Hillary Clinton is making things hard on herself
Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has been doing her level best to position herself on the right side of history on a few issues at the forefront of the American consciousness. That’s a good thing. What’s bad is that her level best seems to involve waiting for others to do the heavy lifting.
Friday, Clinton called on Congress to end the trade embargo against Cuba. The decades-old measure has cost the island nation more than $800 million annually, and cost the United States more than $1.2 billion a year, per the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. President Barack Obama recently worked out a deal with Raul Castro to normalize relations between the two nations, and an American embassy has recently opened in Havana. U.S.-Cuban relations have been an issue since the sixties, and, with the current administration making strides to change the status quo, Clinton, in Miami, took the time to comment on the embargo.
“We have arrived at a decisive moment,’’ said the former secretary of state at the University of Miami. “The Cuban people have waited long enough for progress to come. Even many Republicans on Capitol Hill are starting to recognize the urgency of moving forward. It’s time for their leaders to either get on board or get out of the way. The Cuba embargo needs to go once and for all.’’
While GOP candidates have made their stances on Cuba clear, Democrats are warming to the possibility of better relations with a nation once featured on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. But Clinton, it must be noted, waited nearly two weeks after the last, most pertinent bit of information concerning the Cuba issue made its way through the news cycle before commenting in earnest. While her supporters could point to her schedule as the reason—Miami has the highest concentration of Cuban-American citizens—Clinton and her handlers are the arbiters of her schedule.
She could have been there whenever she wanted to be.
It hasn’t been all missteps for Clinton on hot-button issues as of late. She delivered an impassioned speech on the state of race relations after Charleston in June, and rightly called the shooting an “act of racist terrorism.’’ If Cuba happened to be the only case of Clinton front-running, she’d be in the clear. But black voters have noticed the practice elsewhere.
After Bernie Sanders balked at the chance to win over potential black voters (and media personalities) when he appeared at this year’s Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix, he dropped the ball again on social media, when he responded to one of the demands of protesters who interrupted his speech and called for attention to the deaths of Sandra Bland and other women of color with a tin-eared response that featured mostly black men. Sanders, who has recently gone from pipe dream vote stealer to legitimate threat, left the window open for Clinton to capitalize and leave him in the dust with a valuable subsection of the democratic base. Instead, she waited. And waited.
She waited until July 30, 12 days after Bernie’s blunder to speak directly to black voters. Her remarks to the Urban League touched on a multitude of points well known to the audience.
“I’m planning to be president,’’ she said, “and anyone who seeks that office has a responsibility to say it. And more than that, to grapple with the systemic inequities that so many Americans face. Anyone who asks for your vote should try their hardest to see things as they actually are, not just as we want them to be. So I want you to know I see it and I hear you. And the racial disparity you work hard every day to overcome goes against everything I believe in, and everything I want to help America achieve.’’
As far as sentiments expressed by presidential hopefuls go, her remarks on Cuba and racial inequality are all well and good. Nobody gets in front of throngs of loyal party voters and decries the issues specific to said audience. Still, it must be said that for a candidate once thought to be running for the Democratic nomination essentially unopposed, Clinton is still behaving like a candidate running essentially unopposed.
With the calendar just now turning to August, the general election is nearly 15 months away, with the first primary nearly seven months off. It remains to be seen if the field will widen or narrow, or if any candidates will further establish themselves as favorites.
But in a political horse race of nearly 20 candidates, Clinton has the inside track on the Democratic side. She boasts experience as a senator and Secretary of State, she is still well liked by a large portion of her base. She should be making quick work of a grayed socialist from Vermont. With more than a year to go before election day and more than six months before primaries, she should be rounding into form, not lagging behind her only real competition on key issues. These past few months should have been practice, and coaches, athletes and actors tend to agree that, by and large, you play how you practice.
Unless Clinton starts capitalizing on the blunders and missteps of opponents and getting out in front of issues as they arise, she may find herself in a harder battle than need be come this time next year.
2016 Presidential Candidates
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