27 Chapter 1: 2014: The MSM has Hillary Clinton Fatigue
Chuck Todd telegraphed it accurately in late 2014: by then the media already had ‘Clinton fatigue.’
The same media that are obsessed with Hillary—asking nonstop will she or won’t she, when will she, what’s that pause in her voice mean, is she likable enough—that same media have decided they are experiencing “Hillary fatigue.”
“I think that the thing she has to fear is fatigue among the media,” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd said on Morning Joe earlier this week. “The media is going to have Clinton fatigue before the country. I don’t think the country has Clinton fatigue. I think the media has Clinton fatigue. You can sort of feel it sometimes in the way the coverage—”
Then, in the next beat and without a glimmer of self-awareness, MJ co-host Willie Geist asked Matt Lewis of The Daily Caller, “Let’s play the parlor game…. who would be the strongest challenger” to Hillary Clinton? (Lewis obliged, suggesting Rubio and Christie, two nonstarters, but if they somehow luck out, they could rise to ranks of fatigue-makers, too.)
The fatigue galloped on. On yesterday’s MJ, Mike Barnacle asked, as if he were stuck in the political junkie’s version of 50 First Dates: “Chuck, it’s obviously July 2014, but do you sense, within the media, already, right now, Clinton exhaustion, just from covering the early stages of not even a campaign yet?” Chuck spent another chunk of segment explaining that he sure does sense that”
But in fairness to Todd he DID accurately prescribe the mood of he and his fellow MSMersh. It wasn’t the public but the MSM that had Clinton fatigue. This is something in retrospect that many may find hard to understand. For Clinton fatigue among the public came to be seen as a self evident fact. After all, check out her low approval numbers right?
But that’s just it: when she left her job as Obama’s Secretary of State she was very popular. She had an approval number of 64%. But by the end of the campaign the media had drilled into people the idea that Hillary’s alleged unpopularity was just an eternal fact of nature.
But, in fact, over her 25 years in national life, Hillary had seen many peaks and valleys in terms of her popularity. During Bill’s first term, she was generally unpopular. She had been cast in the role of a kind of liberal, henpecking, Lady McBeth. Indeed, her husband while not that popular himself in the first three years, was more popular than her. Hillary tended to be the lightening rod who was blamed for whatever faux scandal the GOP was currently on about at the moment more than Bill himself.
In Bill’s second term her popularity came back but even there it’s very instructive what seemed to lead to her political resurrection. She became popular again after news of Bill’s affair with Monica came out. There was great sympathy of her as the wronged woman.
And while no doubt from her standpoint the rise in her popularity was welcome, that it came at the price of her public humiliation was instructive. It showed that the public’s attitude towards women in power was still very ambivalent.
UPDATE: Though speaking of US attitudes about women in politics circa 1998 as “still” very ambivalent is pretty ironic as here in 2024 they remain very ambivalent-still… Which is clear just watching the-brutally uncharitable-coverage Kamala gets today.
FN: While overall, I’m a big fan of the YouTuber-cum “BreadTuber”-Vaush this video of shows his own Kamala Derangement Syndrome.
HOW DO YOU GIVE AN ANSWER THIS HORRIBLE (youtube.com)
In a 15 minute 20 second video, it’s basically Vaush’s catty theater criticism for 15 minutes, with Kamala even getting a chance to speak for 20 seconds-and these 20 seconds are divided into about 6 discrete pieces. Basically he’d play her 3 seconds then spend the next 5 minutes haranguing her very little of it substantive. Again, overall I really like his work-he’s done some great work calling out and exposing the Tankies a la Caleb Maupin cum Jimmy Dore cum The Grayzone.
And who can forget his excellent takedown of the Far Leftists urging folks not to vote for Biden.
“YOU ARE A CHILD!” — Surprisingly Heated 3V1 Debate On Voting For Biden (youtube.com)
But unfortunately even someone like Vaush has fallen into the KDS on much of the Left. If you watch his ranting attacks on her in the above video-almost none of which is substantive on the alleged topic of Israel-he basically refuses to even take her arguments on their own terms. Again he won’t even play her 20 second answer on The View in one continuous clip. He also declares her guilty of all the war crimes folks are saying Biden is guilty of in Gaza. Yet I think it’s a real possibility that if she were the President-true story she had been my first choice in the 2020 primary, Warren was my second, Biden was number 3-her Israel policy would be superior to Biden’s. Even as Veep, in an Administration that gives her very little free reign-she has been the toughest public critic of Israel in the WH.
End FN
It was quite ironic that Hillary’s numbers came back by being Tammy Wynette essentially. By standing by her man.
She had been pilloried in that first interview she and Bill gave with Diane Sawyer to push back against the negative headlines from the Gennifer Flowers stories when she said that she wasn’t being ‘Tammy Wynette standing by my man…’
UPDATE: Like Todd, Paul Waldman had his own psychic moment predicting in the spring of 2015 that the media would be her primary opponent. Find Sargent piece, Mike. April-May 2015?
In 1998 and 1999 she became popular by being Tammy Wynette. Of course, she went on to win a Senate seat in NY in 2000 and was generally popular after that. But in 2008 it was when she seemed to break down a little after losing Iowa and seemed about to lose NH that there was a groundswell of public support for her; then she rallied and won NH and while she ultimately fell short of the 2008 Dem nomination she pushed Obama all the way to the brink.
As Obama’s SOS she was very popular-more popular than him. So it’s accurate to say that in 2014, the MSM may have had ‘Clinton fatigue’ but the public did not.
But over the next 48 months, Chuck Todd, Morning Joe-to say nothing of Chris Cillizza, and the entire NY Times-managed to infect large numbers of the body politic with Clinton Derangement Syndrome.
In 2015 the MSM kept discussing how the email probe-like Jerry Seinfield’s show, an investigation about nothing-would kill her popularity-and in time the numbers would reflect precisely that but were these MSM pundits seers or engaging in self fulfilling prophecy?
FN: A major theme of this book is the idea that Beltway journalists decide on a narrative and once it’s decided facts and truth matter only to the extent that they confirm the narrative. The next question is how they select their narrative-for this journalism expert Jay Rosen has an answer-the MSM likes a narrative that they think makes them sound savvy. Chapter A for more.
So for the 2016 election the MSM’s narrative developed very early that Emailgate-for whatever reason-was treated as a huge scandal that would hurt Clinton with the voters-how do you trust her she used private email for God’s sake!
Note the difference in narrative about Trump’s much more serious scandal-colluding with Russia to “‘win” an election. In this case the MSM has largely shrugged its shoulders-it’s too byzantine an affair to matter to voters very much. Yet if anything Russian collusion is a much more intuitive scandal than Emailgate-while it was treated like a terrible thing but it was never clear what made it so terrible. Russian collusion at its core is a very easy to understand scandal-treason with a hostile foreign power to steal a Presidential election.
But this isn’t the MSM’s narrative so it’s never framed in this simple, straightforward way the ‘smart take’ is no one understand why Trump’s campaign had so many connections to the Russians and it didn’t make any difference-or at least we have no absolute proof that it did so we can just presume it didn’t.
End of FN
By October 28, 2016 with the release of the Comey letter, Todd, Cillizza, Maureen Dowd and the rest of the entire NY Times had successfully transferred their ‘Hillary fatigue’ when the country freaked out to such an extent over a vague statement by Comey-‘we may or may not be reopening the Clinton investigation’ that they elected an unqualified madman with deep authoritarian tendencies to avoid the scourge of using private email for government business. Unnoticed is that the Trump ‘White House’ regularly does the same and part of why it’s not a bigger story is this is the least of their crimes-and Emailgate was a fake scandal all along that was hyped up to the crime of the century because the Clinton Rules.
Many 2016 hopefuls have used private email | HeraldNet.com
Indeed, just to underscore the utter vacuousness of the entire Emailgate exercise even more we recently learned that-yes-Comey himself used private email while he was investigating Clinton for using private email.
IG: Comey used personal email account for FBI business | CNN Politics
In 2016 the MSM practiced the Clinton Rules and the Trump Rules.
1. The Trump Rules meant what would be a felony for a normal politician would be treated like jaywalking for Donald Trump.
2. The Clinton Rules meant that what would be jaywalking for a normal politician was treated like a felony for Hillary Clinton.
While the MSM was absolutely obsessed about her email server, there was very little talk about the many Republicans in the POTUS race who had used private email previously. Now that Trump has won-illegitimately-we now see what a piece of hypocrisy the email obsession really was.
Many 2016 hopefuls have used private email | HeraldNet.com
So many Trump senior officials actually use private email. Which is no surprise. The Bush WH used the RNC private server and many in the Trump WH are still using it.
The obsession over this would never have happened for any other politician but Hillary Clinton.
Yet the email obsession of 2016 did not happen in a vacuum. Quite to the contrary, the GOP and the Right wing media bubble had been setting the foundation for this over a 25 year period.
Still while he’s right that the Right lost its mind it was able to move much of the MSM with it. The media came to see its role more and more not as arbiters of the truth-no matter how imperfectly-to nonpartisan referees arbitrating between squabbling partisans.
For the most part the Right wing was able to blackmail the MSM into spending lots of its time tied into knots proving the negative that it’s not somehow practicing liberal bias.
For this reason the MSM tends to blowup trivial Dem misdemeanors or even just the equivalent of jaywalking or a speeding ticket to the same level as GOP felonies.
The Comey letter would not have had such a huge effect if not for the media’s weaponization of the damn emails for 20 months.
You can argue that ‘Lock her up’ was the outgrowth of the false meme pushed by the media that there really was a good chance that she would be indicted. When the GOP later grilled Comey he had said that not indicting her hadn’t been a close call.
UPDATE: Indeed, it turns out that “Lock Her Up” politics didn’t start in 2016-the obsession with locking up Hillary Clinton in particular actually goes back to the 1990s with the original faux Clinton scandal, Whitewater. As we’ll see in a later chapter, in 2018 Ken Starr-may his soul not rest in peace unless peace isn’t what his soul wants-capitalized on the flawed mainstream media premise that he was this honest broker he could objectively inform us on the Mueller investigation through his own experience leading Whitewater.
The flaw in that premise is that Starr was and always had been a partisan hack, Whitewater was a partisan boondoggle, indeed a genuine “witch hunt” as Trump wrongly claimed the Russia investigation was, which Starr would prove when he volunteered along with-who else?-Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley. Dersh copied Turley’s trick in 2019 by claiming he wasn’t a Republican and actually votes Democrat. Turley literally later suggested Pelosi should be impeached as House Speaker for insulting Trump during his State of the Union speech. If you’re counting he has testified on the GOP side in every impeachment case going back to Clinton’s in 1998.
So, of course, he’s again giving the GOP talking points in their baseless impeachment case today.
Legal Analyst Warns of Critical ‘Problem’ With Hunter Biden’s Lawyer (msn.com)
Yet Turley’s a Democrat-according to Turley.
End FN
Exactly. But that was obvious all along-which also raises some very vexing and uncomfortable questions for Comey and his FBI as well, but more on that in the FBI chapters. The MSM chose not to admit this.
“Back in the spring of 2016, when it was clear Hillary Clinton was about to be exonerated for her email- Media outlets all knew this was a false claim, but they also knew that it was too good for ratings to pass up, so they all gave each other cover by pushing the same line of bullshit. When Hillary was exonerated, we were so relieved, we didn’t stop to think about how dishonestly the media had just played us. Now it’s happening again, with Donald Trump and Robert Mueller.”
But this dishonesty by the media wasn’t harmless as it led to the expectation that she would be ‘locked up.’ Again, after Comey admitted there were no charges polls showed that most people believed she SHOULD HAVE BEEN indicted.
Of course, Comey-as we will see in Chapter No Probable Cause-for his part has a lot to answer for too. HE had known since early 2016 at the latest there was no criminal liability and HE also allowed this false narrative to fester, one that still lives to this day as the GOP has been running a parallel investigation in Congress where the real bias at the FBI was against Trump-they are still demanding answers on why she wasn’t indicted-even though she’s now a private individual.
FN: Yes they were so biased against Trump they elected him…
Indeed, even nice, liberal reporters like Chris Hayes basically drunk the Emailgate Koolaid. Hayes interviewed Clinton later during the 2016 primary and at the end of the interview he asked her if she thought she’d be indicted. This by inference again accepted the basic frame that the chance that she’d be indicted was very possible if not probable. After all ‘even a liberal like Chris Hayes knows she may well be indicted.’
But in truth the likelihood was while logically possible very remote.
FN: Actually now in retrospect we now know Clinton was never even the subject of Emailgate even logically it was pretty remote.
At the height of the fever of obsession over the damn emails, then, even the MSNBC pundits propagated the illusion that she had done something-though what was never explained exactly-terrible and stood a very real chance of, indeed, being ‘locked up.’
Late in the 2016 election, Matt Yglesias put his finger on the true scandal of Emailgate.
Some time ago, Hillary Clinton and her advisers decided that the best course of action was to apologize for having used a personal email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state. Clinton herself was, clearly, not really all that remorseful about this, and it showed in her early efforts to address it. Eventually aides prevailed upon her to express a greater degree of regret, which they hoped would lay the issue to rest.
It did not. Instead, email-related talk has dogged Clinton throughout the election and it has influenced public perceptions of her in an overwhelmingly negative way. July polling showed 56 percent of Americans believed Clinton broke the law by relying on a personal email address with another 36 percent piling on to say the episode showed “bad judgments” albeit not criminality.”
To be clear apologizing was IMO a mistake-that only whets the Clinton hating pundits to double down on the demands for more answers over a scandal of which there was no there there-and as we’ll see in the FBI part of this book no actual probable cause either which means the real scandal of Emailgate was that it was opened in the first place.
Because Clinton herself apologized for it and because it does not appear to be in any way important, Clinton allies, surrogates, and co-partisans have largely not familiarized themselves with the details of the matter, instead saying vaguely that it was an error of judgment and she apologized and America has bigger fish to fry.
This has had the effect of further inscribing and reinscribing the notion that Clinton did something wrong, meaning that every bit of micro-news that puts the scandal back on cable amounts to reminding people of something bad that Clinton did. In total, network newscasts have, remarkably, dedicated more airtime to coverage of Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
“This is unfortunate because emailgate, like so many Clinton pseudo-scandals before it, is bullshit. The real scandal here is the way a story that was at best of modest significance came to dominate the US presidential election — overwhelming stories of much more importance, giving the American people a completely skewed impression of one of the two nominees, and creating space for the FBI to intervene in the election in favor of its apparently preferred candidate in a dangerous way.”
The real Clinton email scandal is that a bullshit story has dominated the campaign – Vox
Late in the election after the Comey Letter I admit I completely lost it on Twitter. I tweeted out to a bunch of MSM journalists and ranted that if this American Furher is elected they would all have this on their hands and that I knew all along this was where they were taking us with the Clinton Derangment Syndrome; over 25 years they’d always shown themselves to be total fools for faux Clinton scandals where nothing was trivial or implausible enough for them to glom onto.
Now Trump was going to win and crack down on their own press freedoms I ranted. And it would all be their own fault.
I still believe this will go to the grave believing-that the media itself has ‘President Trump’ on its hands.
For much more on the MSM’s failure to learn see Chapter A.
UPDATE: Nor have they learned their lesson-in the case of Dean Baquet and his NY Times there seems to be an almost militantly stubborn refusal not to learn the major lessons of the Beltway’s awful 2016 coverage.