Patrick Healy's headline in a NY Times story from Iowa earlier this week, Hillary Clinton Races to Close Enthusiasm Gap With Bernie Sanders in Iowa. has to make you wonder how someone with 100% name recognition could be struggling in a state against some old guy from Vermont by way of Brooklyn who almost no one in Iowa had ever heard of until recently. "Iowa Democrats," he wrote, "are displaying far less passion for Hillary Clinton than for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont three weeks before the presidential caucuses, creating anxiety inside the Clinton campaign as she scrambles to energize supporters and to court wavering voters."
An event Monday in Waterloo underscored Mrs. Clinton’s challenge: About 300 people welcomed her enthusiastically and listened to her diligently, but many of them, still unsure, rebuffed Clinton aides trying to get them to sign “commitment cards” to caucus for her.“I personally want to find out if she’s trustworthy or not,” said Katie Bailey, 71, of Cedar Falls. “There’s so much untrust. I want to eyeball her.”...A poll published on Tuesday, by Quinnipiac University, found that Mr. Sanders had jumped to a lead in Iowa, with 49 percent to Mrs. Clinton’s 44 percent, after trailing her by 11 points in mid-December. The Quinnipiac poll also found that liberal Iowans were the most enthusiastic about the election, and that Mr.Sanders was the favorite among these voters. A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Tuesday showed Mrs. Clinton’s once formidable lead shrinking from 20 points a month ago to seven points.The tightened race is revealing a sharp generational divide within the Democratic Party, with primary voters under age 45 favoring Mr. Sanders by a roughly 2-to-1 ratio....Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is trying to shore up her base among female voters: Lena Dunham, the star of the HBO series “Girls,” was deployed on Saturday to make a feminist pitch for Mrs. Clinton to crowds of mostly young women in Iowa. Yet many younger women who gathered did not share Ms. Dunham’s visceral enthusiasm for Mrs. Clinton, saying that for most of their lives she has been a familiar fixture of establishment politics rather than an exciting new voice or an agent of change.“Bernie Sanders feels new, and Hillary seems like a Washington insider,” said Laura Cornell, 17, who was encouraged by friends to hear Ms. Dunham’s pitch but remained committed to Mr. Sanders.Many of the Sanders supporters interviewed said they felt personally moved by what they described as his sincerity. Bert Permar, 86, a retired professor, said he had gone to four Sanders events and was now making calls to share the candidate’s message.“I love to see him. He motivates me,” Mr. Permar said on Sunday, sitting in the front row at a Sanders forum on veterans’ issues in Marshalltown. “I get emotional. It brings tears that someone is talking about the issues that we should be concerned about.”
Guess what Rand Paul plans to do during every waking hour?Voters, of all ages, and from both parties are famished for authenticity and truth from our politicians. That's why peoples' skins crawl when they listen to practiced phonies like Rubio, Cruz, Hillary, Jeb, Fiorina, Christie. There's nothing real about any of them. Bernie is real and authentic. Trumpf in in a parallel university, playing a role on a reality TV show of a gross, loud-mouthed huckster but staying in character at all times. His appeal, I'm afraid, is primarily to people without the mental capacity for abstract thought. Under those parameters he's plenty authentic.When Cruz comes sucking around NY for contributions and loans he winks at the valuesWatch the cruel video (above) that Cruz's SuperPAC deployed against Rubio in Iowa and New Hampshire this week. It's killing him there because it shows him as inauthentic, untrustworthy and utterly untruthful. (And it's made so as it looks to a casual viewer poor Rand Paul is the one attacking Rubio.) Meanwhile, Cruz is getting slammed in the same way: inauthentic, untrustworthy... he tells one audience one thing and the other audience something else. Is he even American? Is his whole life a lie? He's in the quicksand with his pal Rubio now and they're both trying to drown each other in it while Herr Trumpf and the ghost of P.T. Barnum yuck it up on the sidelines.The kind of inauthenticity represented by Hillary will be no match for the kind of perverse authenticity of Herr Trumpf. It's why poll after poll after poll shows Bernie beating Trumpf and Hillary... faltering. Hillary's ugly distorted lies about Bernie's record this week didn't go unnoticed. People don't want her to be president, any more than they want any of the other lying political careerists. Bernie's the one. Let's make it real; it'll be the besting that hoaxed for this country syncing of us were born.
