Michael Arnovitz writes here about the attacks on Hillary Clinton and the reasons behind them.

Arnovitz probes the hatred for Hillary that is so pronounced on both the left and the right. And he notes that until she starting running for office, she was one of the most admired women in the world.

He writes:

To conservatives she is a radical left-wing insurgent who has on multiple occasions been compared to Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Kremlin’s long-time Chief of Ideology. To many progressives (you know who you are), she is a Republican fox in Democratic sheep’s clothing, a shill for Wall Street who doesn’t give a damn about the working class. The fact that these views could not possibly apply to the same person does not seem to give either side pause. Hillary haters on the right and the left seem perfectly happy to maintain their mutually incompatible delusions about why she is awful. The only thing both teams seem to share is the insistence that Hillary is a Machiavellian conspirator and implacable liar, unworthy of society’s trust.

And this claim of unabated mendacity is particularly interesting, because while it is not the oldest defamation aimed at Hillary, it is the one that most effortlessly glides across partisan lines. Indeed, for a surprisingly large percentage of the electorate, the claim that Hillary is innately dishonest is simply accepted as a given. It is an accusation and conviction so ingrained in the conversation about her that any attempt to even question it is often met with shock. And yet here’s the thing: it’s not actually true. Politifact, the Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking project, determined for example that Hillary was actually the most truthful candidate (of either Party) in the 2016 election season. And in general Politifact has determined that Hillary is more honest than most (but not all) politicians they have tracked over the years.

He reviews data about her polling numbers and concludes:

So what do we see in this data? What I see is that the public view of Hillary Clinton does not seem to be correlated to “scandals” or issues of character or whether she murdered Vince Foster. No, the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover.

Especially interesting is his commentary on her speaking fees, which Donald Trump points to as a mark of corruption:

Money — OK let’s talk about her money. Hillary has a lot of it. And she has earned most of it through well-paid speaking fees. And the idea of getting paid $200,000 or more for a single speech seems so ludicrous to many people that they assume that it simply must be some form of bribery. But the truth is that there is a large, well-established and extremely lucrative industry for speaking and appearance fees. And within that industry many celebrities, sports stars, business leaders and former politicians get paid very well. At her most popular for example, Paris Hilton was being paid as much as $750,000 just to make an appearance. Kylie Jenner was once paid over $100,000 to go to her own birthday party, and to this day Vanilla Ice gets $15,000 simply to show up with his hat turned sideways.

And yes, I’m back on that, because I feel compelled to point out that before he ran for President in 2007, Rudy Giuliani was making about $700,000 a month in speaking fees with an average of $270k per speech. It’s estimated that in the 5 years before his run he earned as much as $40 million in speaking fees. Nobody cared, no accusations of impropriety were made, and there was almost no media interest. So why did Giuliani get a pass, while Hillary stands accused of inherent corruption for making less money doing the same thing?

Arnovitz does not write about Hillary Clinton’s stance on education. Perhaps he doesn’t know or care about it. Personally, I do not expect her to join the Network for Public Education. She may turn out to be as bad as Obama on education. My expectations are low. But the alternative is far worse: Putting a racist, misogynistic, unethical, self-serving, narcissistic, jingoist bully in the White House is unthinkable.

Ha! Another article disappeared by WordPress! Or the combination of WordPress and my iPhone, unhappy together.

Here is the link.

I saw Michael Reagan, President Reagan’s conservative son, on CNN last week, and he said that his father had little in common with Trump. His father, he said, was a man of deep humility. He never boasted or bragged. He deflected difficult situations with a joke, and he had a large store of them.

During President Reagan’s second term, I was invited with a group of about 20 other educators to meet with the President. We met in the Cabinet Room of the White House, which is awe-inspiring. I sat next to Vice-President Bush and directly across from President Reagan. He listened to all we had to say, and at the end of the meeting he told a story about an encounter with a young college student when he was governor of California. The angry young man said, “your generation can’t possibly understand my generation. We grew up with space rockets and computers, and….” named the many innovations of the age. Reagan said he replied, “Son, my generation invented all those things.”

That was Reagan. Donald Trump is no Reagan.