There’s been some discussion of how damaging FBI Director Comey’s announcement that Clinton should not be indicted will be (or should be) for Clinton’s campaign. The general consensus is that it should be pretty damaging but she’s running against Trump so it doesn’t matter.
To the first part. If it’s not going to be damaging to Clinton it’s because no one cares. Clinton took the hit for this in January and she’s past it. There wont be additional fallout from Comey’s announcement because there was no additional information in Comey’s announcement.
But the media say it’s a big deal! The same media that have been hyping the eGhazi story for a year. Will Clinton get indicted or impeached? Can Obama pardon her in the middle of an election campaign? What does the use of a private email server say about her character?
Just a day before these same people were hyperventilating about the “appearance of impropriety” of the meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch.
So how does the media pirouette from the wild-eyed conspiracy peddling nonsense they had been so carefully harvesting without admitting that they got the story completely wrong. Because admitting you got it wrong might be embarrassing and require some self-reflection about how deeply they have been manipulated.
Which is why this construction (this is not a quote):
Clinton should be devastated by this but her opponent is Trump so it doesn’t matter.
is so absolutely perfect for them. Because no matter what happens they get to be right. Even though they have been so. completely. wrong.
But I would really like to dissect the false premise underlying the second part of that construction. That Clinton is lucky to be facing off against Trump and some other Republican would be better at taking advantage of Comey’s announcement.
This premise requires that everyone has entirely forgotten the Republican primary.
In case anyone has forgotten, the Republican primary was run, explicitly, to determine who would be the best candidate at attacking Hillary Clinton.
Rubio, Cruz, Christie, Jeb!, Trump, Kasich … every one in the clown car was doing their level best to demonstrate to the Republican base that they, and no one else, had the chops to take down Hillary Clinton.
And the Republicans quite explicitly rejected Rubio and Kasich and Christie. They chose Trump. Not because they’re delusional, not because they’re all racists (though some are). They chose Trump to beat Clinton.
To say at this point that Trump is the worst possible candidate to exploit Clinton’s mistakes is to completely ignore the reality that Trump was selected in a contest centered around the question of “who is best at exploiting Clinton’s mistakes.”
The consensus now is that Trump is the worst candidate to go against Clinton because the moment he went head-to-head against Clinton he proved to be brittle and she proved to be unbreakable. But before that, when Clinton was still fighting her bitter primary opponent, the pundits were all talking about Trump’s enormous advantage in free media coverage. They were all talking about how he was the perfect candidate to counter Clinton because he was non-traditional, an outsider, not afraid to tell-it-like-it-is, not constrained by civility or worn down by decades of political infighting.
Yeah… not so much.
Many of the people insisting that eGhazi is a big story are people who staked their reputations to eGhazi being a big story. Many of the people insisting that Trump is the worst candidate are people who insisted that Trump was a brilliant choice bound to upset our entire understanding of American politics right up until Clinton exposed him as a charlatan.Keep calm and carry on.