Monday’s presidential debate was a blowout, surely the most one-sided confrontation in American political history. Hillary Clinton was knowledgeable, unflappable and — dare we say it? — likable. Donald Trump was ignorant, thin-skinned and boorish.
Yet on the eve of the debate, polls showed a close race. How was that possible?
So begins Paul Krugman’s column for Friday’s New York Times, titled How the Clinton-Trump Race Got Close.
His answer to the question he was asked has several parts. First, there is a significant chunk (not a majority) of the electorate
are white nationalists at heart. Indeed, implicit appeals to racial hostility have long been at the core of Republican strategy; Mr. Trump became the G.O.P. nominee by saying outright what his opponents tried to convey with dog whistles.
But of greater importance is that Clinton got “Gored” by the media, that
she ran into a buzz saw of adversarial reporting from the mainstream media, which treated relatively minor missteps as major scandals, and invented additional scandals out of thin air.
As examples of this he cites both the AP coverage of the non-scandal of the Clinton Foundation and the really poor questioning (with too much focus on emails) by Matt Lauer at the Commander-in-Chief forum.
Krugman views the media hostility towards Mrs. Clinton, that
it had the feel of the cool kids in high school jeering at the class nerd.
While sexism was clearly part of it, given that it had been directed also at Gore it goes beyond that.
What I think Krugman does not fully grasp is that the media hostility to the Clintons goes back as far as Sally Quinn of the Washington Post when the Clintons first arrived in 1993. We can also note that something of a similar attitude has at times been directed in Obama’s direction.
The attitude of the press going in was set to continue a mindset, with lower expectation for Trump, except that the American people saw the debate, and despite those who try to spin the first part of the debate as good for Trump, that was not what the American people experienced. As Krugman puts it
For many, the revelation wasn’t Mr. Trump’s performance, but Mrs. Clinton’s: The woman they saw bore little resemblance to the cold, joyless drone they’d been told to expect.
Krugman thinks it will have an impact going forward, particular on some voters who might have voted third party or stayed home because what they saw in Mrs. Clinton was NOT the “she-devil” that had been prepared to experience. If that happens, Krugman says that Mrs. Clinton’s “bravura” performance Monday night will deserve the credit.
But things should never have gotten to this point, where so much depended on defying media expectations over the course of an hour and a half. And those who helped bring us here should engage in some serious soul-searching.
And yes, major organs of the media, which may now finally be regularly challenging Trump on his misstatements and outright lies and ridiculous lack of meaningful or practical policy, those words are directed at you.