On Face the Nation this past weekend, the story everyone was talking about was Hillary Clinton calling out Donald Trump’s voting base for being a bunch of racists.
"To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables," Clinton said. "Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it."
Right. She’s right. Well, the traditional media is not interested in what is true and what is not true; they are solely interested in the game of politics and so they decided to dance around the issue with a lot of “is this a gaffe?” and “is this a smart move?” Slate’s Jamelle Bouie was on Face the Nation along with everyone’s favorite porcelain witch Peggy Noonan to discuss what Clinton said. Bouie walked through host John Dickerson’s talk about “strategy” to ask the simple question: was what Hillary Clinton said wrong? Was it misleading? Was it a lie, an exaggeration?
When I heard the remark my first question was: Is this true? Right? Regardless of how it sounds, what it looks like, is it accurate? What is the case about Donald Trump supporters? And if you break down the numbers and you look at the RealClearPolitics average, and it gives Trump up about 43 percent of registered voters. So it's about 30, 31 million people.
Compare that to polls that show 65 to 70 percent of all Republicans who say Barack Obama either wasn't born in the United States or is a Muslim. You look at pilot data from the American National Election Study, and it shows upwards of 40 percent of Republicans saying things like, "Blacks are more violent, blacks are lazier, Muslims are more violent, Muslims are lazier." Among Trump supporters in particular, 60, 50, 70 percent of them agree with statements political scientists categorize as being explicitly racist. So I'm looking at Clinton's statement, and half—which is about 31 million people again—doesn't really seem that out of bounds. Forty to fifty percent of Republicans, I would say, looking at the full spectrum of data, agree with beliefs that we would categorize as “explicitly prejudiced.” So regardless of whether or not Clinton needs to walk it back or not, I think she's being correct and accurate.
Wait a minute, did Face the Nation forget to tell Jamelle Bouie that they don’t want none of his journalismising? With his “facts” and his “reporting what is true and not true” stuff! The impudence!