This is excellent. Quoting at length because not a few people on this forum are guilty of doing the very same thing. It illustrates that Clinton had to be perfect. No verbal gaffes. No strategic decisions that in hindsight proved miscalculated. She can’t even articulate her own feelings on the loss without getting pilloried for being self-serving (which no other losing candidate in political history has had to face.)
Well, I’ll let Dave Roberts do the talking:
Should Clinton have just not said that dumb thing?
If you read Clinton’s answer to the town hall question in full, it’s all pretty garbled and inarticulate. She was clearly not at the top of her game at that event. "You say millions of words in a campaign and you do your best to be clear and accurate,” she writes. “Sometimes it just comes out wrong.”
Of course, even at her best, Clinton was never adept at the poetry of campaigning. You could never imagine Obama fumbling words like this. Even in his alleged gaffes — like “they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion” — he said exactly what he meant. Even speaking spontaneously, he delivered complete sentences and paragraphs, with uncommon command over his tone.
Clinton lacks the kind of verbal dexterity her husband and Obama have, and their ability to connect to any crowd. She made up for it by studying, by knowing more, forging deeper relationships, having more detailed policies. But it was inevitable that during a long campaign, she would mix a few G.W. Bush-style word salads.
But garbled sentences, in and of themselves, are not significant. As discussed, Clinton’s actual intentions toward coal communities are clear. What does it matter, in the grand scheme of things, that she misspoke about it? Does it reveal anything about her character or her policies that is germane to what kind of president she’d be? “Occasionally misspeaks” has not typically been a barrier to higher office in the US, or else there’d be very few politicians.
There is one and only one reason to pluck out that sentence and make a story of it: to try to hurt Clinton politically by lying about her meaning and intentions.
I guess I’m just stating the obvious here, but this point is also worth belaboring: It was a political hit job. It wasn’t a revelation of relevant information; it was a distortion, a lie.
From the media’s perspective, “Clinton garbled a sentence” is true but not particularly newsworthy. “Clinton boasted about putting coal miners out of work” is false but definitely newsworthy (and damaging to Clinton) if it were true. In other words, there’s no honest reason to make this “gaffe” a story at all.
“But Dave,” you’re saying. “This got covered everywhere, including the MSM. Are you saying they were all lying in order to damage Clinton?”
No. That’s not how the game works. The game works like this:
Right-wing operatives and media figures watch Clinton intensely. Anything she says or does that can be plausibly (or implausibly) spun to appear maleficent, they spin. A vast echo chamber of blogs, “news” sites, radio stations, cable news shows, and Facebook groups takes each one of these mini faux scandals and amplifies the signal.
If one of the faux scandals catches on enough and dominates right-wing media long enough, then a kind of alchemy occurs. The question facing mainstream outlets is not, “Why aren’t you writing about what Clinton said?” That question is easy to answer: It’s a nothingburger. The question becomes, “Why aren’t you writing about the scandal over what Clinton said?”
Reputable mainstream journalists don’t have to pretend that Clinton meant the ridiculous thing right-wing media says she meant. They can just report that “some interpreted Clinton to mean [ridiculous thing],” and hey, that’s technically true. The fact that a bunch of right-wing political and media hacks feigned outrage becomes the story.
The coal gaffe followed that well-established trajectory. The second Clinton said the words, right-wing media yanked them out of context and spun them as cartoonishly evil. Then it’s, hey, CNN, why aren’t you covering the scandal over Clinton’s coal comments?
The groove is so well-worn that the whole cycle has compressed to hours now. Writers for purportedly nonpartisan outlets, desperate for clicks, eagerly hoover up the faux scandals, their journalistic sins washed away by the transformation of Thing to Scandal-About-the-Thing. The former does not need to have any significance, or even to be real, for the latter to flourish.
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But note that when mainstream critics talk about these things, it’s never the things themselves that are the problem. It’s always the optics: “how it sounded” or “how it looked.” If you unpack that a little — “she should have known how it would look” — here’s what it means: She should have known that anything she does or says that can be spun to look bad will be spun to look bad, and the MSM will pass along the spin uncritically, so she shouldn’t have done or said anything that can be spun to look bad.