OPINION:
Hillary Clinton is the pluperfect wonk. She grooves on the trivia of policy and conversations with whoever carries a checkbook. But she doesn’t understand campaign politics and has no appreciation of the fine points of the game she insists on trying to play.
She obviously doesn’t listen to the pillow talk in the Clinton boudoir, because there’s a million-dollar tutor right at hand. Bubba knows the game. He might think half of the Trumpkins comprise “a basket of deplorables,” that they’re “irredeemable,” but he would never say it. The first rule of any campaign is that you attack your opponent, never your opponent’s supporters.
Politics is a game of collecting fractions, not insulting them, and wonks, unlike successful campaigners, don’t know any better than to dismiss with fear and loathing half of the opponent’s half. A successful campaigner like Bubba thinks he can redeem some of them (and sometimes he can).
Since all is fair in love and war, and politics is war, successful campaigners are always on the scout for someone nutty, embarrassing or otherwise vile in the opponent’s camp, to demand apologies for sins real and imagined. Such demands are made in hopes that an apology won’t actually be forthcoming, and the story can be kept alive. Bernard Sanders made high sport of scolding Hillary for selling her soul at discount to Wall Street, and the Hillary campaign was later delighted to find an obscure Ku Klux Klansman who said he would vote for Donald Trump. She no doubt hopes that no one has noticed that the chairman of the Communist Party of the United States says he’s a Clinton voter. Indeed, a Clinton campaign of the distant past wrapped itself in the Confederate battle flag, calculating that half the electorate would never notice, or would forget.
Such fraction-mongering can be revealing, and always more revealing about the fraction-flinger than about the target of the insult. Mitt Romney forgot which century he was campaigning in four years ago, when he told an “intimate” Florida fundraising dinner — and someone’s smartphone — that 47 percent of the voters pay no taxes and, though he didn’t say the word, these free-stuff voters are all but irredeemable. These 47-percenters, he said, “are dependent on government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to health care, food, to housing, to you name it. That’s an entitlement … and they will vote for [Barack Obama] no matter what.” Mr. Romney revealed himself to be, as the media described him, a rich man with no sympathy for poor folks. He never survived his indiscreet remarks. Hillary has the big media at her back, but her remarks damage her appeal, anyway.
Just as Mr. Romney’s remark reinforced the suspicion of millions of voters that he neither understood nor sympathized with real-life problems and would take his lack of understanding to the White House, Hillary’s remarks about half of the Donald’s voters reveal not only that she doesn’t understand average Americans, but regards anyone who doesn’t agree with her as beyond redemption. Millions of voters might remember this on Nov. 8.
Her “apology,” such as it was, made it worse, suggesting only that she shouldn’t have used the word “half” in describing how many Trump voters she would consign to her “basket of deplorables.” She says she still thinks they’re racists, sexists, homophobics, xenophobics and Islamaphobics. She omitted the LGBQphobics from the list, perhaps an oversight, and there are no doubt other phobic miscreants out there yet to be named. We’ll hear about them soon enough.
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