Hillary's Long Game

Late last night, my BNR colleague Peter Daou wrote a lovely piece about "Hillary's Long Game."

From Hillary's admirers we hear about Hillary's discipline, resilience, compassion, experience and knowledge. From her detractors, we hear she is robotic, calculating, and dishonest.

What we rarely hear about from either side is her uncanny ability to play the long game, to see through the fog of news cycles, to hear through the cacophony of opinions, and to make decisions that are many steps ahead of her opponents.

...What Hillary also knows is that her voters are profoundly invested in her campaign and that their support gives her the capacity to withstand intense attacks and weather the most turbulent news cycles.

She is playing the long game...

Click through to read the whole thing. And also to admire the perfect picture Peter chose to accompany his piece. He has a knack for finding the most moving images for our posts that explore the many positive things there are to write about Hillary.

His piece reminds me of a comment I left on a friend's Facebook page recently. (I never do politics on Facebook, but sometimes I dive in on this Clinton supporter friend's page to battle his Bernie Bro pals.)

Notice how Clinton keeps saying she'll release her transcripts when everyone does, even though Sanders has none to release? Well, Donald Trump has been getting paid to give speeches to various corporations since the '80s. If Clinton releases her transcripts now, she'll have no leverage in the general to get Trump to release his, which will be full of problematic shit.

It's almost like Clinton is good at politics or something.

Welcome to the long game, folks.

One of the things I most admire about Clinton is her ability—and her willingness—to stand there while Sanders gets his stupid applause lines for shouting "You want me to release my transcripts?! Okay! Here they are! There are none!" while he mimes throwing invisible papers into the air.

She takes the minor hit, because she's got a long game in mind that is way more important than capitulating to a gnat.

It can't be easy. She must desperately want to exclaim, "I have a plan, you fool!" But instead, she stands at her podium, chin slightly tilted upward, an inscrutable smile on her face, waiting. Waiting.

Playing the long game.