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UPDATE: It seems I have multiple chapters on this same theme. what about that Right wing book “Hillary is Unlikeable? Still not sure if I did another chapter regarding this theme-Ed Klein book?

I give Amy Choznick some credit as she’s the first major MSM reporter to admit the sins of the MSM in the 2016 election. She freely admits the press made itself into ‘unwitting’ Russian agents-in covering the Podesta emails, DNC hacks, etc. Note that the media had not given much coverage to North Korea’s hacks of Sony in 2015 or Wikileaks hacks of the CIA after the election, so they are capable of not amplifying and doing the work of foreign hackers.

But, of course, the Clinton Rules were always different-the media always felt less need to corroborate negative stories about her before connecting the dots and assuming the worst. But Choznick admits some culpability on the part of her and her fellow journalists. 

“It’s dizzying to realize that without even knowing it, you’ve ended up on the wrong side of history. Months after the election, every time I heard the words “Russia” and “collude,” this realization swirled in my head, enveloping everything.”

Still she falls back on the crutch that, after all, Hillary was a bad candidate who should have won despite Russia, the media obsessions on the emails, Comey, etc. This has been a favorite canard of the media post 2016-in order for them to avoid facing the full truth of what they did. Choznick goes a lot further than others in taking some responsibility have-what the media always demand HIllary do but they normally pass on themselves- but she still holds on to this baseless argument to perhaps lighten the blow.

Even if it were true that a better candidate would have won despite Russia, the MSM, and much of the FBI conspiring against her, dwelling on that rather than the conspiracy would make little sense. After all, if the refs are paid off and a basketball team loses by 2 points at the buzzer, what is more important-that the team also made a number of mistakes down the stretch-failed to make adequate substitutions, had some bad turnovers, a star player dribbles the ball off his foot in the last 60 seconds-or the fact that the refs were paid off?

The media’s ‘bad candidate’ narrative is that interference is only really bad if you can show that you shouldn’t have been able to win even with it.

But in fact, it’s not at all clear that Hillary was such a bad candidate-it never was for me. The ‘Hillary the terrible candidate’ who’s also terribly ‘unlikeable’ meme-this was the product of the media’s theater criticism method of election coverage. 

“I figured that if anyone knew whom Mrs. Clinton was referring to with that insidious “they” that, like some invisible army of adversaries (real and imagined), wielded its collective power and caused her to lose the most winnable presidential election in modern history, it was me.”

That 2016 was the most winnable election in history is a flawed premise.

“To state the obvious, the idea that 2016 was the “most winnable election” in modern history is absolutely insane. No matter how bad a candidate you think Trump was, 2008 was very, very obviously a more “winnable” election, and the argument that it was more winnable than 2012 isn’t a lot more plausible. (Even if we assume arguendo that Romney was a substantially better candidate than Trump — plausible, but given the anachronistic means by which the United States chooses a president not actually a slam-dunk — it’s very far from clear that this difference outweighs the value of being a peacetime incumbent.)  And, of course “modern history” at a minimum includes 1984, and very possibly 1972 and 1964 as well. So, in other words, to say that 2016 was the most “winnable” election in modern history means that Clinton with better choices not only could have done better than Obama in 2008, she apparently could have won all 50 states in the Electoral College and taken the popular vote by more than 20%. This is astoundingly stupid. Even structurally, 2016 was not an especially favorable context for the Democratic nominee no matter how bad you think Trump is, and that’s before we get into stuff like “the director of the FBI making repeated prejudicial statements about the Democratic nominee while saying nothing about the investigation into the Republican nominee” and “the media mostly treating the Democratic nominee as the presumptive president and the Republican candidate as a joke.”

Yes-on a fundamental basis, it was always clear 2016 was a tough year for the Democrats. There haven’t been many parties that have won the third term-it has happened only twice; FDR won 4 times of course, in an pretty anomalous case; and Bush Sr. effectively won Reagan’s third term in 1988.

This was how Alan Litchman successfully predicted the winner of 2016-not based on any sense that Clinton was a bad candidate but just looking at the fundamentals. 

Indeed, if anything, what 2016 unexpectedly did was reaffirm the idea that the ‘party decides’-an idea that seemed to take a real beating with the rise of Trump. After Trump the assumption became that it’s all about ‘candidate centered politics’-but Litchman got it right by ignoring the candidates and looking at the fundamentals in a vacuum.

So why does this zombie idea get so much traction? Because various people in different professions have an interest in perpetuating it:

“In the variety of people who share the meme, we can see the various reasons why people repeating something that is obviously, ludicrously false makes sense to them”:

• A lot of political commentary comes from people who, like Favreau, were campaign operatives, who for obvious reasons want to inflate their own importance. (It’s not limited to any profession; it’s the same reason that, say, Ruth Bader Ginsburg claims that Roe would have faced less opposition if it had been decided on equal protection grounds. It’s obviously wrong when you think about it, but within the norms of the profession it can seem rational.) One thing Favreau is saying when he says that “2016 was the most winnable election in modern history” is “we won in 2008 not because we were in a race with no incumbent president and incredibly favorable conditions for the out party” but because of the sheer brilliance of the candidate and their decision-making. But, actually, any Democratic nominee wins in 2008. Probably Clinton doesn’t carry Indiana and maybe she doesn’t carry North Carolina, but she wins.
• The same thing is true of beat reporters like Chozick; one implication of the Halperinesque idea that elections are determined solely or almost solely by candidate quality is that horse race/theater critic coverage is immensely important. And since reporters are more likely to get political analysis from the operatives or other reporters they talk to than from political science or history, it creates a feedback loop in which the importance of candidate quality/tactics is greatly exaggerated and the importance of structural factors greatly understated.
• And Linker reminds us that theater critic analysis is useful for pundits with an axe to grind, and in the particular case of Clinton the derangement tends to be particularly pronounced. So while transparently silly the “most winnable” meme is useful to Linker because it allows him to claim that Clinton and her supporters have no legitimate grievances and nobody else needs to be held accountable, when of course Clinton does have perfectly legitimate grievances and there are a lot of people who made bad judgements and need to be held accountable. As Sargent says, Comey is openly admitting that he put his thumb on the scale because he assumed that Clinton would win. This is bad behavior! (And, incidentally, it’s another reason why high levels of confidence in the outcome of counterfactuals are misplaced. Rubio or Cruz might have been “better” candidates in some abstract sense, but Clinton wouldn’t have been treated as the president-elect by the media or the FBI in those scenarios, and we have no idea how that would have played out.  The question of whether Trump is a “bad” candidate is actually very complicated given the Electoral College and the media environment.)

“And the thing is, in this case making absurdly exaggerated claims isn’t even necessary if attacking Clinton is your thing. Unlike a lot of elections, 2016 was so close that you can make perfectly reasonable arguments that another candidate would have won or that Clinton would have won with different choices. You’re full of shit if you claim that you know how alternative scenarios would have played out, but Clinton’s mistakes might have been decisive and hence are worth assessing. But the idea that Clinton had an unusually easy job in 2016 is crazy, and it’s embarrassing that people who should know better are saying it.”

My own take is that she was a pretty good candidate-with the fundamentals against her and the campaigns against her being waged not just from the GOP and Breitbart, but Russia, the MSM, and much of the FBI-she still won by 3 million votes.

Indeed-it really took a LOT to bring her down and even though her haters finally succeeded in beating her they had to do all sort of nefarious and sundry things to do it and are now all seemingly cursed to ultimately pay a big price for their treachery.

As noted elsewhere: