In April 1994, I drove across better than half the country and spent several hours each day listening to Rush. This was the first time I heard him and was also the first time I heard the beginnings of what we now refer to as the alt-right. The internet only sent brief messages without pictures or sound, Fox News as a cable network didn’t exist, Glenn Beck was enrolled in a sobriety program, Sean Hannity was working at a small, AM talk-show radio station in Georgia and Alex Jones was sitting in a classroom in Austin Community College twiddling his thumbs.
So here I am driving through Kansas, Nebraska and Illinois, and listening to Rush who talked endlessly about Whitewater without telling his audience that his entire story-line was picked up each day from the Whitewater coverage in the most mainstream of all mainstream publications, a.k.a., The New York Times. The Times was obsessed with Whitewater, probably because they blew the Watergate scoop, and it was their reportage, particularly error-riddled stories written by Jeff Gerth, which provoked more than six years of government investigations that ultimately came up with nothing at all.
What was most interesting listening to Rush’s daily excoriation of possible Clinton malfeasance was what happened every time that Rush opened the phone lines and took a listener’s call. Just about every caller told Rush he was doing a ‘great’ job by exposing the Clinton’s dark side, but the real anger was directed at Hillary, not Bill. A story had just broken that Hillary cleared nearly $100,000 in commodity trading with an initial investment of $1,000 in 1978-79. Where was the story? In The New York Times. Rush never mentioned Whitewater without also talking about the commodity profits, reminding his audience that it was Hillary, not Bill, who profited from those trades. And the people who called in to voice their reactions to Rush’s daily riff always emphasized that Hillary was the villain, the evil force behind all the shady deals.
I was recalled this when I read Hillary’s new book, What Happened, which puts her back into the center of things thanks to a fifteen-city publicity tour. The book is actually about Hillary and what she likes and doesn’t like, eats and doesn’t eat, wears and doesn’t wear, along with an exhaustive list of the wonderful, talented and extraordinarily expert people who worked on her campaign. A little mistake here and there? What the hell, we’re human and we all make mistakes.
On the other hand, the chapter on the gun issue is very well done, perhaps the clearest and least self-aggrandizing section of the book. But here again, it wasn’t her, it was that damned NRA which has become “one of the most dangerous organizations in America” because Wayne-o saw Hillary as such a mortal threat. Hillary admits that her gun-control rhetoric was particularly aimed at female voters in swing states. So how was it that in those critical swing states most of the Republican women stuck by the man?
I’ll tell you why. Because those female voters, along with many voters who switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, didn’t vote against the message, they voted against the messenger who has been a toxic presence in the political arena since I started listening to Rush. I’m not sure how and why Hillary has been such an easy target for the alt-right/white, but the bottom line is when it came to going after her, the NRA couldn’t wait.
Hillary did the GVP community an important service by bringing the gun issue back out of the closet where it had been snoozing since the alleged impact of the pro-gun vote in 1994. But if we learned anything from the unthinkable success of You Know Who last year, voters are as much or more influenced by who says it than what they say.
Want to use the next election as a mechanism for promoting sensible gun regs? Find a candidate whom the voters really like, not someone with a shopworn name.
I don’t think it is not only to “Find a candidate whom the voters really like,” but also one who can tell the truth. Just one very simple example that is easily verified: in her book she says “It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching ‘well, what would you do?'” This was referring to how Trump would follow her around and it made her skin crawl. Well…I went back and watched the 2nd debate that she made reference to and I couldn’t find Trump following her around but Hillary would go into Trump “space” and follow him around. The video is around one hour and thirty-three minutes, watch and see what you think.
P.S. I know one of Bill Clinton’s security members when Bill was the Governor of Arkansas and was told that no detail member wanted to drive Hillary…”she was a real bitch.”
Gah. I first heard Rush Limbaugh when I was a fresh hire at the University of Hawaii and building geochemical separation equipment our geochemistry clean lab. I would be in the machine shop several hours a day on some days (my stepdad was a career Chevy machinist, UAW, and some of it wore off). The head departmental machinist, a nice guy who was rebuilding the old Oahu sugar mill locomotive as a tourist attraction in his spare time, was a real Rush aficionado and it was exasperating. This was in 1988 and the Great Rush Conspiracy Theory Operation was already going full bore.
Hillary isn’t just red meat for the alt-right/white crowd. She seems to have alienated a lot of the center/left as well. 2016 Dem voting was apparently down considerably in many of those purple states that He Who Shall Not Be Named carried.
I was at a Dem gathering in Santa Fe a few weeks ago (I too tend to be a Yellow Dog Democrat lately) where Jon Hendry, President of the New Mexico Federation of Labor, gave an impassioned talk to the local Progressives telling the local Dem/Prog bigwigs to get off the identity politics/gun control/bathroom rights issues and get back onto economics. Made a lot of sense.
As far as Hillary v Trump, Michael Moore wrote this up long before the Servergate turds hit the windmill and I was hoping he was wrong: https://michaelmoore.com/trumpwillwin/
OK, I would have preferred Martin O’Malley stay in the race if we really wanted to see firearms regulation discussed.
The entire picture changes if you see Hillary as winning the popular vote by nearly 3 million, but lost due to the Electoral College distorting the vote. Still, there were three states she “should” have “won”, PA, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but didn’t. I know that she lost a lot of votes in PA by threatening coal.
Anyway, it is probably much easier to blame Clinton for her “loss”. In fact, it seems most everything is being blamed except what should be fixed.
I think the real issue is the seriously broken system of elections.
The Electoral College simply is a fact of political life and everyone knew it. As you say, Hillary should have paid more attention to those swing/Rust Belt states. Elections are not won on the basis of ten point policy statements. They are won or lost on the basis of who appeals to the voters more than the other person. Surface crap really matters.
Let me break the nbews to all of you as gently as I can. Hillary did not win a majority of the popular vote, despite what her supporters keep saying. She beat Trump by 3 million, but the Libertarian and Green candidate together polled 5 million votes. Sorry, that doesn’t add up to a majority of the popular votes for Hillary.
I was actually very polite to her in my review. And here’s why. Trump got into the race oin June 24, 2015. A year later he was effectively the GOP candidate. Who comprised his entire senior staff over this period? His local lawyer, his idiot son, his daughter and son-in-law, his daughter’s college chum Hope Hicks, and Paul Manafort as Chair and Lewandoski as Campaign Director. The only one of this entire group who had any experience at all in an election was Lewandowski and his entire experience consisted of running the Senate campaign for the incumbent NH Senator, Bob Smith in 2002, a campaign in which Smith was challenged in the primary by the son of John Sununu and lost. That was Lewandowski’s entire experience. Trump made him campaign manager after he lost Iowa and knew that if he didn’t do well in NH he was finished and Lewandowski was a NH native and GOP hanger-on.
If you read Hillary’s book, it begins with a long rapture about all the people she hired for 2016 whose experience, smarts, knowledge, contacts, blah, blah, blah would allow her to ‘avoid’ the mistajkes she made in 2008 although she never explains what thoise mirtakes were. But she does go page after page with how wonderful this poerson was, and how experienced that person was, and so on and so on.
So how does she explain how this galaxy of all-stars couldn’t compete with the six shlumps who were running Trump’s campaign? Answer: anti-female feelings, trhe email server, Comey and the Russkies.
But here’s what she doesn’t say. Trump’s polling told him that in swing states, where he ended up doing event after event and Hillary rarely, if ever showed her face, it turned out that 15-20% of the white voters who went for Obama in 2012 wouldn’t vote for Hillary no matter what. And that was exactly the margin he needed to win the swing states that got him the brass ring.
Now home come Hillary’s dream team didn’t figure this out? In fact, Hillary actually mentioned that she didn’t have good numbres but only said this as regards Republican voters, she never mentions the 2012 Democrats who weren’t going to vote for her in 2016.
So I was very polite in my review. And with all due resepct to the problems with the Electoral College, I didn’t notice any of my liberal friends complaning when Bill Clintoin didn’t get a majority of the popular vote in 1992.
That pretty much covers the story.
That’s because the Electoral College is conveniently neglected in the discussion. It was mentioned in 2000, but forgotten. I’m sure it would be front and centre had the results been the other way around (Clinton lost pop vote, but won in electoral college). On the other hand, getting rid of it is one of many fixes needed in the system.