{"id":16971,"date":"2016-05-27T11:54:52","date_gmt":"2016-05-27T15:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16971"},"modified":"2016-05-27T11:54:52","modified_gmt":"2016-05-27T15:54:52","slug":"why-hillary-clinton-appears-untrustworthy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=16971","title":{"rendered":"why Hillary Clinton appears untrustworthy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Philippe Boulet-Gercourt has a long article<\/a> in the French magazine\u00a0L’Obs<\/em>\u00a0(formerly\u00a0Le Nouvel Observateur<\/i>)\u00a0entitled “The Ten Sins of Hillary.” He quotes me saying, “I see her\u00a0as someone very sensitive to what\u00a0is possible and what is not, you watch her\u00a0thinking in\u00a0real-time, seeking the right answer that takes all the constraints into\u00a0account. … Her\u00a0answers can be complex because she\u00a0attempts to answer honestly. [She’s] a political junkie and, in a way, it is a mark\u00a0of sincerity!” (I was interviewed in English, my words were translated into French, and here I translate back.)<\/span><\/p>\n

I am open to objections to what I said. First, it could be that the center-left in the US imposes these constraints on itself<\/em> unnecessarily, to its detriment. For instance, if you’re a “serious” politician, you never\u00a0say that we should float bonds to\u00a0pay for infrastructure. That is what economists would recommend, but you don’t say it because it’s supposed to be politically impossible to advocate borrowing and spending. By censoring yourself, you narrow the range of what actually is possible, and you come across as pervasively dishonest because it’s clear that you’re for things that you won’t defend. Arguably, HRC is Exhibit One of that phenomenon.\u00a0Second,\u00a0one could assemble a list of specific prevarications or evasions from her long career. Third, maybe people don’t trust her because of her gender.<\/p>\n

But I still think that genuine efforts to be realistic can\u00a0look dishonest, especially in contrast to passionate statements that pay no heed\u00a0to constraints.\u00a0In January 2003, I posted\u00a0<\/a>on this blog about my day’s work with a class of kids who were conducting an oral history project\u00a0on the desegregation of Prince George\u2019s County (MD) schools. They were all students\u00a0of color, and they were exploring (with me) how their school had been de jure<\/em> white\u00a0until Brown v Board<\/em> of Education<\/em>, was then integrated for a time, and is now\u00a0diverse but minus a substantial white population.<\/p>\n

One interviewee [had been]\u00a0the first African American student at the school. (He was still the\u00a0only one when he graduated three years later). He said: “Initially\u00a0I was actually hoping that it wouldn\u2019t work. My parents had said that\u00a0if there was a lot of violence, we would back up. \u2026 Instead of violence,\u00a0there were three years of hostility.” His main motivation was to\u00a0be “part of something bigger,” the Civil Rights Movement. He\u00a0later became a successful chemical engineer. I found him enormously appealing\u2014and\u00a0easily understood what he meant in his understated way, but the kids took\u00a0his reticence about his own emotions as evasiveness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He wouldn’t say much about how he personally felt about integrating the school. Our next speaker\u00a0was a current member of the County Council, a\u00a0white man who was formerly a civil rights lawyer and who spoke very passionately about his commitment to integration. I was mildly suspicious of him; the kids loved him. Our reactions were different,\u00a0probably not because of age or other demographics characteristic but just because assessments of character are subjective. But I do think it’s possible that I was right to trust the\u00a0speaker who was guarded and private more than the\u00a0guy who said exactly\u00a0what his audience wanted to hear. The question is whether HRC\u00a0faces the same problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Philippe Boulet-Gercourt has a long article in the French magazine\u00a0L’Obs\u00a0(formerly\u00a0Le Nouvel Observateur)\u00a0entitled “The Ten Sins of Hillary.” He quotes me saying, “I see her\u00a0as someone very sensitive to what\u00a0is possible and what is not, you watch her\u00a0thinking in\u00a0real-time, seeking the right answer that takes all the constraints into\u00a0account. … Her\u00a0answers can be complex because she\u00a0attempts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-election","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16971"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16978,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16971\/revisions\/16978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}