Likability, judgment still dog Clinton
In biggest speech of her life, she will try to change perceptions she is too disliked, mistrusted to seize the presidency
PHILADELPHIA — Long before President Barack Obama dismissed her during a 2008 Democratic primary debate as “likable enough,” Hillary Clinton has struggled to endear herself to Americans.
Now, as she prepares to make the biggest speech of her life at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night, she will try to change the perception that she may be too disliked and mistrusted by voters to capture the presidency — even against an equally unpopular opponent, Donald Trump.
“I don’t know how you can do it in a forum like this — I think it’s nearly impossible — but she needs to give the people the feeling of who she really is, her heart and soul,” said Vicki
Marti, a Clinton delegate from Marin County who was one of Clinton’s closest friends from their slumber party days in high school together in Illinois. “People say, ‘I don’t like her,’ but do you know her? It’s frustrating to me.”
A nationwide Gallup poll released Tuesday showed both Clinton and Trump viewed favorably by only 37 percent of the electorate and unfavorably by 58 percent — the first time she was as unpopular as her rival. Even worse for Clinton, a CNN poll conducted after last week’s Republican National Convention found that only 30 percent of voters found her trustworthy, compared with Trump’s 43 percent.
Democrats have spent much of their convention this week trying to rehabilitate Clinton’s image, but that is no easy task given that so many Americans made up their minds about her years ago. The grueling primary against avuncular Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — and the passionate antipathy fostered among his most dogged followers into this week’s convention — didn’t help.
“I just don’t see how her numbers at this late date are going to improve on the likability issue or the trust factor,” said Barbara Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
At this point, Perry said, Clinton’s closest doppelganger is Richard Nixon, another unpopular, scandalridden, socially awkward politician who nonetheless twice claimed the presidency.
Clinton’s favorability rating with voters has ebbed and flowed through the years, peaking at nearly 70 percent when she was U.S. secretary of state.
But it has plunged during her latest run for the presidency. Some of the damage is the product of a quarter-century of Republican attacks dating back to Whitewater and Travelgate, but many of her troubles have been self-inflicted, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a senior political scholar at the University of Southern California.
Clinton’s decision to take six-figure speaking fees from Wall Street firms after leaving the State Department in 2012 — and refuse to release the transcripts of those speeches — enabled Sanders to brand her to a new generation of voters as a corporate shill. And her refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of her email server scandal reinforced Republican talking points that she cannot be trusted.
“She was dismissive about it, and I don’t think people appreciated that,” Bebitch Jeffe said.
But some feminists said that Clinton’s poor poll numbers are partly explained by the inevitable backlash women face when they challenge traditional gender roles.
Gloria Allred, a celebrity women’s rights lawyer and Clinton delegate from Southern California who once challenged Trump in court over a Miss Universe case, said she understands what Clinton is enduring.
“She’s challenged the status quo — that women are supposed to go along and get along,” said Allred, waving a “Girl Power” sign in the front row of the California delegation on Wednesday. “That’s very threatening to people who want to maintain the status quo.”
Margot Bohanon, a social worker from Oakland, said she’d feel better about voting for Clinton if she devoted some of her speech Thursday to addressing concerns about the email scandal.
“I would like to hear her acknowledge some of her flaws,” said Bohanon, a Sanders supporter. “I want to hear her say that, in view of what happened, that she intends to earn our trust.”
But Bohanon knows that any such admission would likely become fodder for Trump — and wouldn’t win over Clinton skeptics like Robert Potmesil, an independent voter from Milpitas who plans to cast his ballot for Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party.
“I can’t tell you how much I hate Hillary Clinton,” he said. “She’s been driving me crazy since the ’90s.” Potmesil, a 47-yearold bartender and stay-athome dad who twice voted for Obama, said revelations over the weekend that the Democratic National Committee was siding with her over Sanders during the primary campaign reinforced his conviction that Clinton is corrupt.
“She deserved all the booing she got,” he said. “If I were a Bernie Sanders delegate, I would be going completely insane.”
Clinton also faces a new demographic quandary in trying to boost her image. She entered the national spotlight as an unapologetic feminist who turned off many older Americans by refusing to assume the traditional role of the first lady.
But now she finds herself viewed with mistrust by younger voters, who overwhelmingly supported Sanders.
“My generation of women see her as a hero who fought the male establishment all the way up to the point of earning this nomination,” Perry said. “But I think millennials see her as a bit of a harping grandmother who is always criticizing.”
Democrats have been trying to soften that image this week. They offered testimonials about her forging bonds with a 9/11 survivor and several women who lost their sons to gun violence. Then Bill Clinton gave an intimate portrayal of the woman he courted more than four decades ago as a young law student who has devoted her life to helping people in need.
Bohanon, who before the speech called Clinton “crooked,” said on Wednesday the appeals made her more comfortable with the idea of voting for her.
“My opinion of her has changed a bit,” she said. “I do recognize her accomplishments working for people who don’t have a lot of money. But I’m still concerned about her not being truthful.”
Clinton has a lot of work ahead to persuade Bohanon and others like her.
“It’s hard to redefine overnight when the narrative has been negative all these years,” Allred said. “We need to chip away at it.”