In Post-Mortem of Election, Clinton Learns Literally Nothing
Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.
New York: Crown, 2017.
The left, Clinton, and the media are defiant, and refuse to learn anything from the 2016 presidential election — root causes, messaging, or anything else which would hint at self-awareness. They still want us to believe that the Russkies did it. Or they point towards breaches against PC doctrine about race and gender they think somehow proves their case. How can we get through to people who are at once so sensitive about words and speech, and yet so dull in perceiving cause and effect?
Some documentation has emerged recently which gives us a more intimate look into the Clinton campaign’s strategy and the thought process of Clinton herself, both post-election and during the campaign. Some of this we already know: that she is arrogant, entitled, and so forth; but what is in particular amusing is that she still seems to think that the “argument” of referring to Trump and his supporters as “racist” is an a priori proposition — no evidence needed, rather than a contentious characterization of which people have grown weary.
For example, it may be underestimated how devastating Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” speech was to her campaign. This is described in Shattered, a book which gives an inside look at the Clinton campaign (though through an annoyingly partisan Democrat perspective). The authors, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, compare “basket of deplorables” to Romney’s “47 percent” remark, which may well have cost him the election: “Hillary had become the 2016 cycle’s Mitt Romney […] For all the messaging she’d done on inclusiveness, she now sounded like not only an elite but an elitist” (316). While it was hard to gauge the political effects at the time due to the constant spin from the MSM, that may well have been the moment that she lost the election. Shattered shows that the Clinton campaign was more cognizant of her mistake than they let on. At any rate, the remark certainly demonstrated Clinton’s cavalier attitude towards non-ethnomasochistic Whites (for those who weren’t already aware). Read more