NYTimes: Hillary Clinton’s Toughness
Hillary has had to endure 40 plus years of Republican smears--and smears from her own Democratic Party at times. Yet, she continues to learn and listen and build a strong character.
Hillary Clinton’s Toughness
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/opinion/campaign-stops/hillary-clintons-toughness.html?_r=0
Thomas B. Edsall
DEC. 9, 2015
Photo Credit Randall Hill/Reuters
When voters look at equally experienced male and female politicians, “the man will still be seen as more capable on issues of national security and defense,” Meredith Conroy, a professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, wrote me in response to my inquiry about the current election. But “Hillary is able to overcome this and other gender stereotypes. She turns much of the scholarship on voter perceptions of Democratic candidates, and furthermore female politicians, on its head.”
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A late November YouGov survey conducted after the attacks in Paris but before San Bernardino found that Hillary Clinton stood apart from Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina as the only candidate a majority of voters believe
is ready to be Commander in Chief. She is the only one about whom as many people express confidence in her ability to handle an international crisis as say they are uneasy.
There is a striking dichotomy between voters’ evaluation of the Democratic Party’s ability to deal with terrorism and their belief in Hillary Clinton.
These findings suggest that Clinton has effectively separated herself from the liabilities of her own party. In February, when Pew Research Center asked voters which party could better deal with the threat of terrorism, the Republican Party won hands down, 51-31. CBS News reported similar results in a series of four surveys in 2014 and 2015.
On Nov. 16, three days after the terrorist attacks in Paris, the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania sponsored two focus groups in Columbus, Ohio to gauge the strengths and weaknesses of Hillary Clinton compared to three of the best-known Republican presidential candidates.
Peter Hart and Anna Bennett, both Democratic pollsters working with Annenberg, asked participants to consider Jeb Bush, Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Clinton, and to give their opinion of the candidates: “What material is their backbone made of?” The focus group sessions were transcribed.
According to the transcript, the 12 women and 12 men — a mix of Democrats, Republicans and independents — variously described their impression of Bush’s spine as made of “marshmallow,” “styrofoam,” “Jell-O,” “play dough,” “pillow,” “papier-mâché” and “chalk.”
In contrast, participants described Hillary Clinton’s backbone as made of “titanium,” “steel,” “ice” and “cement.”................
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