I really doubt anyone vile enough to vote for Trump would ever consider voting for Hillary.
If anything the problem was all the Democrats who criticized her comment about deplorables instead of agreeing with it. Every time some Democrat condemned her for that, they sent two messages; they told the Republicans they were weak, and they told the Democratic base that they were willing to sell their base out to the fascists & bigots.
Oh, yes. Acquittal, sweet sweet acquittal! Plus, permanent victim-hood…those nasty Democrats, attacking a great American totally innocent hero like Trump!
Yes, he wants that impeachment vote. Well, he has mixed feelings—he’d love it if every member of Congress continually sang songs of adoration and praise of him. But since that’s not going to happen, getting to posture as the victim of mean ol’ Democrats, and then taking a victory lap after his Senate acquittal, is next best.
I have a parallel but slightly different take. My issue with the comment was how the media covered it. The media, and this is just one example of it, bent over backwards to make false equivalencies throughout the race. This is yet another example of this. Her comment, one that was pretty much born out to be accurate, was given breathless and expensive treatment by a mainstream media desperate to put anything she did or said on par with anything he did or said.
Hillary also didn’t have a foreign entity ready to create diversionary news stories whenever she had a gaffe of any kind. Donald Trump had the Access Hollywood tape surface and immediately WikiLeaks dumped the podesta emails.
The media can definitely move needles and throughout the campaign they did their best to make every equivalency between the two candidates and everyone with a brain knows that was incorrect.
Had the media not done that, and made an apples-to-apples comparison of her factual deplorable quote with actual deplorable quotes, things might have been different. The media gets a black mark for this, and unfortunately I don’t think they’ve learned.
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I agree with your entire post.
A lot of the problem stems from the fact that the media are for-profit entities. They knew a hotly-contested election would get much higher ratings than would an election of a basically-qualified candidate against a highly-unqualified candidate. So they did their best to make sure that happened (greatly aided, as you point out, by the fact that Mr. Unfit had Russia behind him).
I’m not sure how to fix that problem, which is likely to be ongoing. The media companies want to get ratings/views/subscriptions, and the way to do that is to distort the actual facts. Create conflict! Create a contest between equally-strong candidates! Create respectability where there is actually none!
It’s going to keep happening.
eta: I should say that I also agree with Der Trihs that Democrats competing with Clinton were also guilty of treating the ‘deplorables’ comment as Bad and Wrong—for their own gain.
Referring to her as “Hillary” rather than “Clinton” didn’t help either; while there are exceptions in both directions (Arnold, Garbo), in general the American usage of “single word as whole name” when it is not an artistic name (i.e., Prince and Madonna don’t count) is that men get the more-respectful lastname, women get the more-familiar firstname, and very often when a woman is known by firstname only it’s because her husband gets the lastname. Back during the election I could tell whether articles in Spanish newspapers were written by a Spaniard or translated from US English based on how they referred to both candidates. I sometimes wonder if American media intended to refer to her as President Hillary. Has there ever been a POTUS who was known as President Firstname?
Excellent point. (And interesting about the variation in the newspapers by national origin.)
I guess the test of whether a female President would be referred to less respectfully would be more clear if it were a woman who had a last name that differed from any earlier, related male President.
It’s looking as though the views of those who believe that Democrats can’t run a woman because that would risk losing the votes of all the insecure males, will prevail, which is a shame from the sociological angle, at the very least.
It’s not just males. I remember a comment, maybe on this board, where someone said their mother wouldn’t vote for Clinton because “She didn’t trust a woman to run the country.” I would think this would be an older woman. I imagine there is some small percentage of women, conservative I’m sure, who probably do think a woman’s place is in the home.
In her case, when she first became a national figure, “Clinton” would be assumed to be her husband, the president. Not saying there’s no validity to your point, but there are extenuating circumstances
You’re right, of course. I think there’s a phenomenon called “queen bee-ism”* which might account for some women deciding they’d never vote for another woman—it’s to do with not being willing to have a woman in charge of them, because that would mean the other woman was the queen bee, and they think of themselves that way. Or something to that effect.
Then of course there’s Kanye-ism:
—Kanye in the Oval Office, 11 October 2018 Kanye West’s confounding political evolution, explained - Vox
Having a female leader feels like a humiliation to people with this mindset. It would weaken them, they believe, to the point that they can no longer throw a baseball to their kid.
Humans are weird.
*I got just 63 hits on Google, but maybe it’s normally written in some other way.
It’s probably folly to make sense of anything Kanye says, but what does that mean?
It’s really quite simple. Maybe some days he might want to play catch with his son, but then he’d hear a Hillary Clinton campaign slogan and think “F*** him, I’m going to watch some porn!”, or some such.
ETA: Excerpting of the quote by me.
I would say it means, men (that is, insecure men) are vulnerable to feelings that they are no longer in charge. The kind of men that actually feel threatened if women make more money that they do.
So if a woman was president, or whatever, these men wouldn’t feel like a “man” anymore, and throwing a baseball to your son (and only sons, no daughters) is the quintessential shorthand for a “manly” father. So they’d have to do something else, like eat a quiche or something.
Or pee sitting down, maybe.
Ah! Thank you.
Yeah, that.
That as well.
The great writer Paco Ignicio Taibo says that a man’s sitting down to pee is one of the great pleasures of the world.
I thunk conservative humorist ( usually that’s an oxymoron, but I like this guy ) PJ O’Roarke nailed it when he referred to Clinton as “America’s Ex-Wife”.
At least he stopped telling us how he used to be a hippy but wised up and became an alcoholic.
Spelling nitpick - it’s O’Rourke.
The President of the United States implies that the Speaker of the House, leader of a coequal branch of government, is a lush: Trump, Pelosi wage Twitter war over 'stammer' video
I believe this is a misprint. I’ve informed their ombudsman that it should read “Trump tweeted the video at about 9 p.m. after a long day of snorting addies, screaming at the television and bobbing for Chicken McNuggets in an inflatable kiddie pool filled with sweet 'n sour sauce.”