To pick up where I left off: There were fatal flaws with Hillary’s approach to telling her own story during the general election campaign — some strategic, some tactical and one insurmountable.
The first flaw was not having a single, powerful, simple story and sticking with it. (Something for which Obama was famous.) This was compounded by the fuzziness and inherent blah-ness that made it impossible for the Plugger story to resonate.
A second, strategic flaw was writing a closing story that didn’t have Hillary Clinton at its center, let alone as its hero. (She was, in fact, not really the hero of any of her own stories. In one, she was the dutiful worker bee. In another, she explicitly made her various constituencies, personified in her videos, the center of attention. And in the backstory, she stood in for all women.) In the end, she was a bulwark. This last chapter was a defensive, finger-in-the-dike tale. A reaction to circumstances rather than the proactive, affirming vision represented by Stronger Together.
And damn, it really should have worked. I mean, building walls? Registering Muslims? Grabbing pussies? Not to mention the heights of political incompetence and depths of policy knowledge. This was a one-of-a-kind opponent who, by all that is right and good, should have self-immolated months before. Reminding people of that fact should have been enough.
A big reason it wasn’t enough was a major tactical flaw, related to the first flaw mentioned above: the campaign allowed itself to be thrown off its game. Intentionally set or not, they fell into the trap of reacting to events, instead of controlling them. They didn’t see this — or they did, and just didn’t know how to deal with the one-of-a-kindness of our first reality TV candidate. The normal rules simply did not apply. Yes, presidential campaigns aren’t waged or won with facts, and stories are essential. But typically these stories — based on nostalgia or fear or lies or whatever — require some internal coherence to hold up. In 2016, that went out the window.
This was compounded by an overarching flaw: hubris. Understandable, because really, who the hell thought that Mr. Cheetos ever had a shot? Not me. I never imagined that so many millions of people would so eagerly embrace or so willingly look past his ... (fill in the blank; you’ve read this list from me before). This led to electoral overreach (maybe we’ve got a shot in Utah!) and a much-too-late pivot toward directly addressing a serious threat — which, as noted above, they never did quite figure out.
What they missed was that Trump inverted Hillary’s it’s-not-really-about-me approach. His story was literally all about him.
His character was his campaign. He was able to say anything, no matter how much or how quickly it contradicted something else he had said, and it didn’t matter. He was able to spit on accepted political “norms” (more on that another time maybe) and more specifically upend Republican dogma without consequence. As a reality entertainment star, he was playing a part. His words were simply set dressing. In this world, once a persona has been established (villain, two-timer, backstabber, straight talker, etc.), all the audience requires is a steady repetition of favorite catchphrases and applause lines ("lock her up!"), and an ongoing and ideally escalating series of thrills and cliffhangers.
Not only did this keep his core supporters satisfied throughout a long campaign, but it left the Clinton campaign (thanks to its closing story) — and the press, which also had no idea what to do with a problem like Trump — chasing and responding to an ever-expanding set of outrageous statements, lies, contradictions and logical impossibilities. Baiting and switching. Bobbing and weaving. (How much of this was intentional on his part, how much was the calculation of his team and how much was sheer Id-driven happenstance is still up for debate.)
Instead of adding up to an unimpeachable argument against him, it buzzed like a swarm of gnats — impossible to hold onto and more annoying than anything else. If you weren’t predisposed to recoil from his very orange hair, or had no deep interest in politics or policy, it all and all-too-quickly became background noise.
Oh, and that press I mentioned? Say hello to the insurmountable flaw. The egregiousness of the national journalistic corps knows few bounds. (Pardon my tarring of the entire media world with a single brush, but this was an amazingly widespread weakness.)
On the one hand, they were clearly outmaneuvered by a superior savant of an opponent. I’m not sure it’s fair to blame them for having a hard time figuring out how to deal with a lifelong conman and mercurial egomaniac like Donald J. Trump. But I do, believe me I do. That’s their friggin’ job. One at which they continue to struggle, and fail.
And on the other hand? If anything, that was worse. Where they really shredded just about any possibility of Hillary’s stories gaining traction was in their dogged determination to act as Javert, turning every action, email and decision into a presumed scandal and refusing to accept “there’s nothing here” for an answer — and making damn sure that their readers and viewers would have great difficulty ever reaching that conclusion. She certainly has her flaws, and could rightfully be dinged for unforced errors before and during the campaign, but we were in a “Hillary Clinton: Ogre Or Troll? Opinions Differ.” echo chamber.
I sound like a Hillary apologist. Fair enough. A good candidate — a better candidate? — may have found a way to overcome this, to get around the press. A singular candidate certainly did. But try this thought experiment: If Hillary had been running against Cruz, or Rubio, or Bush, do you think the “first woman president” story would still have been pushed all the way to the furthest back burner of election coverage? Or compare 2008 coverage specifically focused on The First Black President story to treatment of 2016’s First Female President. Even when the Obama story hit a speed bump, it was more often that not because of race (see: Jeremiah Wright, Kenya, Michelle’s’ nonexistent Whitey tape, etc.)
Also too: We can and should argue about the role played in the election by James Comey and other nefarious outside actors (gerrymanderers, vote suppressers, hackers, etc.). Votes were swung, no doubt.
But we rely on the press to sift through the haystacks and find the actual needles. This time, they acted as if the entire pile was HIV-infected hypodermics. There really were Clinton Rules.
Maybe it was familiarity breeding contempt. Maybe it was a perversion of the already perverse equal time, “both sides do it” instinct. Maybe it was an uncontrollable Pavlovian response conditioned by the modern-day requirement for ready/fire/aim breaking news. Maybe it was, fatefully and painfully enough, because the media assumed along with the rest of us that Trump was toast and decided to focus their energies elsewhere. (The conventional wisdom had to come from somewhere, after all.) Whatever the reasons, she was always walking ten miles through the snow to get to and from work, uphill both ways.
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So no, I don’t think it was absence of story that doomed the Clinton presidency. There was plenty of story — too much story — to go around.
It just wasn’t strong enough and sharp enough to stop a uniquely devious and despicable black swan candidate, abetted by an exceptionally ineffectual press corps, from besting a traditionally run, overconfident, moderately well-executed campaign. (I say moderately, but in retrospect whatever happened to the much-vaunted, micro-targeted Clinton GOTV effort that was going to be worth at least a percentage point or two? Never mind.)
Like many aspects of the election, a comparison of the two sides’ stories kind of misses the point, trying to force equivalence where there can be none. (See? Journalism is hard.)
Which leads (finally!) to what you’ll get in part four: Does any of this teach us anything? Because believe it or not, this series is not intended to be a completely useless intellectual exercise.