In Case You Forgot: President Obama Is Hillary Cl

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In Case You Forgot: President Obama Is Hillary Clinton's Secret Weapon
POTUS, Elizabeth Warren, and others will break down Trump in ways HRC can't.



BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
MAY 16, 2016

It strikes me that when Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, she will go into the general election with a murderer's row of campaign surrogates–all of whom seem uniquely suited specifically to torment He, Trump.

There's the president. There's Smilin' Joe Biden, who laughed Paul Ryan off the stage. There's Senator Professor Warren. There's HRC's husband, the former president. When Bill Clinton is No. 4 on the depth chart, you're doing very well.

Of course, SPW and the president already began the botheration. SPW is tweeting He, Trump into the ground. And, on Sunday, speaking at commencement at Rutgers, the president brought him down to Chinatown. CBS News reports:

"Facts. Evidence. Reason. Logic. An understanding of science. These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy. These are qualities you want to continue to cultivate in yourselves as citizens. We traditionally have valued those things, but if you were listening to today's political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from," he continued.

"So class of 2016, let me be as clear as I can be: In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue. It's not cool to not know what you're talking about. That's not keeping it real or telling it like it is. That's not challenging political correctness. That's just not knowing what you're talking about. And yet we've become confused about this."

If the best tactic against He, Trump is a lethal concoction of equal parts savvy and ridicule, then HRC's got people with the chops to be deadly with it. At the very least, it ought to be fun.

Of course, this wouldn't be the right shebeen if there weren't something about which to complain.

In that same speech, the president chided the students at Rutgers because, two years ago, protests forced Condoleezza Rice out of the commencement gig.

"I don't think it's a secret that I disagree with many of the policies of Dr. Rice and the previous administration. But the notion that this community or this country would be better served by not hearing a former secretary of state or not hearing what she had to say—I believe that's misguided," Obama said. "I don't think that's how democracy works best, when we're not even willing to listen to each other."

The president is making a bit of a category error here. The protests against Rice didn't have anything to do with what she might say. They were directed against her actions as a public official–from her complete failure as a national-security advisor, to her less-than-compelling testimony before the 9/11 Commission, to her complicity in the worst foreign policy crime in half a century.

Surely the president wouldn't have criticized the students at NYU who, in 1966, walked out of an appearance at their graduation by Robert McNamara. Maybe he would have. Who knows?

And, in any case, it was Rice who backed out of the appearance. She chose not to face the questions.

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