OPINION:
Hillary Clinton, who once thought she could coast down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, has a new view and a new strategy. She has to remind everyone that Donald Trump is mean, egotistical, and nuts, and persuade them that he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office and all those knobs, switches and buttons that could dispatch half the world to dark oblivion.
For a while Hillary and her wise men and wiser women thought accomplishing this task would be a slam dunk, and for a while she was getting more help than she could dream of from the Donald himself. He sounded out of control and looked anything but presidential. He didn’t have much of a campaign organization, he had no commercials on television in key states and the campaign organization he had was in what the cliche-mongers in the media like to call disarray.
But now, not so much. Putting corks back in the champagne bottles may be difficult, but someone has to try. He seems to have learned not to rely too much on a teleprompter and read prepared speeches only to avoid the off-the-cuff remarks that can destroy campaigns, and often do. In recent appearances Mr. Trump has seemed relaxed and looks confident, neither crazed nor irresponsible. Republicans who were wary of him in August are coming home. The polls in targeted states are beginning to tighten, and he has drawn even with Hillary in some important states.
That’s why Mrs. Clinton is doubling down on what so far hasn’t worked. His unremarkable and perfectly defensible observation that like him or not, Vladimir Putin has been a more effective champion of Russian interests than President Obama has been of ours. (He may be trying harder.) Hillary thinks this is evidence that Mr. Trump is in Mr. Putin’s back pocket, or doing his bidding as a “Manchurian candidate.” How she squares this with her idea that a President Trump would start a war with Russia is hard to figure, but so much of what both campaigns have said is hard to figure.
Hillary discovered last week that Mr. Putin isn’t the only American adversary cheering for her opponent. She told Israeli reporters that the Islamic State, or ISIS, is praying for a Trump presidency. “They are saying ’please, Allah, make Trump president of America’.” She does not say how she knows this, but the idea apparently is that ISIS is mortally afraid of her and thinks that Donald Trump would be easy prey. That’s hard to figure, too.
The first face-to-face meeting between the two candidates on Sept. 26 is likely to make or break this new strategy. If the Donald doesn’t look and act like someone voters can envision in the Oval Office her strategy might succeed, and she will look as wise as a tree full of owls. But she has set very low expectations. He doesn’t have to look and speak like a bookish wonk. If he doesn’t sound and look like the blood-crazed monster of Hillary’s fevered imagination — drooling and foaming at the mouth — he wins the night.
Such a reasoned, credible performance would shift the focus back to Hillary’s greed, arrogance, limited competence and lack of careful protection of the nation’s security secrets. She lifted a few eyebrows last week in responding to a question about her emails that sums up her attitude about everything she has ever said or done, and demonstrates why nobody trusts her: “I did exactly what I should have done,” she said. “Always have and always will.” It sounds worse than we thought.
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