It was just this week when I asked the question as to whether Hillary Clinton or the rest of the Democrats running for office next year were being pushed too far to the left by the SJW, Black Lives Matter and the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party. I’m guessing that nobody sent the former First Lady a copy of that column because the presumed nominee took a meeting this week with The Motherhood. (That’s a group of mothers of suspects killed during lethal force encounters with police plus, for some reason, Trayvon Martin’s mother.) The optics of this probably sounded like a good deal for the primary to her campaign staff but it might not play very well on the wider general election stage. (CNN)

Hillary Clinton met Monday with a collection of parents whose African-American children have died in shootings at a local Chicago cafe, discussing their loss and outlining her criminal justice reform and gun control plans.

Fulton, Martin’s mother, said the meeting with Clinton was “powerful” and “productive.”

“It was a very powerful meeting, it was very powerful,” she said.

Clinton tweeted about the meeting afterward, saying that she was “grateful to spend time today with mothers who have lost a child to violence and turned their grief into a national call to action.”

The fact that Clinton tacked a capital “H” on her tweet, letting everyone know she’d pecked it out herself on her phone, will be a footnote to keep in mind during the campaign to come. Her characterization of the families she met with is rather telling and all too common among liberals these days. She mentions families who have “lost a child to violence” and created a “call to action” in response. She’s not talking about the hundreds and hundreds of people gunned down in gang violence in our major cities here. That’s an obvious and undeniable BLM reference and the “violence” which took some of those lives was hardly unprovoked.

We don’t need to rehash the entire Trayvon Martin shooting here yet again, but George Zimmerman was found not guilty and even the Justice Department concluded they couldn’t bring a civil suit. You have to dig down quite a ways in the article to find it (as if CNN was rather embarrassed to include her) but Michael Brown’s mother was in on the meeting as well. That case has been exhaustively reviewed and even some of the most liberal voices in the country finally concluded that Brown died because he attacked a cop after knocking over a convenience store. That was not just a child lost to violence except perhaps the violence he engendered himself.

Also at the meeting was the mother of Dontre Hamilton. That young man was allegedly mentally ill, but it doesn’t change the fact that he attacked a cop with the officer’s police baton and the cop in question was cleared of charges.

If this is where Hillary Clinton wants to plant her flag, she’s welcome to all the territory she likes on that hill. There were much better choices if she wanted to talk to families of those who died during encounters with the police. She could have chosen to do a photo op with the family of Walter Scott in South Carolina, given that the officer in that case appears to have flat out murdered the guy. She could even have made an argument (though a weak one) for meeting with Eric Garner’s family. But the choices here place her squarely in the camp of those who choose to blame the police when the deceased were either obviously engaged in criminal activity or (in the case of Tamir Rice) who were the victims of absolutely tragic accidents which were completely absent of malice on the part of the police.

If Clinton thinks this is going to play well with the general public she may be in for an unpleasant surprise next year. She’s winning friends among the SJW this week but it could cost her in the end.