Tim Kaine: Dems made the mistake with Hillary that the GOP made with Romney | Mulshine
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Paul Mulshine | The Star Ledger
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on July 23, 2016 at 4:28 PM, updated July 23, 2016 at 4:52 PM
As I watched
Virginia Senator Tim Kainespeaking after
his introduction as Hillary Clinton's running mate, I realized the Democrats made a big mistake.
They should have put him at the top of the ticket instead of Hillary.
Her husband Bill was the best public speaker in recent national politics.
She may be the worst, at least in this century.
You have to go back to Bob Dole in 1996 to find a speaker quite as bad.
Dole, you may recall, kept talking about himself in the third person.
He kept telling us what "Bob Dole" would so as if he were someone other than Bob Dole who was privy to his personal information.
Clinton doesn't refer to herself as "Hillary Clinton." But she shares Dole's penchant for putting audiences to sleep.
As I watched her intro, I noticed that she was scowling practically the entire time. She didn't smile till the bitter end, as if she was glad she could escape the podium.
For most of that time she was denouncing Donald Trump, always with a scowl.
Some people would refer to him as "her fellow New Yorker Donald Trump."
But Hillary doesn't have an ounce of New Yorker in her.
New Yorkers, like New Jerseyans, pride themselves on their sense of humor.
It seems like half the time Trump is speaking he's laughing at one of his own jokes - many of which are pretty funny even if the media don't get them.
Hillary is a dour Midwesterner at heart. She looks like she's always worrying whether the corn and the peas will make it to harvest.
If she were any stiffer the Secret Service would have had to rush a doctor to the stage to check her vital signs.
That wasn't the case with Kaine.
The minute he took to the podium the energy level shot up about a hundred times.
As a conservative, I disagree with him on every policy issue he brought up.
But as a political analyst I have to conclude: This guy is good.
He quickly covered many important bases.
The first came when he spoke in the Spanish he learned as a missionary in Honduras in the 1980s.
"Somos americanos todos," he said: We are all Americans.
He added that he and the Latinos out there were "companeros de alma" - companions of the soul.
He then went in a very well-done set piece about watching citizenship ceremonies and listening to the new citizens declare how proud they are to be Americans.
Next to Jeb Bush, Donald Trump sounds positively sane on foreign policy | Mulshine
Jeb Bush wants to set up a no-fly zone to defeat an enemy that has no air force; compared to him Donald Trump is a foreign-policy genius.
Then there was the part about his Marine officer son, who's soon getting deployed to Europe. That's not exactly tough duty. My Army brother spent most of 20 years in Germany and found the experience quite pleasant and enlightening.
But Kaine turned it into a shot at the Donald for suggesting we pull out of NATO.
"He's a proud Marine deploying to Europe to uphold America's commitment to Our NATO allies," Kaine said.
Kaine also made a big point of having gone to Catholic school and working as a Catholic missionary - thus making a play for the votes of what is by far the largest religious group in America.
His Republican opponent, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, is also a Catholic, though
an evangelical one.
Kaine also offered free college for everyone, which is nice but impossible.
But to get back to foreign affairs, Kaine's remarks reminded me of one mistake the GOP made in 2012.
After settling on a campaign based on reversing Obamacare, they nominated for president the only politician in America who could be said to have invented Obamacare.
That was of course Mitt Romney, and
in the words of one MIT prof who worked for Mitt as Massachusetts governor and later worked for the architects of Obamacare, "It's the same F-ing bill!"
That was the stupidest move any party organization made in this millennium - until the Democratic elite united behind Hillary for 2016.
The big issue this year is ISIS and the terror attacks that seem to be coming at an ever-faster rate.
As Secretary of State, Clinton was the prime mover of the so-called "Arab Spring" movement to depose secular dictators. In the Mideast. The theory was that we'd be Western democracies.
A sea change on regime change: Will Hillary drown?
Most of my fellow members of the media missed a major change in our political alignment this year: It's now the Democrats who are ready to go into the 2016 elections backing the Bush-era policy of regime change
The reality was that we got ISIS.
When Donald Trump first proposed limiting immigrants from Muslim countries he was considered by many to be a nut.
Now that we see members of the Islamic communities in Europe resorting to knives and even trucks for mass slaughter, you'd have to be nuts to think immigration doesn't come with consequence.
President Obama has been reciting a version of the Rodney King mantra "Why can't we all just get along?"
But Clinton will have to show she can do a 180-degree turn on foreign policy and terrorism.
I doubt she can make that turn.
Clinton is committed to the liberal/neocon idea that it is the proper role of the United States military to spread liberation in the Mideast.
She's got more baggage than Louis Vuitton.
I doubt Kaine has ever had a private email server in his basement.
Kaine starts with a clean slate. But he's not the one running for president.
Hillary is.
And that brings up the Democrats' other big mistake.
It's usually the Republicans who nominate the politician who's "next in line" as the saying goes.
But this year it's the Democrats.
If you think of it, Clinton has exactly zero accomplishments as a first lady (think "Hillarycare"), a senator, and as secretary of state.
Hillary got the nomination because she's been around a long time and she's related to someone who was successfully elected president twice.
Who does that remind you of?
The difference is the Republican voters weren't dumb enough to settle for Jeb Bush.
The Democrats were dumb enough to settle for Hillary.
And as she stood there watching Kaine outshine her, I strongly suspect she was asking herself the same question I was asking myself:
Why didn't they nominate this guy for president?
But they didn't.
They nominated her.
And now they're stuck with her.
(On the above photo of Hillary with Cory Booker, I never thought for a second she was going to nominate him. She's already got the black vote. Booker should have made his own run if he'd wanted to be on this ticket. I'll bet he now wishes he had.
Below: This is pretty roughly assembled, but funny anyway.)
http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/07/the_dems_are_making_the_same_mistake_with_hillary.html
