Media Matters points out today that Donald Trump's "vermin" comment of a few days ago got way less press attention than Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" remark during the 2016 campaign:
That's a pretty dramatic difference, though in fairness the election is still a year away. Hillary Clinton made her comment two months before Election Day.
But you know what? It doesn't matter. I'm sure you all recall a far worse Trump disaster during the 2016 campaign: the release of his comment about sexually assaulting women just because he could. This was the great "grab 'em by the pussy" remark, and it came just a month before the election. It even had audio! It got tons of coverage and......
......had no apparent effect on the election at all:
Clinton's "deplorables" remark might have caused her to lose a point in the polling, but even if it did she made it up within a few days.
Trump's remark, likewise, might have cost him a point—which he made up within a week or so.
It just doesn't matter what they say. People don't care. Far more important in the 2016 campaign was the New York Times' coverage of the Comey FBI letter about Hillary's emails. Almost immediately her lead against Trump was cut by four points and she never fully recovered.
I don't think the point is what it means to voters so much as what as what media wants it to mean to voters. The double standard in how D's and R's are covered is, in a word, deplorable.
It doesn't matter where in the election cycle we are, you know if Biden had called his enemies "vermin," the whole world would never hear the end of it.
ETA:
Based on the graph, it looks like both 2016 comments had an effect on polls. But only a short-term effect, maybe a few weeks.
I tend to agree that a singular remark is unlikely to make much of a difference but what matters here is the asymmetry of the coverage and that does tend to have an effect. It is not a stretch to think that the unprofessional and unethical Comey letter had the impact it did because of prior press coverage (including the disgraceful Uranium One headline story in the NYT). The media is again failing in their coverage of the election. For heaven sake, the one year old $16 Big Mac fake story got renewed attention in the front page? WTH? Journalists, get your act together.
It was always fucking Comey that sunk Hillary. She was also a reasonably bad candidate, who came off phony and tone-deaf, and also forgot to push the campaign hard in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
I don't think the "golden shower" tapes, if they ever showed up would materially hurt Orange Jesus.
Going back half a century, there might have been two or three presidential nominees who were better candidates than Hillary Clinton. But among the 20 or so we've seen in that time, she ranks pretty high. Clearly, there were mistakes. She wrote a book about it. But far worse candidates have been elected. She lost and gets the blame for that, but her race was far harder to win than her predecessor's in '08 and she uniquely faced an extraordinary level of misogyny that made her task even harder. The misogyny continues in assessments of her candidacy. She still beat her opponent by almost 3 million votes.
"Going back half a century, there might have been two or three presidential nominees who were better candidates than Hillary Clinton"
I mean, sure, if you think it's a good idea to run a candidate with almost 100% name recognition about which the public had strong opinions such that there were precious few people to be persuaded, and whom the other side had a 20-year head start on demonizing so that large chunk of the populace came into the election holding negative views, then yeah, there were hardly any nominees who were better candidates.
I largely agree that, if elected, Clinton would likely have been a good *president,* (and light years better than Trump!) but she was a sub par candidate. How do I know? She lost in the only contest that mattered. Twice, actually, although I think that there's very little shame involved in getting beaten by Obama.
Nothing you said refutes my point that she was a relatively good candidate, among the better ones over the past half century.
Democratic voters chose her to represent the party, all your objections notwithstanding. Maybe they saw value in her experience, her capabilities, and her vision that you fail to appreciate.
She did lose, true. The better candidate, like the better team in sports, doesn't always win. It was the toughest cycle for a Dem candidate in the last 20 years. If she'd been the nominee in '08, she likely would have won then. Joe Biden won in '20, a far easier year for D's, despite being at best a mediocre candidate in the campaign. (He's been an ace in the White House, and people may been looking back at his presidency with admiration in the future. But no one will take his candidacy in '20 as a model.)
Whatever you think of Clinton, no one had to deal with the crap that she did, and if you're looking to place the blame for losing '16, it's not that she ran a lousy campaign or that she was an incompetent candidate. The blame was a collective one, with the guilty parties including a corrupted media ecosystem and an ignorant electorate.
Like +50!
She ranks high if her approval numbers are not taken into consideration. There was ample evidence her numbers were very weak heading into that campaign video, but millions of primary voters ignored this. I like and admire Hillary Clinton a great deal, but at this point it’s simply delusional, not to acknowledge her very serious flaws as a nominee. None of that is the least bit fair, but it’s also very real.
I'm not ignoring her flaws. I'm comparing her to major party nominees in my adult lifetime. Do you think Dukakis, Mondale, Dole, Kerry, McCain and other losers were better? Even winning candidates like the Bushes were awful to mediocre candidates.
I'd invite you to consider that the media's unfair and misogynistic hatchet job in covering her campaign is not the fault of the candidate. They'd have gone after her even if she were "perfect." And there's more to judging a candidate than if they they won or lost. If that were the case, then you'd have to conclude that Trump was a better candidate. That would be delusional.
"If that were the case, then you'd have to conclude that Trump was a better candidate."
By the objective test of reality, the truly and deeply unfortunate truth is that Trump was, for that moment in time, a better candidate than Hillary. He won; Hillary didn't. It sucks, and I wish to god we lived in some other timeline where she beat him, but we don't.
Now, we can play all sorts of fun hypos about how this-or-that candidate was actually better than their electoral performance demonstrates based on this-or-that metric that you or I or both of us may value, but the fact is that the number one most important job of a candidate is to *win* election. That's not the same thing as the most important job of a president, or a politician, but candidates that don't win are not good candidates. By that metric, Clinton is in the bottom 50% (and maybe even lower than that, as one-termers who lost reelection like Carter and Bush and, yeah, Trump, at least managed to win once).
If presidential elections were contested on a level playing field, with each candidate having an equal chance based on their performance in the campaign, and each with an equal objective, your argument might make sense. But that’s just a plainly wrong view of how it works.
The task for Clinton was to be perfect, and she fell short. The task for Trump was to not actually shoot someone on 5th Avenue, and he barely passed that low bar.
You might want to rethink the idea Trump was a better candidate. It’s nonsense.
Realistically, everyone (including Hillary) knew what the media coverage of her campaign would be. And understood the damage it was likely to do. Yet she ran for the party’s nomination knowing what she’d be facing and how her baggage would weigh her down in the general election.
And she basically blew off the “commitments” she’d supposedly made to keep the Bernie people from causing trouble at the convention which left her running on a traditional Republican economic platform even as Trump ran sharply to her left on trade and economic issues generally. Which did immense damage to her candidacy in the crucial midwestern “firewall” states (which she arrogantly ignored).
In that context it’s worth mentioning that Hillary and the Democratic establishment she represented lost to Donald Trump. The stakes were well enough understood by everyone else (including the actual communist party) that they sacrificed their agendas. But Hillary and the Democratic establishment just didn’t care that much about the fate of the republic.
“But Hillary and the Democratic establishment just didn’t care that much about the fate of the republic.”
More ridiculous nonsense. Sheesh.
Everyone underestimated Trump. And many continue to do so. That’s because Trump’s appeal completely escapes us. I can tell you I still don’t get it.
I was completely unprepared for him to completely crush his Republican opposition. He basically made mincemeat out of them. He also crushed the MSM which basically did his bidding through this campaign, his presidency, and shockingly continue to do so.
"Everyone underestimated Trump. And many continue to do so."
+1
He is good at pretending to be a fool.
The large number of people on this blog that still think he is stupid is quite depressing.
Your claim was that there might have been "two or three candidates" who were better going back a half century. I'd say Nixon, Carter, Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden were all at least arguably better. They all won at least one presidential election. I'm tempted to add John Kerry to that list, too, as he outperformed fundamentals and came very close to unseating a sitting president (that's very rare in US political history). I don't think HRC was uniquely terrible at all—she probably should be grouped with Ford, Dukakis, Gore and Romney. But I believe your specific claim is a stretch given the awfulness and weakness (he lost the popular vote) of her 2016 opponent .And, while I wrote above about the element of unfairness in all this (you can't tell me misogyny didn't play a role), it does bears pointing out that some of her problems as a candidate flowed from her Iraq war stance. And there's really nothing unfair about that. Mind you, many Democrats (and nearly all Republicans) shared Clinton's flawed judgment on the 2003 invasion, and for me it wasn't a deal-breaker (hell, I supported her over Obama in 2008). But sometimes a political price must be paid for bad decisions. Which is as it should be.
I’ve already stated my case and don’t feel like repeating myself.
But I’ll just say the assumptions all of you are making are fundamentally flawed.
But I’ll just say the assumptions all of you are making are fundamentally flawed.
I can't speak for the others, but I think it is your interpretation of history that is flawed.
Uniquely bad candidate? Not at all. But opining that "only two or three candidates" have been superior over the last half century is the same as saying HRC was one of the three or four best candidates. Which seems manifestly unsupportable.
Mind you she'd likely have made a great president.
OK. Let's take the past 43 years.
Candidates who were "better": Reagan, Clinton, Obama. That's it.
The Bushes and the losers were worse. That's my opinion. I grant in a few cases it's debatable.
Trump was demonstrably worse. He was the most flawed candidate running the worst campaign in the history of major party presidential campaigns. Have you forgotten already? Everything he did was stupid, stupid, stupid. The skeletons poured out of the closet. A hundred things he said or did would have doomed any other candidate. People need to stop thinking he was a "better" candidate. He was awful. But he got away with it. He had a cult behind him that was going to stick with him whatever he did. The media (not just Fox) was doing his dirty work treating Hillary as a parish. Her fucking emails! Give me a break.
Once upon a time, the media played the umps calling balls and strikes. In '16, Hillary's strike zone was an inch wide and Trump's was anything within a foot of home plate.
There were other advantages going for R candidate, whoever it was going to be. Something to keep in mind.
I think it's a disservice to history to treat the race as a even-steven race to determine who was best for the job. It was not.
The Bushes and the losers were worse.
George HW Bush actually won the general election in 1988. This was third in a row for the GOP. That's historically rare in the modern era. George W. Bush managed to win two elections in a row. Hillary Clinton didn't win a single time. You're suffering from historical amnesia.
"Mind you, many Democrats (and nearly all Republicans) shared Clinton's flawed judgment on the 2003 invasion"
This I think actually reinforces Joseph's point because Trump the same position and he paid no price for it.
With everything stacked against her, for no fault of her own, to win Clinton needed the equivalent of pulling a Straight Flush, while Trump only needed a pair of Two's.
Trump the same position and he paid no price for it.
Trump wasn't in office when the 2003 invasion was launched. That's a huge difference. He's also a Republican, and members of that party normally don't pay a political price internally for being warmongers. Democrats do. Which yes, may seem unfair to Democrats. But the issue isn't whether Clinton's shortcomings as a nominee were "fair" or not. The issue is whether those shortcomings rendered her a fairly weak general election candidate. I'd say clearly they did. In the particular case of HRC's position in favor of attacking Iraq in 2003, it meant support for her among significant swaths of the left was tepid at best, or questionable. And this dynamic clearly weakened her in 2016 (look at the Stein vote).
Nominating her was't wise. But sure, hindsight's always 20/20.
I'd like to remind everyone that Hillary Clinton lost the electoral college as a result of losing 3 states by a combined margin of less than 78,000 votes. If HRC had gotten 0.56% more votes in those three states, she would have won the election. It wasn't any one thing that did it, it was the combination of all of the things, and "deplorables" (and the media hype surrounding it) was one of the things.
Agreed. The election was so close that in the vast majority of parallel universes, politicos are now stroking their chins wondering whether this or that democratic primary hopeful can repeat "that Hillary magic" in 2024.
The margin was small, so there are a lot of but-for causes for her loss. Comey is one, but the decision of newspaper editors to go nuts with the "deplorables" thing needn't have cost her many votes to have cost her the election.
They care only when they want to care. It’s their excuse for voting a certain way but it’s not their reason for voting a certain way.
If you included Fox on that chart you’d have to change the y-axis to logarithmic
Did everyone just forget how the wikileaks emails came out within 8 hours of the Access Hollywood tapes?
Those tapes had a low impact because a competing story was strategically leaked. This is in the senate report and everything.
Like, for all that Kevin Drum, is very anti republican and acknowledges the role of Fox News, he is too quick to dismiss a very successful Republican media operation.
Count me as a contrarian then. I think it was not doubling down on the deplorables comment that lost her the election.
Here is a reminder of what she actually said:
"You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
She should have come out and said something along the lines of, I stand by what I said because 50% are deplorable and 50% may not be deplorable but are OK with that the other half is. But of course she is too wishy-washy and poll-driven to do such a thing.
Two things:
In context, she was telling her people who were going door-to-door not to waste their time trying to convince the “deplorables”. They were beyond convincing. She was telling them to concentrate their attention on people who could be convinced.
At this point anyone who votes for Trump is deplorable.
Guy loses his Illuminati ID card,
https://old.reddit.com/r/Weird/comments/186mxkc/found_this_on_the_ground_outside/
Apparently he's a relative of Sam Altman.
We're through the looking glass, people!
Whatever your thoughts on the campaigns or the candidates, we all know who is in the bag for Capital.