One of the Clinton’s top consultants and pollsters, Doug Schoen, recently appeared on Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s program to unpack his 40-year career working to get the Clintons and Obamas elected and revealed why Hillary didn’t win the White House and why he discounts Barack Obama’s entire presidency.
During his visit with Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Today,” Schoen spoke of the lessons he thinks should be learned from his close work with the Clinton and Obama camps, Fox News reported.
Schoen is a long-time campaign power player and is a partner of the political consulting firm Penn Schoen & Berland. He made his bones first as a behind-the-scenes consultant for Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s after Clinton’s party took a drubbing in the 1994 midterm elections that flipped the House to the GOP.
He went on to work for the Obama campaign and then Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
While the pollster noted that there were some very big differences between Obama and Hillary Clinton, he went on to add that even Obama was not all he was cracked up to be.
“My sense of Obama was just a great speechwriter, a great author who had a persona that was far more substantial than the…leader he proved to be,” Schoen told Carlson. “I had no problems with him as a person. My problems were that I don’t think he was a particularly successful president.”
Worse, Schoen felt that Obama was far too prone to skating by on his ability to persuade people to join him but failed to do the hard work to follow through with many of his promises and policy goals.
“I had a sense that [Obama] was a guy who was very facile, very, very much able to persuade people, but his governance was far less effective than the promise,” Schoen said.
He also pointed out the patently obvious fact that Hillary Clinton was far more ambitious than her husband, Bill.
Did Hillary Clinton come off as unauthentic?
Yes: 96% (26 Votes)
No: 4% (1 Votes)
“She was far more ambitious than Bill. And Bill was pretty darn ambitious,” Schoen told Tucker. “She absolutely — it was clear — felt she had a calling.”
“The analogy I offered was the two students: Bill Clinton was the one who did best in the open book exam where you could think. She was the one who would memorize and then regurgitate,” Schoen explained. “Now she has a very good mind, she’s focused and she’s disciplined, but she’s not a particularly creative thinker.”
Again, this seems pretty obvious. Hillary Clinton has always been horrendous off the cuff. Bill, on the other hand, was usually smooth as silk when dealing with questions, and very personable in informal situations. And astute political observers easily saw these traits in Bill, Hillary, and Barack.
Schoen went on to point out a particular problem with Hillary’s suitability for higher office.
“She’s had so many different incarnations. She ran first as a centrist, then she tried to run to the left. Nothing quite worked because she wasn’t authentic,” he insisted.
Voters clearly understood that Hillary Clinton would literally say anything at all if she thought it would get her elected to something and no one ever really believed a word she said.
Still, Shoen gave Hillary Clinton credit for understanding that as first lady, she could also be a problem for her hubby president, Bill. After she was credited with the widely hated Hillarycare health care plan that Bill Clinton was preparing to implement in 1993, she understood that she made a disaster out of that debate and realized that she needed to step back and let her husband fix the mess she created.
“Hillary also, having created the problems with healthcare, understood that she was a retardant — harmful, at that point to Bill’s career — and she made it clear, ‘I’m not participating, I got you in this mess, you gotta get out of it your own way,’” Schoen told Tucker.
In the end, voters could tell that Hillary’s ambition and ego far outweighed her actual abilities, and when faced with the charismatic Trump in 2016, she was absolutely stymied on how to respond to him. While most of what Schoen said is pretty unsurprising to anyone who was really paying attention between 1992 and 2016, it is amazing to see a Democratic powerhouse finally admitting to it all.
