Hillary Clinton's campaign is "collapsing" or "panicking"; if that were true, would she be so free and easy about being herself?

As she races through Iowa in the days before next week's caucuses, Hillary Clinton is taking few chances. She tells crowds that it’s their turn to “pick a president,’’ but over the last two days she has not invited them to ask her any questions.

Before the brief Christmas break, the New York senator had been setting aside time after campaign speeches to hear from the audience. Now when she’s done speaking, her theme songs blare from loudspeakers, preventing any kind of public Q&A.

She was no more inviting when a television reporter approached her after a rally on Thursday and asked if she was “moved’’ by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Clinton turned away without answering.

There's actually a great deal of logic to this strategy.

First, Mrs. Clinton has demonstrated that she stinks at thinking on her feet and speaking extemporaneously in any sort of genuinely spontaneous exchange as takes place when candidates take questions from an audience of voters. The fewer questions she takes, the fewer opportunities for her to flip-flop her position on an incendiarily controversial issue five times in three minutes.

Second, why answer voter questions when everything she says is buffalo bagels anyway? We all know what Hillary REALLY is: a hardcore left-wing extremist who will take America the way of Hugo Chavez's Venezuela to the greatest degree humanly possible. Donk primary voters know this, she knows they know it, and she's relying upon that implicit knowledge to carry her to the Democrat nomination. As it will.

Third, it's refreshingly honest. Senator Clinton looks upon the American people as cattle anyway; she doesn't give a rat's ass about any of us other than as voters to be hoodwinked and revenue sources to be pillaged. That, too, comes across in ad lib conversation; better for her later triangulation needs if she limits her exposure to such rhetorical minefields that she has no genuine, much less natural, inkling to navigate.

Richard Nixon ran precisely this sort of no-retail/all mass advertising campaign in 1968 and captured the White House. He did so for the same reasons Hillary is now.

She's still up five in Iowa, three in New Hampshire, and seventeen nationally. And the GOP is committing its usual ritual Republicide. So pardon moi if I stifle another yawn.