Clinton's Two-Step On Trade

WASHINGTON -- On Saturday, I was impressed with Hillary Clinton. On Sunday, I was disappointed. Something tells me that the rest of this presidential campaign is going to be more of the same roller coaster.

First, the peak. Clinton's roll-out speech laid out an overarching rationale for her candidacy -- as a fighter for the middle class. She backed that vision up with an array of policy specifics that are center-left but not apt to offend swing voters in the general election who could be lured to support her.

She showed she could take it to Republicans, calling them out on climate change, trickle-down economics and voting rights. She repeatedly embraced the ceiling-shattering nature of her candidacy.

And, for a candidate with total name recognition and entrenched views among voters, she harnessed a lesser-known part of her biography to buttress her case that, immense wealth notwithstanding, she understands the plight of "the factory workers and food servers who stand on their feet all day" -- indeed, that she has devoted her career to working on their behalf.

If there was a State of the Union, laundry-list quality to the speech -- well, Clinton's forte has never been transporting an audience with soaring rhetoric. It's laying out a program and arguing that she has the grit and experience to implement it.

My beef with the speech involved not content but timing: two months too late. Clinton's soft, substance-free launch created a vacuum. That space was filled by damaging reports on her family's lucrative speechifying and foundation-building.

"No poll shows that voters don't trust Hillary," her campaign manager, Robby Mook, insisted to CBS' "Face the Nation" host John Dickerson.

Except the CNN-ORC poll this month that showed 57 percent said she is not honest and trustworthy, up from 49 percent in March. Or the Washington Post-ABC News poll that found 52 percent of voters who said they did not find Clinton honest and trustworthy, up 12 points from a year earlier.

Further, Clinton's relative silence opened up room for the emergence of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is unlikely to foil Clinton's march to the nomination but has already complicated it.

Some of this would have happened even if Clinton had come out, center-left guns blazing, earlier. None of it is fatal. But there has been an opportunity cost.

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