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Originally Posted by DVaut1
I'm sure they'll wage pre-impeachment proceedings on emails during the lame duck sessions. Just listen to Trump drone on about this to see how much fertile ground is here. They can just mad lib their nonsense stats, throw around inane technical terms they don't understand, make it tawdry and lustful and Islamophobic since Weiner's dick pics and Huma Abedin are at the center of it. Like there's a non-zero you will hear a sentence like "Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton used bleach bit to delete 650,000 emails before taking 13 hammers to her phone to prevent Comey from investigating her Muslim Brotherhood ties to Benghazi, which an unnamed source has said were acid washed, all because of pictures of a male genitals!" spoken non-ironically by a GOP Congressman between now and January. It won't make any sense at all but it's already part and parcel of the GOP talking point playbook, the mish mash gibberish where every sentence has some X number of emails, a vaguely technical point about email, some dramatic thing Hillary did to them, and then sometimes, a quip about Huma or Weiner either being Muslim or the dude's dick.
Related:
The Media Freakout Over the Clinton Email Story Is a Preview of the Next Four Years
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There are two vital things to understand about that future. The first is that Republicans will be devoting the bulk of their energies in the next four (or eight) years to finding—or, if that fails, inventing—Clinton "scandals." This isn't a possibility, it's a certainty. Last Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Representative Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House oversight committee, is already planning on "spending years, come January, probing the record of a President Hillary Clinton." And it won't just be Chaffetz's committee—don't forget that Republicans managed to conduct eight separate congressional investigations of Benghazi in an endless quest to get something on Clinton. If Republicans hold the House, without any actual legislating to distract them they'll do almost nothing but investigate her. They know well, because it was their strategy throughout the 1990s, that if you can't find a scandal you can still create the appearance of a scandal just by launching one investigation after the next, berating administration witnesses, and shaking your fists in the air for the benefit of the cameras.
The second thing to understand is that the news media will eat all this up with a spoon. Washington journalists long ago convinced themselves that the Clintons are corrupt, and there's some kind of Watergate-level scandal about them just waiting for the right intrepid reporter to discover. And just like Republicans, they too know that while a scandal is the best story, a pseudo-scandal is almost as good, because it allows for all kinds of "BREAKING NEWS!!!" chyrons and breathless speculation. As Jonathan Allen wrote in perhaps the best explanation of the special rules that govern how the media treats them, "The Clinton rules are driven by reporters' and editors' desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family's political empire. At least in that way, Republicans and the media have a common interest."
And consider this: If and when Clinton is elected, Republicans will complain bitterly that the news media were too harsh on Donald Trump. This is a complicated issue, but what's undeniable is that Trump has forced journalists to find new ways to talk about a candidate who lies as frequently as Trump, has such contempt for democratic norms, and who attacks journalists themselves so unceasingly and personally. Even if all their decisions in shaping that coverage have been justified, they'll be eager to show they aren't playing favorites, and one of the best ways to show you aren't captive to "liberal bias" is to rake Hillary Clinton over the coals.
Co-sign all of this. If you thought the past few days debating the merits of an indescribable scandal that even the critics can't coherently explain with no actual information was tedious, it only continues from here.
- no governing to do
- revanchist GOP base can only be united in their will to shame HRC, obstructing HRC main play to unify party after toxic election
- media hates the Clintons or at least cover them far more skeptically than a league average politician (I can acknowledge the Clintons invite some of this), and have collectively built up the notion that the right-wing fever swamp stuff about the Clintons are valid or at least potentially so and feed it into the mainstream news diet; this was less true about Obama
All of this is to say I think 2020 HRC re-election campaign is going to be a huge uphill battle. Economy has grown steadily, recession/correction might be likely. It is a fait accompli she will be entirely scandalized, merits be damned and tons of fence-sitters, NeverTrumpers, 'undecideds' and others will have some potentially large set of faux scandalous stuff to point to as reasons for why they are folding back into the GOP. Plus a fourth consecutive term of one party holding the Presidency is a rarity; the 'change' narrative is going to play well regardless. Only factors in the Democrats favor (and it's a big one) are the related demographic death of the GOP base + GOP's inability to fight the associated epistemic closure/white oppostional cultural problems. In other words, GOP might not be able to get out of their own way and stumble on the way to the layup.
HRC is probably going to win and we'll probably dodge Trump and that's nice but unless there are some huge crisis, events, foreign policy stuff, etc. that really change the political culture and dynamics, or HRC/the Democrats are really effective getting out of this feedback loop, I don't see how the next 4 years plays out much differently than the campaign.
Last edited by DVaut1; 11-01-2016 at 03:19 AM.
