Jon McHenry’s comments in The Boston Globe regarding Hillary Clinton’s performance on the campaign trail:
Not everyone is giving her high marks.
“I don’t think she’s doing a whole lot better,” said Jon McHenry, a Republican pollster and strategist who worked on Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, noting that everyone gets a little better with practice. “Mostly what she is is not Donald Trump. There’s so much attention on him every day. Even when she’s drowning in e-mail scandals, he’s not content to let her drown.”
Leaving the awkwardness of the primary behind seemed to help loosen Clinton up. There’s a natural tension in a primary battle when some of a candidate’s natural allies pick the other side, and a candidate must attack — but not too harshly — his or her teammates.
Clinton seemed to feel the discomfort acutely; one close aide said Clinton’s new self-assurance started in early June, when she had effectively clinched the nomination, in part because she was “excited to stop dancing on the head of a pin.”
McHenry, the GOP strategist, said Clinton overreached during the primary, trying to bend over backward to appeal to Democratic rival Bernie Sanders’ base of passionate progressives. Clinton does better with her general election approach, he said, of playing toward the middle and focusing on policy rather than emphasizing ideology.
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