Hillary's Campaign Manager: 'This Election Will Be About Trust'
Even as he says those words, you know he hopes deep down they aren't true -- because if this election really does boil down to trustworthiness, his widely-distrusted serial liar of a boss is in some serious trouble:
Note how Couric prefaces the question with a reference to a national poll showing Clinton underwater by 20 points on the honesty metric, a vulnerability that has consistently hurt her even among her own party's electorate. Faced with that data, Mook deflects, blaming Republicans for "trying to dust up this email pseudo-controversy." This laughable talking point is belied by the fact that the "pseudo-controversy" in question arose from the Obama-appointed intelligence community Inspector General, who was confirmed unanimously by a Democratic Senate. He blew the whistle on her shockingly reckless, national security-compromising conduct, not those awful Republicans on Capitol Hill. And it's not Ted Cruz who's investigating the matter; it's the FBI, which has expanded its probe on multiple occasions. This partisan excuse-making is as feeble as it gets, but it's the best option they've got. Later, he triumphantly claims that Hillary testified about Benghazi (a "bogus" issue, he says) for 11 hours, resulting in "nothing." Well, except for the moment when she was confronted with concrete proof that she had precise knowledge of the nature of the deadly attacks in the hours immediately following the bloodshed, yet publicly peddled a false political narrative for days -- including lying to the families of the grieving, whom she's since dismissed as confused liars for unanimously remembering exactly what she told them at the time. And her provably false statements about her supposed "non adviser" Sidney Blumenthal. And her inaccurate assertions about transparency and turning over all relevant documents. There are many reasons why Hillary Clinton's honesty rating and personal favorability are in the toilet. Her campaign's mendacious spin about it only underscores the point.
If Mook could be frank, here's what he'd actually say: "Yeah, Secretary Clinton has spent her entire adult life lying to people in her creepy obsessive pursuit of power, and she's lurched cynically and decisively to the left over the last year because our party is increasingly radical on almost every issue. But we're not concerned about the state of this race because our establishment saw to it from the very beginning that she'd win the nomination, and because the Republicans look like they're going to nominate a frequent Hillary donor whose unpopularity and untrustworthiness are somehow a lot worse than hers -- which we deeply appreciate." Instead, he's forced to spout this claptrap about how people trust Hillary -- the godmother of Obamacare -- to lower their healthcare costs, or something. On that note, I'll leave you with this flashback:
If this struggling woman takes Hillary's grand advice and 'shops harder,' she'll discover even fewer and more expensive options than ever.