Susan Bordo - The Destruction of Hillary Clinton

Epilogue

How harmful to Clinton was the second Comey intervention? Common sense alone suggests that the revival of the email scandal, which had led so many Americans to see Clinton as untrustworthy and a liar, would have had a significant effect. Before the new email investigation was announced, the national consciousness was awash with revulsion and condemnation of Trump over the Access Hollywood tapes and the allegations that followed. After Comeys letter? For all intents and purposes it was as though the Access Hollywood tapes had never happened, and the twelve women alleging abuse had never come forward. Breaking News of new email revelations swept all that away.

Since the inauguration, however, things have changed. With Trump in the White House, all hope of a pivot is gone, and we now know that the man we elected is just what he seemed to be, and worse: an inveterate liar and authoritarian narcissist who appears to take what few orders he obeys not from constitutional constraints on his authority, but from right-wing ideologues like Steve Bannon and the interests of big business. In November, after the election, we were all instructed to have an open mind and give him a chance. But the abusive tweets never stopped and the baldfaced liesabout the size of the crowds at his inauguration, the three million fraudulent votes for Clinton, the failure of the dishonest press to cover terrorist attackshave become daily fare. At the same time, weve found out that candidate Trump didnt lie about the things many of us most feared: in his first few weeks he ordered frantic, if clumsy, assaults on Obamacare, environmental and consumer protection, reproductive rights, and as of this writing, is attempting to put into effect the ban on Muslim immigration he promised throughout his campaign.

In the face of what seems to be a full-scale Trumpian attack on democracy, the rule of law, and the authority of fact, that Clinton was ever seen by any liberal or left-leaning voters as the lesser of two evils is painfully surreal, and those polls that showed that people found Trump more trustworthy now seem a betrayal of reason, evidence of just how deeply we were connednot only by Trump but by the popular narratives concocted by the GOP and perpetuated by the media.

The GOP and news commentators alike cried sore loser when the Clinton campaign claimed Comeys interference had cost them the election. We now know, however, that the Clinton campaigns interpretation is highly likely to be correct. The polls, we were often told, simply got it wrong in predicting Clinton would be the winner. As Vox points out, however, much of what pundits are describing as error might better be described as the Comey effect. For very few of those polls were taken after Comey re-opened the investigation, which also happened to coincide with the final stretch of days when an unusually large number of undecided voters were making up their minds. Many of those late-deciding voters were likely to have had lingering reservations about Clinton (otherwise, why were they undecided?), but we know from earlier polls that such reservations were almost always based on mistrust, issuing largely from the faux email scandalwhich had just been revived by James Comey.

Comparison of absentee votes and votes on Election Day show evidence of a late surge toward Trump. Bolstering the Comey effect hypothesis, too, is the fact that the national polls show indisputable evidence that Clintons margin over Trump fell swiftly and steeply directly after the Comey letterand never recovered. By November 3, Clintons lead in the national polls was evaporating, and Trump had several plausible electoral map routes to victory.

That Comey was a massive blow to Clinton at a pivotal moment in the election seems beyond doubt. But if this book has argued anything at all, its that Hillarys loss wasnt just the result of Comeys interference, or just the result of Putins hacks, or GOP witch hunts, or fake news, or right-wing Hillary hate books. Her defeat isnt just attributable to sexism or just the fault of the media. It wasnt just caused by the Sanders effect, which splintered democratic unity by generation. The destruction of Hillary Clintons candidacyand our hope of defeating Donald Trumpwas the result of all of these. One on top of the other, overlapping, mutually reinforcing, a massive pile-on of open assaults, secret strategies, unconscious biases, and blundering media business as usual simply proved too much. Even so, Hillary Clinton won nearly three million more votes than Trump. As to those states she lost: she didnt fail to deliver, as its now often described. I would say instead that she almost made it, despite a daily barrage of character attacks, lies, and distortions.

When I began this epilogue, it was the day after Donald Trumps inauguration, and millions of women, men, and children were gathering around the world to protest his policies. Where was all this energy before the election? one newscaster asked. Undoubtedly, many of the protestors had voted for Hillary Clinton. But the newscaster has a point. If the same coalition of anti-Trump forces, united not by a single issue or a single preferred candidate, had put their hearts and minds together with the aim of defeating him, it surely would have been accomplished. As things actually went, however, fear of a Trump presidency was not motivation enough to generate mass enthusiasm for the one action that was required to defeat him: electing Hillary Clinton.

Many people, to be sure, simply couldnt wrap their minds around the possibility that Trump could actually win, and didnt vote for Hillary, thinking she had it sewn upas the pre-Comey polls had predicted. But others didnt want to vote for Hillary and couldnt bring themselves to, because they had been schooled in and accepted a false picture of who she is. Weve seen, throughout this book, how and by whom that false picture was createdand how it was greatly enhanced by the (seemingly non-partisan) mainstream media, who served as a conveyor belt and mass disseminator of negative narratives and imagery about Hillary.

The forces working against Clinton, then, were multiple and determinedand as it turned out, as effective as any true conspiracy in creating a critical mass of voters to derail her campaign. Who belonged to that mass? Of course, there were the natural Trump lovers, the racists and xenophobes who were with him from the beginning. There were the faithful Republicans who wouldnt vote for a Democrat under any circumstances. And there were those who wouldnt vote for a womanany womanno matter how qualified or experienced she was. Trump would have gotten all those votes in any case.

The voters I have in mind are different. They belong, mostly, to the almost five million Obama voters who either didnt vote at all, voted third party, or may even have voted for Trump: The white, middle-class, suburban women who wanted to distance themselves from the unscrupulous, cold, elitist politician who was definitely not their kind of woman. The rust belt men who believed she was the corporate whore who had proposed putting coal miners out of business (rather thanas was actually the casean honest candidate describing an economic reality that had to be confronted by the government whose responsibility it was to find other means of employment for them). The Sanders fans who came to see Hillary as barely better than Trump, and who just couldnt rouse themselves to campaign for her (or for too many, to vote for her). The 46 percent of black voters under the age of thirty who did not vote, who may or may not have been Sanders supporters but who often, when asked why they didnt intend on voting for Hillary, recited the Sanders caricature. The many hardworking, stressed, perfectly decent folks with little spare time to research the facts, who put their trust in the media to tell them what was important, what was true, what to believe, and who came to believe that Hillary Clinton was too untrustworthy to be our president. The man I met at the grocery store who crossed Hillary off his list when she seemed to be describing many of his relatives as a basket of deplorables.