A Thought for Hillary

I was struck by this in an Atlantic piece on Biden:

"It’s better to be a mystery [like Biden is to many] than to be like Hillary Clinton, who faced what amounted to a 25-year negative-advertising campaign that left even sympathetic voters suspicious. Her 2016 word cloud was dominated by liar, criminal, and untrustworthy, with strong registering a bit too."

That seems to be the way she's remembered now. But it's wrong about the way she was regarded during her political career.  Wikipedia shows that she had 22 appearances topping the "most admired woman in America" list between 1948 and now, far more than anyone else.  (Ike and Obama each had 12 as the most admired man.)

Granted this just means that she had a plurality of strong supporters, but there were years in which her favorability was quite high.  What happened in 2015-16 was the Republican publicity machine tearing her down, aided by a "both sides" media world, eager to balance Trump's real faults with Hillary's supposed ones.

You can see I'm aggrieved here.  I won't say that Clinton was a good candidate nor that she didn't open the door to some of the attacks.  I will say she would have been an above-average president, not the total disaster of the man who beat her.

How To Forget Occam's Razor: a Conservative Example

Scott Johnson at Powerline has a nice example of logic discussing an Andy McCarthy piece (which I did not read).  He believes the "fix" was in from the beginning for the investigation into the Clinton emails (yes, the conservatives are still digging over that--pretty soon they'll be tying it into the Clinton Filegate  scandal).  His reasoning: Obama said Clinton didn't have any bad intent in using a private email server.  Comey listened to Obama and said the same thing.

That's convincing, isn't it?

But apply Occam's Razor.  Which is simpler:

1. There was no evidence of evil intent and two men of different political parties came independently to that conclusion.
2. There was evidence of evil intent, Obama corruptly said there wasn't, Comey ran an investigation using FBI agents, usually considered conservative which was really just for show, made sure he didn't find any smoking gun evidence, and agreed with Obama. 

The second alternative is simpler only if you believe in Clinton's guilt from the beginning.