Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton said at a Tuesday town hall meeting that she would strive as president to "model the kind of behavior" that hopefully all Americans would have.
Clinton made the remark while responding to a question about cultural intolerance in Claremont, New Hampshire, according to The Blaze.
"My question is about something that's troubling me about our culture in the United States right now," the town hall participant said. "There is a strong undercurrent of hatred with racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism. Besides being good neighbors to each other, what can you do and will you do as our leader to help us move beyond all of that?"
"I think we have to, as a nation, really ask ourselves some hard questions about how we truly feel about and treat each other, and the level of vitriol and insult that we see on the Internet is so distressing to me, and it goes exactly after people in the categories you have outlined," Clinton said. "As president, I would do my very best to model the kind of behavior that I would hope all of our citizens would have. I'm not asking people to like everybody. I'm asking people to be respectful."
Clinton leads the Democratic field but is underwater in overall favorability; she received a 37% favorability rating, in compared to President Obama who received a 40% rating. The unfavorability rating for both was 48% and 47%, respectively. Clinton has particularly struggled to get voters to trust her in the wake of revelations about her private email server at the State Department and the federal investigation that was subsequently launched.
On CNN's New Day, Nia Malika-Henderson said Wednesday that Clinton is doing "terribly" in getting voters to believe she’s trustworthy and cares about their issues.
"She is doing terribly in terms of people believing she is honest and trustworthy and she also just has low marks in terms of people believing she cares about their issues," Henderson said. "This has been a problem, I think, ongoing for her. You talk to folks in the campaign and they say, well, the campaign hasn’t really started yet … The others will start to take on water as well as the campaign heats up and as they face a barrage of negative ads, but my goodness, this is certainly a turn of events for her and we’ve just seen this steady slide in terms of her poll numbers."