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Tag: hillary cinton
Debates To Help Half Of U.S. Voters Decide Between Clinton, Trump – Reuters/Ipsos Poll

Debates To Help Half Of U.S. Voters Decide Between Clinton, Trump – Reuters/Ipsos Poll

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Half of America’s likely voters will rely on the presidential debates to help them make their choice between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 election, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Monday.

The results show the stakes for the White House rivals as they prepare to face off on Monday at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York, for their first of three one-on-one debates, a prime-time TV spectacle expected to draw a Super Bowl-sized audience of 100 million Americans.

Some 50 percent of likely voters think the debates will help inform their decision of whom to support, including 10 percent who say they are not currently leaning either way, according to the opinion poll.

Some 39 percent said the debates will not help, and 11 percent said they did not know how the debates would affect them.

In a strong signal that most viewers will also be hoping the debates bring clarity, some 72 percent of respondents said they want to see moderators point out when a candidate says something that is untrue. That included 73 percent of people who identified themselves as Trump supporters and 82 percent of those who said they back Clinton, according to the results.

“It helps the audience, particularly me, to recognise what’s bull crap and what’s real,” said Harvey Leven, 63, a teacher from Farmington Hills, Michigan. “It’s easy for the candidates to quote a statistic and people accept it.”

Clinton currently leads in most national polls and holds critical advantages in key swing states like Ohio and North Carolina. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll finds Clinton leading Trump nationally by 4 percentage points.

Clinton had seen her popularity dip in recent weeks after more questions arose about her family foundation and the use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

“NO” TO NAME-CALLING

Many voters are hoping to see a relatively civilized debate, after months of mutual attacks between Trump and Clinton on the campaign trail. Trump has called for Clinton to be jailed for her handling of emails as America’s top diplomat. Clinton has accused Trump of racism and of being temperamentally unfit for the Oval Office.

Of those polled, 61 percent said they are not interested in those kinds of attacks.

“Quit picking on each other,” said Lisa Miller, 48, of St. Louis, Missouri. “This isn’t a playground. Grow up and talk about your plan.”

A plurality of likely voters want to hear both Clinton and Trump talk about jobs and the economy, the poll found.

“I’ll tell you with Donald Trump I want to see that he has rational answers to questions without name calling,” said Leven. “I want to try to get beyond the political hocus pocus that both of them are doing and try to see who they really are.”

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English in all 50 states. It included 2,124 American adults, including 1,337 people who were deemed to be likely voters due to their voting history, registration status and stated intention to show up on Election Day. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points for all respondents and 3 percentage points for likely voters.

(Reporting by Ginger Gibson and Chris Kahn; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Leslie Adler)

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton reacts after speaking at a campaign event at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. September 19, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

U.S. Must Protect National Security, Not Demonize Muslims: Clinton

U.S. Must Protect National Security, Not Demonize Muslims: Clinton

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, speaking on Monday after the massacre in a Florida nightclub, said the United States must find a way to keep the country safe without demonizing Muslim Americans.

Clinton called for “statesmanship, not partisanship” in the aftermath of the shooting in Orlando while Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, urged the monitoring of mosques in the United States and reiterated his calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.

Fifty people, including the gunman, the U.S.-born son of Afghan immigrants, died in at the gay nightclub in what was the deadliest shooting in U.S. history.

Clinton, in several television interviews, said she would support stronger measures to prevent so-called lone wolf attacks and urged closer internet monitoring. She said she was committed to protecting the rights of Muslim Americans at the same time.

“We cannot demonize, demagogue and declare war on an entire religion. That is just dangerous,” Clinton said on the MSNBC network.

She also called for steps to prevent people who are on the U.S. no-fly list from purchasing guns and said possible restrictions on assault weapons needed to be part of the debate.

Trump plans to deliver a speech on national security at 2 p.m. EDT on Monday in New Hampshire. The topic was a change from his earlier plans to criticize Clinton and what he said was her scandal-prone past.

Trump said on CNN that the United States needed better intelligence-gathering to prevent incidents such as the Orlando massacre.

“We have to look at the mosques … and we have to look at the community,” he said. “And believe me, the community knows the people that have the potential to blow up.”

 

(Reporting by Washington newsroom; Editing by Caren Bohan and Bill Trott)

Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton addresses the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in Washington, U.S. June 10, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

Clinton And Sanders Battle In Debate Over Healthcare, Wall Street Ties

Clinton And Sanders Battle In Debate Over Healthcare, Wall Street Ties

By John Whitesides

MILWAUKEE (Reuters) – Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders battled over healthcare and Wall Street in a debate on Thursday, with Clinton accusing Sanders of misleading Americans on his healthcare plan and making promises “that cannot be kept.”

In a sixth presidential debate that featured several sharp exchanges but a more sedate tone than their last meeting, Clinton said Sanders’ proposal for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all healthcare plan would mean dismantling Obamacare and triggering another intense political struggle.

“Based on every analysis I can find by people who are sympathetic to the goal, the numbers don’t add up,” Clinton told Sanders. “That’s a promise that cannot be kept.”

Sanders said he would not dismantle the healthcare plan known as Obamacare and was simply moving to provide what most industrialized countries have – healthcare coverage for all.

“We’re not going to dismantle anything,” Sanders said. “In my view healthcare is a right of all people, not a privilege, and I will fight for that.”

Sanders repeated his accusation that Clinton is too beholden to the Wall Street interests she once represented as a U.S. senator from New York, noting her Super PAC received $15 million in donations from Wall Street.

“Let’s not insult the intelligence of the American people,” he said. “Why in God’s name does Wall Street make huge campaign contributions? I guess just for the fun of it, they want to throw money around.”

Clinton said the donations did not mean she was in Wall Street’s pocket, and noted that President Barack Obama had taken donations from Wall Street during his campaigns.

“When it mattered, he stood up and took on Wall Street,” she said.

The Judicial System and Race

With the presidential race moving into states with larger minority populations, both candidates decried the high incarceration rate of African-Americans and called for broad reforms of the criminal justice system. Sanders said black incarceration rates were “one of the great tragedies” in the United States.

“That is beyond unspeakable,” Sanders said of a disproportionately high black male prison population. He called for “fundamental police reform” that would “make it clear that any police officer who breaks the law will in fact be dealt with.”

Clinton criticized what she said was “systemic racism” in education, housing and employment. “When we talk about criminal justice reform … we also have to talk about jobs, education, housing and other ways of helping communities of color,” she said.

Clinton entered Thursday’s debate under acute pressure to calm a growing sense of nervousness among her supporters after a 22-point drubbing by Sanders on Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary election and a razor-thin win last week in the Iowa caucus. Both states have nearly all-white populations.

For his part, Sanders, an independent U.S. senator of Vermont who calls himself a democratic socialist, hoped to harness the momentum and enthusiasm he gained from the first two contests and prove he can be a viable contender to lead the Democratic Party to victory in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

“What our campaign is indicating is that the American people are tired of establishment politics,” Sanders said. “They want a political revolution.”

The race now moves to what should be more favorable ground for Clinton in Nevada and South Carolina, states with more black and Hispanic voters, who, polls show, have been more supportive of Clinton so far.

Clinton, a former secretary of state, on Thursday won a significant endorsement from the Congressional Black Caucus, while Sanders has launched his own effort to make inroads among African-American voters.

Sanders met with civil rights leader Al Sharpton the morning after his New Hampshire win, and has aired advertising and built up staff quickly in both Nevada and South Carolina. The debate on Thursday was the last one before those two contests.

After South Carolina on Feb. 27, the presidential race accelerates with 28 states voting in rapid succession in March, including 11 states on March 1 and big prizes such as Ohio, Florida and Illinois on March 15.

(Additional reporting by Amanda Becker, Alana Wise and Megan Cassella in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Photo: Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton arrive on stage ahead of the start of the PBS NewsHour Democratic presidential candidates debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, February 11, 2016. REUTERS/Darren Hauck

Multifaceted Clinton, A Cubist Masterpiece

Multifaceted Clinton, A Cubist Masterpiece

 

Picasso would love Hillary Clinton, with her constantly changing Cubist angles. Painting the 68-year-old — from Illinois, New York, Washington or Arkansas, take your pick — would never grow old. Even the master might have a hard time capturing her character and pinning it down.

As fickle, fateful Iowa caucuses come Monday, presidential candidates have been sized up like livestock at the state fair. None more than Clinton. She took all tough questions thrown at her at the town hall with verve.

It’s abundantly clear that she’s got game, playing to win in a state where she lost to freshman Senator Barack Obama, whose words touched the stars in 2008.

The first black president made multitudes rejoice, but his record of advancing the social status of blacks is thin, reactive, lukewarm at best. Ending solitary confinement for juveniles took seven years.

His singing graced the mourning of a tragic race-related murder in South Carolina, but I mean Martin Luther King Jr.-level advancements, like rights, jobs, wages, education, laws and opportunity.

Will Clinton do better by women? Sure hope so. She believes in progress by laws, she said.

Beholding the cusp of the first woman American president, I encounter vastly conflicting views of Clinton every 24 hours. They are like snowflakes in your eyes in a storm, for she means many different things.

Take two Midwestern girls. Mackenzie and Jordynn, African-American sisters, ages 6 and 4. “My girls now want to be president because of her,” their mother Jencelyn King-Witzel told me.

Girls can’t vote, but they can dream. Mothers are taking daughters on the Clinton campaign trail so they will remember this moment in history.

A 5-year-old in my family was asked if she wanted to campaign for Clinton in another state. She went upstairs and packed her suitcase.

On the other end of the spectrum, take brilliant memoirist Susan Groag Bell, the late women’s historian whose 90th birthday would have been this week. Born to elegance in Central Europe, Susan and her mother escaped the Nazis, but her father was deported to a concentration camp.

Susan was educated in England, from age 12, by the kindness shown to war refugees. She studied at Stanford University and lived in California, where she picked up her pen to write and teach pathbreaking studies of European women’s lives, including Christine de Pisan, a medieval French poet. Susan lived until 2015, but would have dearly wished to witness a woman president.

The Washington Post conservative columnist, Kathleen Parker, just took a more jaded view of Clinton, her fellow baby boomer: “Or, is it that she is reflexively prone to dissemble?”

Journalists are a skeptical lot, and have pursued Clinton’s husband hard for an unseemly affair that was a private sin, not a constitutional crime. Some seem unwilling to forgive her for his betrayal.

Parker revived an infamous line by William Safire, the late op-ed columnist for The New York Times. In 1996, Safire labeled the first lady “a congenital liar” as the Whitewater investigation raged against the Clintons, which, by the way, led like a snake to the sex scandal. How convenient. His enemies thought President Clinton was the Titanic, but he was the iceberg.

And Hillary Clinton is the shipwreck survivor. Another Cubist view.

A senior military man feels open to supporting Clinton, but fears her private email record, with careless handling of secret material as secretary of state, may lead to an indictment for her or her top aides.

A pragmatic read is that nothing will soon get done on the domestic policy front, with Congress wrangling, but Clinton is the best-prepared candidate to handle foreign policy.

Yes, she mended fences around the world as Obama’s star Cabinet player. Then again, she voted for the Iraq War; the lady is a hawk. It took Clinton a decade to admit that major mistake as senator. She has her pride, a character flaw. You can see it now, how hard it is to say sorry. Strong women are like that.

If you believe in something cosmic stirring, the morning after the snowstorm in Washington, Jan. 26, only two women senators were on the floor, with only women there to start morning business. “As we convene this morning, you look around the chamber, the presiding officer is female. All of our parliamentarians are female. Our floor managers are female. All of our pages are female,” said Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

That first in history felt “genuinely fabulous.”

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton listens to her introduction at a campaign event in Sioux City, Iowa, United States, January 5, 2016. REUTERS/Jim Young