www.nytimes.com/...
Okay, it was a very complimentary piece about Hillary’s performance. It merely struck me as clueless as to how the press, including Chozick, is on their own role in making this campaign season as horrifyingly bad as any in memory, including puffing up and normalizing the abnormal and abnormalizing Clinton.
Campaign aides told me the debate was one of the only formats that would allow voters — and the reporters who cover her — to catch an unfiltered glimpse of Mrs. Clinton, a candidate so cautious that even the most innocuous personal details (her favorite TV shows, for example) can seem overthought, and, as a result, come off as overwrought.
On Monday afternoon, as characteristically anxious campaign aides milled around the Hofstra University campus, I tried to pry out details of what Mrs. Clinton did the morning of the debate to deal with the stress.
For instance, I told Clinton aides that I did yoga to hip-hop music in a 90-degree room and drank two iced Red Eyes (cold brew with a shot of espresso). “Did Hillary walk her dogs? Did she do yoga? Do she and Bill binge on blueberry pancakes as a debate-morning tradition?” I asked.
“We’re not that kind of campaign,” a spokesman told me.
That makes the unfettered moments on the debate stage — a late return from the bathroom; a quick-witted response; a rare moment of self-reflection — important in trying to understand Mrs. Clinton.
See that? The Clinton campaign refused to talk about breakfast with a reporter….so what else can a reporter talk about except how secretive and controlled she is. Not issues, not policy. There’s a need for fifty words right now! Quick, something about what someone else is saying about her! Giuliani, Palin, sure, throw it in there!
Chozick shows no idea that it was her job to uncover the real Hillary rather than cover her up.
It requires a debate format, which really is NOT a good place to discuss anything serious in a serious way, to allow us to see even the first relevant thing about the candidates. I mean, really, when these crappy debates are better than the reportage, we get President Trumps.
Jonathan Chait on “The Abnormalization of Hillary Clinton”
nymag.com/...
In the last NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, voters judged Donald Trump to be more honest than Hillary Clinton by a ten-point margin. It is a finding that boggles the mind. Americans deem Clinton less honest and trustworthy than a man who lies in public about opponents in both parties with a frequency and brazenness unsurpassed in national politics, who has broken precedent by refusing to disclose his tax returns, who routinely refused to pay contractors for services rendered, who abused a charitable foundation for personal and political gain, who once boasted in a best-selling book about his habit of lying, and who is currently facing trial for bilking thousands of victims in a massive fraud.
Clinton, as I have conceded, has done some bad things born of secrecy and paranoia. But those bad things have not merely tainted her image but defined it. The email story has utterly dominated the public’s impression of Clinton, who is the second-most-unpopular nominee of all time and whose shortcomings compare in the public mind with those of her grossly unqualified, authoritarian opponent. Open up any interview with undecided voters, and you will find them equating Trump’s shocking lack of qualifications with Clinton’s mundane transparency issues. (For instance, this Florida voter: “Mr. Trump scares him, Mr. Lewis said. Mrs. Clinton, he believes, is dissembling about her health. He, too, is considering sitting out the election.”) The ongoing normalization of Trump is the most disorienting development of the presidential campaign, but the most significant may be the abnormalization of Clinton.