Likable Enough?

Summary

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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: "Likable Enough?"

Date: August 4, 2016
Host: Dorothy Wickenden
Guest: Ben Wallace-Wells (Staff Writer, The New Yorker)

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Dorothy Wickenden and Ben Wallace-Wells discuss Hillary Clinton’s ongoing struggle with likability in the 2016 presidential race. As Clinton emerges from the Democratic Convention and enters the final 100 days of the campaign, the conversation explores how she is defining herself amid persistent mistrust and unpopularity, the challenges of uniting a broad ideological coalition, and whether Donald Trump’s campaign missteps might allow her to win the presidency without having to address the public’s reservations about her character and record.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Clinton's Messaging Post-Convention

• Clinton's Strategy: Recently, Clinton has focused her message on contrast with Trump, moving away from distinct policy positioning.
  • Quote (Hillary Clinton at the DNC, 01:37):
    “America is great because America is good. Enough with the bigotry and the bombast…What are we offering? A bold agenda to improve the lives of people across our country … The choice is clear, my friends.”
• Discussion: Wickenden notes a lack of memorable Clinton statements since the convention, with media attention dominated by Trump controversies.

Uniting Divergent Factions

• Ideological Breadth at the Convention:
  • Ben Wallace-Wells observes the Democratic Party presented a wide ideological spectrum, from anti-war Sanders supporters to establishment figures like Mike Bloomberg and Republican donor Meg Whitman (03:06).
  • “At a basic ideological level, there is no way that the party can be all things to such a broad swath.” (03:57)
• Public Perception:
  • Clinton’s big-tent appeal can also fuel impressions of cynicism and political calculation (04:00).
  • Wallace-Wells points out that unlike Sanders’ specific vision, Clinton’s campaign remains vague in ideology (04:12).

Polls and the Trump Factor

• 2016 Polling Uncertainties:
  • Wickenden questions the reliability of polls given the year’s unpredictability (05:06).
  • Wallace-Wells: Despite likely tightening, Clinton has the advantage due to Trump’s serial blunders and Republican disarray (05:10–05:38).
  • “I do wonder a little bit whether Clinton may just be able to coast through these last three months a little bit more than we’ve been suspecting she would.” (05:35)

The Email Scandal and WikiLeaks Threats

• Lingering Issues:
  • The specter of Clinton’s private email server and Julian Assange’s threats to release damaging documents are discussed (05:38–06:38).
  • Wallace-Wells: Little new has emerged from Clinton’s released correspondence; her inner circle now skews younger and less connected to ‘90s Clintonism (07:47).
• Cronyism Comparison:
  • Both Clinton and Trump are dogged by associations with cronyism, perhaps dulling the potency of these attacks (06:42).
  • “It’s not clear that a Donald Trump administration would be any purer than a Hillary Clinton one.” (07:29)

Wall Street Ties and Policy Ambiguity

• Democratic Platform Shift:
  • Clinton made only nominal leftward moves during platform negotiations, avoiding substantive takes on economic inequality and Wall Street relationships (09:19).
  • She remains hounded by her lucrative Goldman Sachs speeches and refusal to release transcripts (08:58).
  • “We haven’t heard a great deal more than platitudes from her.” (09:13)
• Structural Problems:
  • Both agree America’s deep, structural inequalities will outlast slogans, presenting a core challenge if Clinton wins (09:38).

Foreign Policy & Electoral Vulnerability

• Attack Lines on Foreign Affairs:
  • Trump’s attacks—citing Clinton’s tenure at State as disastrous—hold some substance, especially regarding interventions in Libya and Syria (10:51–11:23).
  • Wallace-Wells: Clinton’s claim of foreign policy mastery doesn’t match the evidence, and a detail-oriented opponent could press the case more forcefully (11:23).
  • “I don’t think you take a cold-eyed look at her tenure as Secretary of State and say this is a master of foreign policy.” (11:34)

Clinton’s Perennial Unpopularity

• The Roots of ‘Hating Hillary’:
  • Wickenden cites Henry Louis Gates’ essay, “Hating Hillary,” outlining the contradictory narratives driving public distrust (13:47).
  • Wallace-Wells: Clinton is now primarily seen as a cynical, calculating establishment figure—no longer a naïve do-gooder (14:27).
  • “The figure that Bernie Sanders describes when he talks about Hillary Clinton and the figure that Donald Trump describes, they’re not very different. They’re a kind of political calculator...” (14:44)
• Why It Might Not Matter:
  • Hillary Clinton remains deeply unpopular, but Trump is perceived as even less qualified and less likable (14:47–15:46).
  • “It probably won’t matter, the hatred won’t matter, because her opponent is seen as... disliked even more than she is.” (15:16)

GOP Defections & Electoral Math

• High-profile Republicans Crossing Over:
  • Recent endorsements (Richard Hanna, Meg Whitman) show the party’s cracks (15:46).
  • Even small GOP defections can tip the balance in such a polarized environment (15:57).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Ben Wallace-Wells (03:57):
  “At a basic ideological level, there is no way that the party can be all things to such a broad swath.”

• Ben Wallace-Wells (11:34):
  “I don’t think you take a cold-eyed look at her tenure as Secretary of State and say this is a master of foreign policy.”

• Dorothy Wickenden quoting Henry Louis Gates (13:47):
  “What emerges [regarding Hillary Clinton] is a cultural inventory of villainy rather than a plausible depiction of an actual person.”

• Ben Wallace-Wells (14:44):
  “The figure that Bernie Sanders describes when he talks about Hillary Clinton and the figure that Donald Trump describes, they’re not very different. They’re a kind of political calculator who has deep ties to the American establishment.”

• Ben Wallace-Wells (15:16):
  “It probably won’t matter, the hatred won’t matter, because her opponent is seen as... disliked even more than she is.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:37: Hillary Clinton’s convention speech excerpt
• 03:06: Discussion of Democratic party’s ideological stretch at the convention
• 05:06: Concerns about polling accuracy and Trump’s campaign chaos
• 05:38–06:38: Ongoing email and WikiLeaks scandals
• 08:58: Clinton’s Wall Street connections and policy ambiguity
• 10:51: Trump’s attacks on Clinton’s foreign policy record
• 13:47: Reference to “Hating Hillary” and reflection on her public image
• 15:46: Republican defections and their impact

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Conclusion

Wickenden and Wallace-Wells conclude that Clinton may have a path to victory not because she has surmounted her deep-seated public image problems, but because the tumult and shortcomings of the Trump campaign have overtaken the political narrative. The conversation leaves open the question of what Clinton’s presidency would mean for the party and the country, but strongly suggests the election may hinge less on likability and more on the relative flaws of each candidate.

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Transcript

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[Dorothy Wickenden]

This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, August 4th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. Hillary Clinton finally seems to have found an effective way to define herself in this campaign. Here's part of what she had to say last week at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia.

[Hillary Clinton]

And in the end, it comes down to what Donald Trump doesn't get. America is great because America is good. Enough with the bigotry and the bombast. Donald Trump's not offering real change. He's offering empty promises. And what are we offering? A bold agenda to improve the lives of people across our country. To keep you safe. To get you good jobs. To give your kids the opportunities they deserve. The choice is clear, my friends.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Ben Wallace Wells joins me to discuss how Clinton intends to win over voters who continue to mistrust and dislike her in very large numbers. Hi, Ben.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

Hi, Dorothy.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

I have to say I'm having a hard time recalling anything that Clinton has said since the convention. It's all about Trump. Still. Every day we've got, you know, the attacks on the Muslim parents of an American soldier, the crying baby at a campaign stop, and then the refusal to endorse Paul ryan and John McCain. I'm assuming it's not going to be this easy for the rest the campaign and that she's going to have to appeal to two very different camps. Die hard Sanders supporters on the one hand and longtime Republican voters on the other. How does she do it?

[Ben Wallace Wells]

The interesting thing about the convention was just how much territory the Democrats staked out ideologically. The party on view at the convention ranged from the Bernie Sanders supporters screaming no more wars, from the California delegation to. To a really bloodthirsty retired general John Allen talking about how Clinton was going to defeat and kill the forces of evil in the world. You had, on the one hand, a kind of party whose center had moved to an opposition to trade agreements, at least some trade agreements. And on the other hand, a party that was putting Mike Bloomberg in the center of its final appeal. And more recently, accepting the endorsement of Meg Whitman, the former Republican candidate for governor of California. At a basic ideological level, there is no way that the party can be all things to such a broad swath.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And it highlights part of the problem that she has, too. Doesn't this add to the impression that so many have that she's just a cynic and will appeal to whoever she needs to in order to get the vote?

[Ben Wallace Wells]

It does. And I would add also to the kind of lack of specificity in her campaign. Sanders ran a very specific campaign. It was very clear throughout the primary what idea Bernie Sanders had of the future of the country. It was never at any point particularly clear what idea Hillary Clinton had of the future of the country. I think that there is a kind of temptation towards seeing her as cynical. Where I think I might disagree with you is I'm not sure she's really going to have to resolve that in this political campaign. We're less than 100 days from the end of the campaign now. Trump is down about 10 points in national polls. In polls in places like Georgia, he's only even with Clinton, he's trailing in places like Arizona, he's in double digit deficits in places he needs to win, like Pennsylvania.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

But haven't the polls been consistently wrong in this campaign?

[Ben Wallace Wells]

Well, the polls are very right in the Republican primary. You know, I don't expect that those margins will sustain themselves through the end of a campaign. But when you have, you know, really open fare like we're seeing this week in the Republican camp, when you have Trump seemingly unable to stop himself from making error after error after error. I do wonder a little bit whether Clinton may just be able to coast through these last three months a little bit more than we've been suspecting she would.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Let's talk about a couple of the issues that are out there and still could hurt her. So there's the ever present private email server at the State Department and we've been having Julian Assange, who founded WikiLeaks, claiming to have incredibly damning evidence about her. I watched him being interviewed last night saying that he had documents that prove her malfeasance above and beyond what we know. But I could not figure out what he was saying.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

I can't either. There's also some suggestion that he has documents not just from the dnc, but also from the Clinton Foundation. And that's interesting too, from, you know, before the beginning of the this presidential campaign, the assumption had been that one of Hillary Clinton's great weaknesses was the wheeler dealer ness, the cronies that deals the Clinton foundation cut with pretty nasty governments overseas and their representatives. And that has not really touched her in this campaign. And that might have been surprising a year ago that that had not come up.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

What if he has something he keeps promising or threatening to release these things?

[Ben Wallace Wells]

It depends sort of how bad it is. You have a hard time imagining that Hillary Clinton, you know, an absolute lawyer's lawyer, would allow herself to become personally implicated in any kind of pay for play scenario. And obviously we're speculating, we have no idea what's in those emails. But you know, the kind of milder scandal of what was in the classified emails on her private server suggests that like, you know, people around her are not always so diligent about paying attention to rules and protocols. One thing that I think has happened in this election that maybe mutes the possibility of a total change in the election is that Donald Trump has turned out to be just as cronyist, maybe obviously more in some ways than Hillary Clinton. You know, he surrounded himself with aides like Paul Manafort and Carter Gage, the oil and gas consultant. It's not clear that a Donald Trump administration would be any purer than a Hillary Clinton one.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

You yourself have read hundreds of Clinton's unclassified emails. So I can't resist asking you what you found in them.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

Very little. A lot of mundanity. I mean, one interesting thing is that the Clinton orbit has shifted. We had this suspicion, as I mentioned a little while ago, that this kind of cronyus network of old Clintonites would continue to, like, surround Hillary Clinton herself and complicate her presidency. But beginning with her time in the State Department, you see her day to day correspondence just relying on, you know, a handful of much younger aides who are close to her now but are in their 30s and early 40s who are not around during the first Clinton administration. And on the campaign, in kind of interesting ways, she's continued that tendency. You know, she's not really surrounded by the old Clinton standbys, but you assume.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

That in her cabinet and in her inner circle in general, there will be old Clinton hands as well.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

Oh, of course. But I think one of the heartening things for liberals about Hillary Clinton's campaign, particularly on the policy side, is that it does show signs of a recognition of the movement that the party has gone through over the last 10 years.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And this lingering question about her ties to Wall street, which is a big question. And, you know, the fact that she was paid almost $700,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs and her refusal to release the transcripts, that fact, which Trump has been trying to exploit, certainly was trying to exploit earlier in the campaign, is worrisome and problematic.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

Absolutely. There were signs in the negotiations of the platform with Sanders and that on certain issues she was willing to nudge a bit leftward. But on these sort of central questions about, you know, inequality and infrastructure, of economic possibility, we haven't heard a great deal more than platitudes from her. I think that one kind of big current in this election, and even in the second half of the Obama administration generally, is that there is a broad recognition that the difficulties that people have in America in getting ahead of are very, very long term and structural. And one I think central question that would face Hillary Clinton should she win this election, is how does she address that?

[David Remnick]

Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, tha God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

I want to get back to your point earlier about terrorism, because Trump has played this card pretty well throughout the campaign. I just want to play a bit from one of his speeches. This one happened to be in New York in June.

[David Remnick]

The Hillary Clinton foreign policy has cost America thousands of lives and trillions and trillions of dollars and unleashed ISIS across the world. No Secretary of State has been more wrong more often and in more places than Hillary Clinton. Her decision spread death, destruction and terrorism everywhere she touched.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

So what about that, Ben?

[Ben Wallace Wells]

I mean, as much as we heard from the Democrats about Hillary Clinton's historical preparedness for the role as president, her tenure as Secretary of State, on the big decisions, her active encouragement of Libya intervention, the long running difficulties that the United States, the Obama administration, had in figuring out exactly what to do about Syria, her record does not look great. And even if you don't agree with Trump on Iran, I don't think you take a cold eyed look at her tenure as Secretary of State and say this is a master of foreign policy. And so we talk a lot about how Hillary Clinton is vulnerable as a person. Been a main theme in the coverage of this election, but we haven't talked as much about the ways in which she's vulnerable as a policy actor. And I think both in her tenure as Secretary of State and in her rhetoric and the overhang of the Clinton administration and her relationship with Wall street as a senator from New York, there was a lot of room to attack her. You could imagine a more detail oriented candidate than Donald Trump was able to make a less abstract and more human case against the kind of continuing economic divides in America. Who was able to really inhale the detailed criticisms of what we did in Libya, beyond the kind of Fox News gloss on Ambassador Stevens death, Ted Cruz for one.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

It would have been interesting to see a debate between Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

Even a clumsier, more emotional politician like Chris Christie, one of them, up against Clinton could have been very devastating for her. But you know, that's not what we've got. We've got Donald Trump and 100 days isn't no time. This race will probably take some turns, but based on everything we've seen for the last 15 months, it's hard to see Trump or the campaign apparatus which exists around him really drilling down into those details and really making not just a kind of first line case against Hillary Clinton, but really describing her errors in a way that seems compelling and seems like he would be a better alternative.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

I was thinking this week about a piece that Henry Louis Gates wrote two decades ago for this magazine about Hillary. It was called Hating Hillary. And Gates said, in the course of a single conversation, I have been assured that Hillary is cunning and manipulative, but also crass, clueless and stunningly. Impolitic, that she is a hopelessly woolly headed do gooder and at heart a hardball litigator, that she is a base opportunist and a zealot convinced that God is on her side. What emerges a cultural inventory of villainy rather than a plausible depiction of an actual person. And Trump, of course, has a genius for tapping into exactly that vein.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

That dichotomous element has dropped. I don't think people look at her and see a naive do gooder, a deep believer in the same way that they did in the early 90s. But the clarity, the fact that she is basically now, I think, just seen as a cynic by those who dislike her as dishonest. The clarity, the dropping of one end of that dichotomy hasn't really used the hate very much. The figure that Bernie Sanders describes when he talks about Hillary Clinton and the figure that Donald Trump describes, they're not very different. They're a kind of political calculator who has deep ties to the American establishment. And the astonishing thing about this election is that it probably won't matter, the hatred won't matter because her opponent is seen as, you know, unqualified and disliked, you know, very marginally, but disliked even more than she is. That is sort of astonishing. I think we could have imagined a couple of years ago a whole lot of ways this election would have gone, but that Hillary Clinton could look at this point 100 days out like she had a pretty clear path to winning the presidency without having become any more broadly liked than she was then.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

With Republicans who are defecting, and I assume we'll be seeing more of them from the Republican Party and have said they will vote for her, including this week, Republican congressman from New York Richard Hanna.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

And Meg Whitman. Yeah, and Meg Whitman. Even more high profile way if we're thinking about this in competitive terms, given how precisely balanced the politics of the country are and how few real swing voters remain, if you start to lose even a small number of votes from your core people that you counted on, you have a huge amount of trouble winning the election.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Thanks so much, Ben.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

Thanks so much, Dorothy.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Benjamin Wallace Wells is a staff writer. His work has been collected in the best American political writing. This has been the Political Scene from the New Yorker. You can find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com or on the New Yorker apps available at no extra charge from the App Store and Google Play. And you can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast. App. The Political Scene is produced by Alex Barron and Jill Dubeuff. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.

[Katie Drummond]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Coloursy, Wired's director of consumer, Tech and Culture.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.

[Katie Drummond]

And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week, we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

Right.

[Katie Drummond]

So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.

[Ben Wallace Wells]

From prx.