Friday, September 16, 2016

A few campaign comments

The opinion here is that Hillary Clinton should not have rushed back to campaigning so soon.  She would have collapsed on Sunday had Secret Service agents not been around her.  For gosh sake, she was diagnosed with pneumonia.  That is not trivial.  It is assumed that much more rest is generally required for people so afflicted, even often a few days in the hospital.  She must think that getting back on the campaign trail as quickly as possible was a necessity.  Once again that is an exaggeration of how influential her campaigning style has been.  Now she has set herself up for a big problem.  If there is one more health scare, one more instance of dehydration, or a big stumble caught on camera, her campaign will be damaged.  Significant plane travel is taxing on the body. Trump and his media minions will make sure that any problematic physical event will now receive plenty of attention.

The good news is that the few days off seemed to give her a chance to reset her campaign.  She now says that she will focus on her major planned initiatives and not as much as on Trump's obvious falsehoods. They are so transparently not true and the majority of voters should see that.  Committed Trump supporters will not be budged by any logic or any facts.

There is an editorial in the September 10th "Economist" magazine with the title "The Art of the Lie".
It is worth reading, and it points out two important thoughts related to this.  Quoting, "Feelings, not facts, are what matter in this sort of campaigning.  Their opponents' disbelief validates the us-versus-them mindset that outsider candidates thrive on.  And if your opponents focus on trying to show your facts are wrong, they have to fight on the ground you have chosen."

Quoting again, "Well-intentioned journalistic practices bear blame too.  The pursuit of "fairness" in reporting often creates a phoney balance at the expense of the truth."  This is why Trump seems to get a pass on many of his outrageous statements while Clinton has to fight tooth and nail about her e-mails, not about her more important policy initiatives. By the way, Matt Lauer was a joke.

"The Economist" refers to a "post-truth" era of politics.  How to hold a candidate with the bombast of Trump to some degree of accountability is difficult.

As a related aside, it would be nice to think that Clinton's "deplorables" comment at Streisand's LGBT event was due to growing fatigue and not just playing to an audience for applause.  That comment was almost as bad as Mitt Romney's 47% comment in 2012.  At least Romney did not know that he was being recorded.

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Blogger Allen Hengst said...

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