Last night’s
debate was an incredible blowout — yet both candidates were pretty much
who we already knew they were. This was the Hillary Clinton of the
Benghazi hearing confronting the Donald Trump we’ve seen at every stage
of the campaign.
But this then raises a
question: how did the race get so close? Why, on the eve of the debate,
did polls show at best a narrow Clinton lead? What happened to the
commanding lead Clinton held after the conventions?
You might say that
Clinton ran a terrible campaign — but what, exactly, did she do? Trump
may have learned to read from a TelePrompter, but was that such a big
deal?
Well, my guess is that it was the Goring of Hillary: beginning in late August, with the AP report on the Clinton Foundation,
the mainstream media went all in on “abnormalizing” Mrs. Clinton, a
process that culminated with Matt Lauer, who fixated on emails while
letting grotesque, known, Trump lies slide. Here’s a graphic, using the Upshot’s estimate of election probabilities (which is a useful summary of what the polls say):
The thing is, it was
all scurrilous. The AP, if it had been honest, had found no evidence of
wrongdoing or undue influence; if meeting a Nobel Peace Prize winner who
happened to be a personal friend was their prime example … But dinging
the Clintons was what the cool kids were supposed to do, with normal
rules not applying.
And this media
onslaught pushed the race quite close on the eve of the first debate. It
was feeling like 2000 all over again; and I think Jamelle Bouie got
this exactly right:
But it all went off
script last night, partly because HRC did so well and DJT so badly — but
also, I think, because pressure from progressives ensured that there
was a lot of real-time fact-checking.
Whether it turns out
to have been enough to turn the tide remains to be seen. But anyone in
the media who participated in the razzing of Hillary Clinton should
think about what we saw on that stage, and ask himself what the hell he
thought he was doing.
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