Based on her latest column, Maureen Dowd is not a fan of Hillary Clinton’s campaign run. But how do the Times‘s readers feel? It’s a guilty pleasure of mine (or a bad habit) to read comment sections in order to gauge the mood out there. At the New York Times, however, comments are broken into three sections—All, Readers’ Picks, and NYT Picks. The All section is a rabbit hole. A subthread can go on for hundreds of comments, none of them addressing the column but rather a reader who mentioned Hubert Humphrey and Vietnam. So I skipped ahead to the ultrafiltered NYT Picks—letters, if you will, selected by the Times as noteworthy. Here’s where it got interesting.
Most of the letters in this category are supportive of a Biden candidacy. There are self-confessed Republicans who say the current GOP field is lousy and they would with all honesty vote for Joe Biden. Hillary gets little love here. And this is where I stumbled across a comment by a certain H. Torbet out of San Francisco who makes the most unusual comparison yet involving Hillary Clinton:
Hillary is like that. She does not seem to have any of her own thoughts. She synthetic, and obviously so.
When she’s asked a question, she does not answer. Instead, she starts bobbing her head, her eyes kind of bug out, and she has a weird smile on her face. She’s not framing an answer. Her brain is calculating a response. She’s searching for what the focus groups have suggested is the best answer.
At some point, she will break down. No one can keep this kind of charade going for very long. The issues concerning “everyday Americans” are too diverse for pure calculation.
Will we ever look at Hillary Clinton the same way after H. Torbet’s comparison of her to this scene?
