Interestingly enough, Hillary's approval ratings didn't go upside down until about this time last year. As First Lady, Senator, then Secretary of State America liked her, sometimes a lot. It really seems like the multimillion dollar fishing expedition into Benghazi, followed by the email server, followed by the Russian hack of the DNC have crushed her historic trend.

We can go back to the 1990s. I remember them well. People were angry at her about cookies, then Rush invented 'Feminazi' as a term for her, then the entire right wing overemphasized 'Rodham' the same way they do with 'Hussein' now, as if using your maiden name as a middle name were some kind of sin. Conspiracies came out of the woodwork - she killed Vince Foster is the most famous one of course.

And we still liked her. She took her lumps from some real knuckleheads, but she just kept going.

So, no, we can't just keep rolling back history until we decide she's a bad guy. That's revisionist as hell. As is the super predator comment, Newsweek (IIRC) had Super Crime and Super Predators on their cover because it was a legitimate anxiety that crime had increased at a rapid rate for so long with no downward relief. It's also really hard to hang her for DOMA when Obama didn't come out in favor of gay marriage until Biden outed him, several years later. Opinions on that one changed fast, and I don't think that having an opinion shared by the majority at the time (on either issue) is a scandal. We certainly didn't think so at the time, because her overall approval was strong for nearly three decades while that was going on.

But you're right, there's no rational way to adjudicate between them. Clinton used a private server recommended by a former Secretary of State (for which he threw her under the bus until HE was hacked), which she admits was a mistake. She apologized for it, even though she broke no laws, and her carelessness was shared by a whole bunch of the people who have been attacking her. When has Trump apologized for anything? Of course, if we're worried about international connections tarnishing a candidate, we could look at the above the board workings of the incredibly transparent Clinton foundation (far more worthy a cause, transparent in disclosure, and ethically executed than the Trump foundation) as a moral baseline, and ask which one really hurt the country - Hillary meeting a Nobel laureate or Trump doing business in Cuba, hiring a Russian stooge, importing models in violation of immigration laws, appearing on Russian TV praising Putin, and lying to the American people about what he knew to be true of the Russian role in the DNC hack?

But you want rational, not feels. Fine. In order for Trump's tax plan to work, he needs the U.S. economy to grow at roughly 4%, which the non-partisan CBO thinks is twice the rate at which the US economy will actually grow. Of course, that's for the bare bones tax plan. That's the one he cites when he wants to claim budget priorities. In order to pay for his tax cut, he'd need massive growth beyond double our expected rate. Of course, as long as we're being rational, let's go a step further. The growth he wants can only be accomplished by emerging economies that have room for that kind of growth, usually lead by exports. We aren't that. We net export services and net import manufacturing. The only way we can fuel that kind of growth, then, is through exporting waaaaaaaaay more services. When we do that, we offshore jobs. Trump wants to outcource our high-paying service jobs in IT, healthcare, and tech in favor of low-paying manufacturing jobs back home, making goods we can sell to all those overseas people we just made rich.

Of course, for any of that growth to occur, we need interest rates to be low. Manufacturing jobs take a massive up-front capital outlay, because you have to build really expensive factories and pay for all of the raw goods. If you want private business to foot the bill, the best way to get it is with low interest rates. But, of course, Trump says that the Fed should raise rates (even though when Nixon said something similar in the 1968 campaign, it sparked a decade of mass inflation, because inflation is as much a rhetorical concept as it is an economic one), so we have to wonder how on earth private business could possibly support all that manufacturing output.

Maybe he wants a big government stimulus to help out? Well, aside from the fact that the government has a terrible track record of directing large scale changes in the American economy short of WWII level military procurement, he also can't afford a stimulus with his tax break, and even if he could.

Only people who already had a fortune could open a factory in that economy, because they wouldn't need to borrow at the higher rate. Actually, those super rich would be making a fortune off of simply sitting on that cash, because of the higher interest rate he's recklessly screaming for. It's almost as if he's trying to make himself richer by getting the government to pay him more for his cash holdings while shipping middle-class jobs overseas so that other countries can afford to buy the stuff being built by low-wage workers here in factories that he owns.

Or maybe he wants to own the factories that arm the world's militaries right before he starts WWIII.

Or maybe none of this matters, because it's empty rhetoric. Manufacturing requires infrastructure and ecosystems, which we don't have and would take years to create. The Fed is walking a real fine line right now, buoyed by the Greek crisis, the Chinese market meltdown, and Brexit which are causing foreign countries to buy the Dollar, keeping the value high, delaying the inevitable hike as long as possible to encourage as much growth as they can while they still can. They know they need to take 3 trillion dollars out of the economy over the next 30 years, and it's going to suck. Right now they're trying a system where they pay interest on holding from the largest banks, hoping that will be enough to slow the economy to where it should be while still keeping consumer prices as low as possible.

But, you're right, it's all feels. It's not like the dislike of Clinton is brand new and irrational, or anything. It's not like Trump has an economic vision of America that either makes no sense when any two pieces are put together or is actively rooting for war profiteering. Yeah, it's just feels.