Marcus: Ride on Clinton roller coaster sure to be a bumpy one

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, told 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 said they did not find Clinton honest and trustworthy, up 10 points from a year earlier.

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.

Inconsistent positions

Now to Sunday’s plunge. The most vexing issue for Clinton in relation to her own party is trade. Her initial strategy for managing this problem was to evade, which is frustrating for journalists like me but understandable as a political tactic: Why say something guaranteed either to rile up the base or lock you into a bad position in the general election?

So Sunday morning began with predictable ducking: “She’s been very clear on where she stands on trade,” campaign chairman John Podesta insisted to NBC’s Chuck Todd. “But the agreement’s not final, so when it is final, she’ll render a judgment on that.”

Come on. Clinton aides portray the current dispute — about whether to give President Obama, and his successor, fast-track authority to negotiate trade agreements — as “Washington inside baseball,” as pollster Joel Benenson told ABC’s “This Week.”

But as Clinton well understands, the vote on Trade Promotion Authority, the fast-track bill, will determine the fate of the underlying trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That’s why the fight over fast-track has been so intense.

By the afternoon, Clinton was moved to offer more clarity on her supposedly very clear position — and this time, to weigh in on the side of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who torpedoed fast-track. Obama, Clinton said, “should listen to and work with his allies in Congress, starting with Nancy Pelosi, who have expressed their concerns about the impact that a weak agreement would have on our workers.”

How can this be squared with Clinton’s previous description of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as setting “the gold standard in trade agreements”? How can we have confidence that she will stand up for what she believes when that happens to conflict with her party’s base and the political dictates of the moment?