The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

How Bad Was the Hillary Campaign?

Posted on | April 21, 2017 | Comments Off on How Bad Was the Hillary Campaign?

 

Matt Taibbi is certainly not my favorite political journalist, and Rolling Stone was permanently disgraced by the UVA hoax, but nevertheless Taibbi’s brief review of the new Clinton campaign book, Shattered by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is very worthwhile reading. After recounting the comedic failure of Clinton insiders to figure out their campaign’s raison d’etre — why did Hillary want to be president? — Taibbi summarizes the problem briefly and accurately:

What Allen and Parnes captured in Shattered was a far more revealing portrait of the Democratic Party intelligentsia than, say, the WikiLeaks dumps. And while the book is profoundly unflattering to Hillary Clinton, the problem it describes really has nothing to do with Secretary Clinton.
The real protagonist of this book is a Washington political establishment that has lost the ability to explain itself or its motives to people outside the Beltway.

What is true of the “Washington political establishment” in the Democrat Party is similarly true for Republicans. There is a yawning chasm of misunderstanding between the voters and people who make their careers in politics, and Taibbi doesn’t want to admit that he and his employer are part of the problem. That is to say, the liberal bias of the media creates such a huge advantage for Democrats, easily worth 5% of the vote in national elections, as to create a sort of cushion against reality. Meanwhile, Republicans in Washington are apt to succumb to “Potomac fever,” betraying their conservative voters in pursuit of a “centrist” or “mainstream” image, which leads them into debacles like the “Gang of Eight” immigration plan. Journalists contribute to this problem — call it The Reality Gap — with reporting so one-sided as to be dishonest.

Is Matt Taibbi willing to admit that Rolling Stone published that UVA rape hoax story for partisan purposes? Isn’t it true that the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria of 2014 was part of a Clinton-friendly propaganda blitz to make feminism a central focus of the 2016 campaign? And isn’t it also true that the Black Lives Matter movement was similarly a Democrat Party propaganda operation intended to mobilize black voters?

Liberal journalists devote enormous effort to promoting narratives that portray Democrat Party core constituencies — women, racial minorities, gay people — as victims of systematic injustice, while demonizing Republicans as racist, sexist, homophobic villains. The media become so entranced by this victimhood narrative that, like the Clinton campaign insiders, they are stunned to discover American voters aren’t buying it.

This was the entirety of Hillary’s campaign logic — (a) she’s a woman, (b) women are victims, and therefore, (c) vote Democrat: “I’m With Her.”

 

If that’s the only argument you’ve got, you deserve to lose. And anyone who thinks Bernie Sanders would have done better is insane. Our national debt is now nearly $20 trillion — that’s trillion, with a “T,” $20,000,000,000,000 — and we cannot afford to pay for the massive federal welfare state we’ve already got, much less the outright socialism that the Bernie voters want. Go take a look at the disaster in Venezuela, if you want to see where the Bernie Sanders agenda leads. Unless and until Democrats are willing to confront the reality of socialism’s failure, and abandon the divisive Cultural Marxism of identity politics, they will continue to alienate the ordinary American voter.



 

Category: Democrats, Election, Hillary Clinton, Media Bias

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