Hillary Clinton’s parsing, revising, and exaggerating on the campaign trail have taken a toll on her image, according to a recent poll. A lot of people say they think she’s a phony.
A recent Gallup Poll found that 53 percent of Americans think Clinton isn’t “honest and trustworthy.” Just 29 percent said the same of her Democratic rival Barack Obama, and 27 percent said it of Republican John McCain.
Gallup analyst Jeffrey Jones called the credibility gap between Clinton and McCain “the largest between any two candidates for any dimension tested.”
It’s not just Gallup, and it’s not just the Bosnia story, which turned out to be demonstrably false, and which the candidate explained away by saying she was tired from campaigning and not thinking straight. And it wasn’t even 3 a.m. Can you imagine what Clinton would have said if Obama offered that excuse?
Another recent poll, this one conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center before Clinton had to back down from her account of her Bosnia trip, found that 29 percent of white Democrats considered her a “phony,” almost twice as many as the 15 percent who described Obama that way.
Pew researchers concluded that Democrats’ views of Clinton “are more influenced by perceptions that she is phony than by any other trait or emotion tested.”
