[VIDEO] Peggy Noonan On Hillary’s Press Strategy: ‘She’s Running A Silent Movie Of A Campaign’

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan took aim at the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s media strategy Sunday, telling “Face The Nation” Clinton is “running a silent movie of a campaign” as she dodges the press.

Noonan made the comments to host Bob Schieffer after giving credit to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for continuing to take questions from the media after he endured a tough week. Bush waffled on questions about the Iraq War.

BOB SCHIFFER: Peggy, this was a tough week for Jeb Bush.

 

PEGGY NOONAN: Yeah, It definitely was. He seemed consistently taken aback by the asking of a question anyone could have told you a year and two years ago was going to be primary question of the primary time. It was difficult for him in ways that are almost mysterious. And because I think he showed such discomfort in his answers, he sort of opened up the possibility that this will only be the beginning of many questions about things your brother did, would you have done them? Do you know what I mean? So, it was difficult.

However, he deserves, I think, great credit in this. He’s going to the press every day, he’s taking questions, he’s being out there, he’s doing sit-down interviews. Mrs. Clinton instead is doing, sort of, a silent movie of a campaign in which she doesn’t feel she has to do those things. I don’t think that’s a good way to go and will problematic for her down the road.

Via: Daily Caller

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[VIDEO] Noonan and Senor School Krugman on the ObamaCare Train Wreck

Despite all the trouble ObamaCare has been having since health insurance exchanges opened about two weeks ago, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on ABC’s This Week Sunday predictably had nothing but praise for the law.

Fortunately the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan and former Mitt Romney advisor Dan Senor were present to set the record straight (video follows with transcript and commentary):

DAN SENOR: There's no doubt that this is damaging to the Republican brand. That said, a year from now, this will have been long resolved and I don't think voters will be talking about this shutdown and the dysfunction. What people will be talking about is the failed implementation of ObamaCare.

There are very few House seats that are really in play. There’s like a tiny percentage of Republican House members that are in districts that President Obama won. There are six Senate seats, Democratic Senate seats that need to be defended that Mitt Romney won by more than ten percent. So, the field both in the House and the Senate is much more favorable to Republicans.

I think this is a bad moment for Republicans. I think it will pass. I think the field, the history of the Party out of the White House winning midterms combined with the failed implementation of ObamaCare is going to be advantageous.

PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: I want to say something about that. The ObamaCare thing will also be long passed. They messed up the software for the federal version of it. But we have the exchanges working just fine in many states which means it’s fixable and it will be fixed. California has a perfectly well-functioning exchange which it’s running itself. If you can do it for 30 million people, you can do it for 300 million. So, that will be, ObamaCare will be working fine by next November.

Via: Newsbusters

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Making Sense of Syria

This is what I think we’re seeing:

The president has backed away from a military strike in Syria. But he can’t acknowledge this or act as if it is true. He is acting and talking as if he’s coolly, analytically, even warily contemplating the Russian proposal and the Syrian response. The proposal, he must know, is absurd. Bashar Assad isn’t going to give up all his hidden weapons in wartime, in the middle of a conflict so bitter and severe that his forces this morning reportedly bombed parts of Damascus, the city in which he lives. In such conditions his weapons could not be fully accounted for, packed up, transported or relinquished, even if he wanted to. But it will take time—weeks, months—for the absurdity to become obvious. And it is time the president wants. Because with time, with a series of statements, negotiations, ultimatums, promises and proposals, the Syria crisis can pass. It can dissipate into the air, like gas.

The president will keep the possibility of force on the table, but really he’s lunging for a lifeline he was lucky to be thrown.

Why is he backing off? Because he knows he doesn’t have the American people and isn’t going to get them. The polls, embarrassingly, show the more people hear the less they support it. The president’s problem with his own base was probably startling to him, and sobering. He knows he was going to lose Congress, not only the House but very possibly—likely, I’d say—the Senate. The momentum was all against him. And he never solved—it was not solvable—his own Goldilocks problem: A strike too small is an embarrassment, a strike too big could topple the Assad regime and leave Obama responsible for a complete and cutthroat civil war involving terrorists, foreign operatives, nihilists, jihadists, underemployed young men, and some really nice, smart people. Obama didn’t want to own that, or the fires that could engulf the region once Syria went up.

His plan was never good. The choices were never good. In any case he was going to lose either in terms of domestic prestige, the foreign result or both. Likely both.

Via: NYT

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Carry on campaigning: Romney sweeps critics aside

Republican battles to revive his fortunes in Ohio as allies turn their anger on candidate

Even as he prepared to answer calls from within his own party to sharpen his message and ramp up his schedule of public rallies, beginning with a three-day bus tour through Ohio, Mitt Romney managed to insist that he was running a "very effective" campaign for President last night , adding that it was "doing a very good job".

One week after voters glimpsed the Republican challenger telling a private gathering of rich donors that 47 per cent of Americans are welfare-dependent "victims" he can't worry about, Mr Romney now finds himself under brutal pressure to return to the offensive against President Barack Obama and reverse a recent slide in public opinion polls, especially in battleground states including Ohio.

Yet, the candidate may have startled even his closest loyalists by professing in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes last night that all remains well with his campaign. That has hardly been the verdict of some pundits even in the Republican camp like Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, who clarified at the weekend what she had said earlier last week about the 47 per cent debacle. "The Romney campaign has to get turned around. This week I called it incompetent, but only because I was being polite. I really meant 'rolling calamity'," she wrote.

But Mr Romney appeared to view things very differently. "I've got a very effective campaign. It's doing a very good job … It doesn't need a turnaround," he boldly told CBS. Referring to some recent national polls that show him and President Obama in a dead heat, he went on: "We've got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent President."

Via: The Independent

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