TRUE TO THEIR WORD
Poll pegs Hillary’s, Jeb’s problems
Hillary Clinton has become Richard Nixon.
Consider the top three words voters used to describe her in a new poll this week: “Liar … dishonest … untrustworthy.” Also in the top 12: “crook … untruthful … criminal … deceitful.”
Crook — as in “I am not a crook,” a quintessential Nixon quote. Even the positive words that respondents used to describe Hillary were the same words that probably would have turned up in a survey about Tricky Dick circa 1974: “experience … strong … smart.”
All this comes out of the new Quinnipiac poll, which showed Donald Trump soaring on the Republican side and Hillary crashing among her fellow Democrats, even though the sixth most popular word used to describe her is “Bill.”
But the most interesting question was the open-ended one at the end: “What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of (fill in the blank)?”
Quinnipiac asked the question only of Hillary, Donald Trump and Juan Ellis Bush.
Jeb, of course, bills himself not as Bush, but as “Jeb!” Like so much else in his campaign, the no-last-name strategy is failing. The word used to describe Jeb most often was “Bush,” turning up twice as often as the runner-up, “family.”
Then comes “honest,” followed by “weak.”
Other words used to describe the runt of the litter: “brother … father … legacy … boring … nepotism … idiot … immigration … wishy-washy … RINO … entitled … incompetent … loser … wimp.”
Oddly, no one mentioned “marshmallow,” “spineless,” “Chihuahua” or “jayvee.” He’s helpless like a rich man’s child — which is what I would answer if a pollster asked me which Bob Dylan lyric I thought best described Jeb!
Then there’s Donald Trump. He starts slow, like the legacies, with his top three words “arrogant … blowhard … idiot.” But his descriptions are a lot more mixed than for the other two — 178 called Hillary a liar, 136 described Bush as a Bush, but only 58 called Trump arrogant.
A lot of the free associations with Trump are ambiguous, depending on the connotation either positive or negative: “businessman … ego … rich … showman.”
Plus, the fact that he’s “bombastic” and “brash” — that definitely would not have been considered a negative among the crowd Friday night in Norwood at Ernie Boch Jr.’s. It wasn’t so much a speech Trump delivered as a routine — he was working the front rows like a stand-up comic, free-associating, falling back every now and then on what have become familiar punch lines, his greatest hits. Jeb! Lindsay Graham! John Kerry! You’ve seen him on TV, now see the unexpurgated Donald LIVE ….
If you like a politician, it doesn’t matter if he strays occasionally. Barney Frank summed it up when he said that your base isn’t the people who are with you when you’re right, it’s the people who are with you when you’re wrong.
Barney would know, wouldn’t he? And it’s equally true for entertainers and athletes — any celebrities, for that matter.
As Randy Newman sang about Georgia voters’ attachment to Lester Maddox, “Well, he may be a fool but he’s our fool. If they think they’re better than him, they’re wrong.”
Nobody says that about Hillary or Jeb. They’re modern-day Macbeths. Those they command move only in command, nothing in love. And Donald Trump, unlike Lester Maddox, is nobody’s fool.
I hope Quinnipiac or somebody follows up this with word association questions about some of the other candidates, although at this point what’s the point of inquiring about Gov. Chris Christie: “Corpulent … sell-out … ba-da-ding … Judas … slob … pizza … doughnuts.” Or Sen. Lindsay Graham: “Capon … steer … gelding … McCain.” Vice President Joe Biden: “Skinny-dipping … hands … groper … plugs … goofball … plagiarist.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders: “Certifiable.”
Gov. Lincoln Chaffee: “Inbred.”
The day the poll came out I asked my listeners to call in with their own one-word descriptions of the candidates. On Hillary, I never realized how many pejoratives there are to describe a real-life Nurse Ratched, and I’m not even talking about the obvious ones like “cankles” “whitetrash” and “wide-load.”
How about harridan, shrew, harpy, termagant and virago, just for starters?
Somebody texted me with another synonym for Hillary: crone. Seemed a bit off, so I looked it up. A crone is an old woman who is ugly and thin.
In other words, the texter was half right.