According to “an Arkansas source,” Monica Crowley writes in the Washington Times, Hillary Clinton’s “debate prep crew has coached her to maintain an air of superiority around Mr. Trump while trying to provoke him” in the second presidential debate this coming Sunday. Specifically, Clinton is being advised to repeat her campaign mantra “Stronger Together.”
It appears that her running mate, Tim Kaine, was given the same instruction for his faceoff against Gov. Mike Pence, during which he preached:
Hillary is running a campaign about stronger together, and Donald Trump — and this is — this is not directed at this man, except to the extent that he can’t defend Donald Trump — Donald Trump has run a campaign that’s been about one insult after the next.
Kaine didn’t do much to answer a question that has been asked by many, including liberals, since Team Clinton came up with that slogan: Namely, what on earth does “Stronger Together” mean?
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
NPR claims the slogan was devised in response to Trump’s “Make America Great Again.” The piece observes that Clinton’s earlier slogans — “Breaking Down Barriers,” “Fighting for Us,” and “I’m with Her” — failed to catch on (especially the last of these, which calls to mind “I’m with stupid”). But why “Stronger Together”?
An even more important question that should be asked during the next debate is how Clinton envisions a nation that is stronger together — presuming that is what she would say the slogan is promising — if she has dismissed supporters of her GOP opponent wholesale as a “basket of deplorables.”
True, as Kaine also noted during the debate, Clinton took back the deplorables comment “the very next day.” But surely Kaine is aware that isn’t how politics works. Donald Trump publicly acknowledged in Septemeber that he no longer believes that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., but that didn’t prevent Kaine from raising the birther topic at the debate.
The nation has now endured eight years of a president hobbled by an us-versus-them mentality. On occasion, he has gone so far as to declare that Republicans are his “enemy” and deserve to be “punished.” It is this uniquely noxious and arrogant posture that has widened the ideological divide in the nation and helped create candidate Donald Trump. Can America tolerate another four years of partisan hackery?
