Yes, Sanders Would Have Won: Exploding False Clintonite Narratives

Clintonites in the press and the Democratic party, sometimes aided and abetted by Hillary Clinton herself, have spun a number of narratives to explain--or, more to the point, to explain away--the embarrassing failure of the Clinton campaign in the 2016 presidential race and continue to labor to generate from them, by mere repetition, an artificial Conventional Wisdom about the outcome of the election. These narratives tend toward the self-serving and self-exculpatory--Clinton and her people are never said to have done anything wrong--and for the most part, range from grossly misleading to entirely false. The campaign generated a great deal of data and collectively, they stand as a bulwark against these misrepresentations. If, that is, anyone bothers to consult them.

"It's Bernie Sanders' fault Trump won," runs a popular one. "He fatally weakened Clinton by putting her through such a grueling primary contest."

Baked into this is a rather irritating sense of entitlement on the part of the Clintonites, one that turns up through many of their narratives. In this case, they're rejecting the notion that the party nomination should be conducted via a vigorously contested democratic process and asserting, instead, the view that their candidate was entitled to a coronation, free of serious challenge. During the campaign itself, there had already appeared a variation on this, when members of the party Establishment began posing as Noble Statesmen thoughtfully looking out for the greater good by insisting, from fairly early in the race, that Sanders should drop out, endorse Clinton and try to "unify the party" so that it may better face the Republican nominee in the Fall. All of these insiders had, of course, endorsed Clinton and were, in this, merely doing their part for their candidate by trying to create the impression that there was something wrong with Sanders contesting the nomination. Toward the end of the race, this became particularly intense. For anyone who accepts the basic premise of a party primary system, the sense of entitlement that underlies these notions is a non-starter. During the 2008 Democratic contest, Hillary Clinton herself had, by the end of February, virtually no statistical chance of winning yet continued to battle Barack Obama right into June, reluctantly dropping out only a few days after the last round of state contests.

Clinton had turned that earlier contest into a bitter, ugly fight--at one point, she'd openly fantasized about her more popular opponent being murdered--which added more and more baggage to the substantial pile she'd already accumulated (and would continue to accumulate). Even in 2008, she'd been an anachronism, a tired throwback to 1990s conservative "New Democrats" trying to sell herself to an increasingly liberal electorate that wanted "hope and change." Entering the 2016 race, she was the weathered face of a way of doing business a lot of people thought they'd finally rejected and buried nearly a decade earlier. This is a chart of Clinton's favorability rating averages from 31 Jan., 2013--as far back as Real Clear Politics allows one to make these interactive charts--to 31 Jan., 2016, the day before the Iowa caucus:

HuffPost Pollster uses a lot of the same polls as RCP but includes some that RCP doesn't and its database goes back farther and thus offers both a slightly different and a longer-running look at the matter. But the story is the same:

Clinton's favorability ratings were in long-term decline. That Huffpost chart begins in Sept. 2010 because that's when they began dropping (and it runs through to the present). By the Huffpost data, Clinton's approval average dropped below 50%--the dead zone--in July 2014, never to return. RCP puts that landmark a little later, in mid-March 2015. In mid-April, when Clinton officially entered the presidential race, her average was, by both data sets, underwater, with more people telling pollsters they disliked her than liked her. And it stayed underwater. It's still there today.

Clinton's weakness was apparent even among Democrats. In a poll that wrapped 8 days before she entered the presidential race, Gallup asked, "Who would you like to see the Democratic party nominate for president in 2016--Hillary Clinton or someone else?" Over 1/3 of Democratic respondents--38%--chose "someone else," along with 43% of Dem-leaning independents.

The unpopularity that proved Clinton's undoing wasn't brought on by Bernie Sanders. Rather, it was just a continuation of a very long-running trend. When, in either the Summer of 2014 (Huffpost) or the early Spring of 2015 (RCP), Clinton's average finally fell below 50% then went underwater, Sanders wasn't yet even a factor. In a March 2015 "people in the news" poll by Gallup, 62% of respondents said they'd never even heard of him, and another 14% said they didn't know enough about him to have an opinion. For a long time, he was one of American politics' best-kept secrets in the press (more on that later). In a YouGov poll conducted at the end of April--the period when Sanders entered the presidential race--53% of adult respondents had never heard of him and only 9% of registered voters were then supporting his bid to become the Democratic nominee. And so on.

One of Clinton's major weaknesses was, of course, that voters didn't find her honest and trustworthy. As with her approval ratings, these numbers, too, had been disintegrating over an extended period before Sanders came on the scene. The data recording this are a bit more spotty. Clinton had left the State Department and was a private citizen for over 2 years before announcing her presidential run; pollsters tend not to systematically track such things until election season rolls around. CNN/Opinion Research offers the following through a series of polls:

During the campaign season, the ABC News/Washington Post poll proved to be a pro-Clinton poll, meaning it tended to yield results slightly more favorable to Clinton than her polling average,[1] but it told the same story. In May, 2014, it had asked, "Do you think Hillary Clinton is or is not honest and trustworthy?" At the time, 59% of registered voters said she was. By May, 2015 though, this was the chart included with the poll results on this question:

A Quinnipiac poll from mid-April: "American voters say 54–38 percent that Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, a lower score than top Republicans." And so on. When Sanders entered the presidential race on 30 April 2015, Clinton was already in trouble.[2]

The Democratic primary campaign did Clinton's numbers no favors, to be sure, but enhanced exposure to Hillary Clinton never does. Her poll numbers have only ever been good when she's mostly out of public sight and mind. Whenever she's becomes a center of attention and is perceived as a partisan political figure, they sink. This isn't a Bernie Sanders-induced phenomenon either; it's a pattern that has been present throughout the whole of her time on the national stage. Nate Silver of 538 was writing about--and charting--it as far back as 2012. Silver revisited this theme in 2013. In Sept. 2015, as Clinton's polling continued to crash, Greg Sargent at the Washington Post's Plum Line covered it as well. Though none of these commentators offer the thought, it's also entirely reasonable to assume that all of those crashes would eventually have a cumulative effect, with each new occurrence reminding people why they'd come to dislike her in the past.

This writer covered most of this ground in real time in various internet venues during the long 2015-'16 campaign season. For anyone who bothered to look, the seeds of Clinton's eventual destruction were right there in the often-brutal data. A few items from my notes:

--A Fox News poll, conducted in May 2015 (only days after Sanders threw his hat in the ring):

--An August 2015 poll by Qunnipiac open-endedly asked respondents to say the first word that comes to mind when the name of a candidate is mentioned. The top 3 words for Hillary Clinton were "liar", "dishonest" and "untrustworthy."

--An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from October 2015 asked,

"Now, which of the following best describes how you would feel if Hillary Clinton were elected president--optimistic and confident that she would do a good job, satisfied and hopeful that she would do a good job, uncertain and wondering whether she would do a good job, or pessimistic and worried that she would do a bad job?"

A plurality--a whopping 43%--chose "pessimistic and worried," with another 13% choosing "uncertain and wondering." Only 24% chose "optimistic and confident," with 19% opting for "satisfied and hopeful." That same poll asked respondents to rank, on a scale of 1 to 5, how "honest and straightforward" they saw Clinton: 40% chose 1--the lowest rating--with another 10% choosing 2 (only 13% chose 5, with another 13% choosing 4).

--When a CNN/ORC poll in mid-December 2015 asked if Clinton was "someone you would be proud to have as president," 56% answered in the negative. Asked in that same poll if Clinton "shares your values," 58% answered in the negative.

--In the head-to-head polling, Clinton's initially-commanding double-digit leads over Donald Trump had disappeared by August 2015. Here are the Clinton-vs.-Trump polls in the RealClearPolitics database from December 2015 and January 2016, the months leading into the first contest of the primary season:

When one takes into account the margin of error (listed in the column marked "MoE"), Clinton was in a statistical tie with Trump in five of the 11 polls, is only leading by one point in a sixth, two in a seventh and only beats Trump by a significant margin in the four that remain. Additionally, a Zogby poll, a CNN/ORC poll and two Morning Consult polls from January (here and here), not included in the RCP collection, also showed the two in a tie (a third Morning Consult poll that month gave Clinton a 4-point-over-MoE lead over Trump).

During this same period, Clinton fared even worse in the head-to-heads against the other major GOP contenders. Of the 9 Clinton-vs.-Ted Cruz polls, one had Cruz winning by 3 points over MoE, one had Clinton winning by 0.5% and the rest were ties. Of the 9 polls matching Clinton against Marco Rubio, Rubio beat Clinton by 6 points in one and was tied with her in the other 8.

All of this before a single vote in the primary season had been cast.

For this writer, Clinton's weakness as a candidate seemed obvious all along and I'd shared that thought (and the considerable supporting data behind it) throughout the campaign, most often on various Facebook groups. By the end of February 2016, I assembled my accumulated thoughts into an article that handicapped Clinton and her candidacy. The present article is very much a companion piece and sequel to it. Interested readers can check it out--I've tried not spend too much time recovering the same ground. Briefly, Clinton, laden with more baggage than anyone else in American politics, was running as a Democrat in the shadow of a two-term Democratic administration, which is always a hard sell, but instead of trying to differentiate herself from the incumbent or blaze any sort of new course (which voters want), she tried to present herself as Obama's Siamese twin for short-term gain. The ultimate Establishment figure in a screamingly anti-Establishment election, she was an opportunistic flip-flopper whose instincts, in a liberal party, were conservative, who positively oozes insincerity and who ran a demoralizing and utterly defeatist "No, We Can't" primary campaign peddling diminished expectations and aimed at crushing, by whatever means necessary, the energizing "hope" candidate who had sprang up as an alternative. The myth of her inevitability, carefully nurtured by Clinton and her surrogates in the press, appeared to have been depressing interest in the Democratic contest. She ran a horrible campaign, making all the wrong calls, pointlessly antagonizing the Sanders voters she was going to need to win and wasting time and resources trying to recruit "moderate" Republicans and flip red states that obviously weren't going to flip while ignoring states she was going to need to win. Throughout all of this, the Democratic party Establishment seemed to be under some sort of suicidal spell, closing its eyes, plugging its ears and chanting to drown out reality while, come Hell or high water, it pushed ahead with a campaign that seemed not only doomed but obviously doomed (I certainly predicted, early on, that Clinton would probably lose any general-election match-up against Trump). Clintonites, whose machinations have now saddled the U.S. with the Trump regime, are constructing these false narratives with the aim of absolving themselves but the hard, inescapable truth, now born out by the predictable election outcome itself, is that Clinton was always a weak, loser candidate and if the goal was to beat the Republican nominee, it was never responsible to back her in the first place. In a sane world, the Clintonites, their Master Candidate defeated by a reality-show joke of an opponent, have now been as utterly discredited as anyone in American politics can be with their pants still on.

And to finally tackle the other of the big, false Clintonite narrative, yes, Bernie Sanders probably would have beaten Donald Trump. Not only that, there's significant evidence he may have rolled right over Trump in a complete rout the likes of which the American presidency hasn't seen in a few decades.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was much beloved in his home sate of Vermont but when he launched his presidential campaign, he was virtually unknown to the broader public. For most of 2015, much of the corporate press tried to keep it that way, carrying out what became known as the "Bernie Blackout." Even basic name-recognition was pretty long in coming. What little coverage Sanders received in 2015 often had a dismissive and/or mocking tone and this mingled with the general lack of coverage to negatively impact the candidate's numbers for some time. When he eventually started to break through this effort to ignore him to death and became a genuine threat to Clinton's candidacy, much of the press switched to the usual Rabid Attack-Dog Mode always reserved for left candidates who become popular, buttressed, in this case, by the slanderous assaults of the Clintonites, both in the press and in the Democratic party. Despite these prolonged efforts to bury he and his candidacy, Sanders persevered and when people finally began to get to know him, they found they liked him. A lot. Most of the public's good will toward Clinton was already history when Huffpost Pollster started keeping track of Sanders' favorability ratings and while hers steadily sank into oblivion, here's the arc of Sanders' own over the course of the last 21 months:

The more people saw of Sanders, the more they liked what they saw, but the Blackout delayed his ability to build that profile with the public. In mid-Sept. 2015--nearly 5 months into his campaign--1/3 of respondents were still telling Gallup they'd never even heard of him. Sanders' net favorability among Democrats eventually shot past Clinton's but that only happened in late March, nearly 2 months into voting (and nearly a year into the campaign). As the primaries neared their end, Sanders had--again, among Democrats--a whopping 13-point net favorability advantage over Clinton.

These numbers suggest that if there had been no Blackout, no imposition of that early, months-long delay in Sanders being able to introduce himself to the public, the primaries may have turned out very differently.

One of the manifestations of the Blackout is that, when it came time to sanction head-to-head polls, news organizations frequently matched Republican hopefuls against only Clinton, pretending as if Sanders didn't exist. There is, as a consequence, less data in this area than with Clinton but there's still more than enough to tell the story. The RealClearPolitics database contains 46 head-to-head polls matching Sanders against Trump between 20 July, 2015 and 5 June, 2016. Of that, Trump only managed to beat Sanders above the margin of error 3 times, the most recent of these happening way back in mid-November 2015. In another 4, they were in a statistical tie. The last of the latter happened in mid-February; from there forward, the chart below tells the story: Sanders won every poll, all but three of them by dominant double-digit leads:

To the 46 polls at RCP, we can add 18 Morning Consult polls:

In all but two of these, Sanders is beating Trump by double digits above the margin of error. Ipsos/Reuters also conducted 7 Sanders-vs.-Trump polls from late January to mid-March; Sanders won all of them.[3]

In the last full month in which Sanders was included in the head-to-heads, he was still rolling right over Trump, while the Clinton vs. Trump polling was previewing what would eventually happen in the general: Clinton was statistically tied with Trump in 6 of that month's 10 polls and losing to him above the MoE in a seventh:

With one exception (covered later), there's a gap in the Sanders/Trump head-to-head polling after the primary season but in his favorability polling during that period, Sanders continued to rise, averaging nearly 60% favorable by the month of September, at which point polling orgs either stopped polling on it or RCP stopped recording their results. Through that same period, the monthly average favorability polling for both Clinton and Trump were statistically flat-lined, Clinton at an embarrassing 40-43%, Trump at a slightly worse 35-39%.

From shortly after he entered the race, Sanders was a star in ascendance, Clinton one in decline. These tracks crossed too late to land Sanders the Democratic nomination but if he had been the nominee, it seems pretty unlikely Trump--disliked by most Americans from the day he entered the race--would have been able to significantly enough alter Sanders' trajectory to eke out a win.

Trump and Clinton will go down in history as the two most disliked major-party presidential candidates in the history of polling (unless/until some new contenders replace them). At the end of April, while the Democratic primaries were still ongoing, the Los Angeles Times noted that "together, Clinton and Trump are the two most unpopular presidential candidates in memory." Eleven days later, the Washington Post's Dave Wiegel wrote--in an article titled "The Year of the Hated"--that "the 2016 election is likely to pit Hillary Clinton, who is disliked by a majority of voters, against Donald Trump, disliked by a greater majority of voters." As the New York Post put it, "No presidential candidate in polling history has been as hated by voters as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are now." On 1 July--that is, before the party conventions and more than two months before the traditional kick-off of the general-election campaign on Labor Day weekend--Gallup reported that "Trump and Clinton are currently among the worst-rated presidential candidates of the last seven decades according to Gallup's long-term 'scalometer' trend." By mid-July, a few days after Sanders dropped out of the race, pollster Morning Consult noted that

"One of the most common stats trotted out in this presidential campaign is that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton are the most unpopular candidates in modern history, with more voters saying they have an unfavorable view of the candidates than a favorable one."

Morning Consult took this a step further and asked those who disliked Clinton why they felt as they did; it was the same reasons they'd been giving pollsters all along:

Among Democrats who disliked Clinton, 39% said it was primarily because she was untrustworthy, 25% said it was because she was corrupt and 26% said it was because she "changes her positions when it's politically convenient." With independents, it was 47% untrustworthy, 39% corrupt, 23% squishy; with Repubs, the split was 50/45/18%. The next day, ABC News was telling the same story, reporting that Clinton and Trump "remain the two most unpopular likely major-party nominees in ABC/Post polling..." By 8 Sept., NPR was reflecting the journalistic fatigue in covering this point:

"You've heard it a bajillion times at this point: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the two most unpopular major party presidential candidates on record. Both of them have unfavorability ratings of more than 50 percent."

That was the story everywhere.

Clinton lost the general election in the Rust Belt. That is the correct characterization. Trump didn't win those critical states, the ones that gave him the election; she lost them. Large portions of these states, which were the industrial heartland of America, have, for decades, been devastated by policies aimed at deindustrializing the U.S. in the name of corporate profits. Heading into this election, Pennsylvania and Michigan had been blue states for a quarter-century, Wisconsin had been for even longer. Clinton is a Wall-Street-backed, tone-deaf "free trader" who, whenever there's an election in front of her, comes out against the latest grant-superpowers-to-the-multinationals proposal--that which is misleadingly sold as "free trade"--then "evolves" back to supporting them as soon as she's in power. Presented with this living embodiment of the policies that had laid waste to their homes, it isn't at all surprising that a large number of voters in these states, the long-suffering victims of these policies, cast their lot with Trump, the first general-election candidate who seriously promised to do anything about their situation. Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by razor-thin margins (0.23%, 0.73% and 0.77%, respectively) while underperforming--often grossly underperforming--Obama's 2012 take among white voters (particularly white males), young voters and independents. Her campaign did just about as badly as any Democratic campaign would ever do in those states.[4] As the primary results and electoral history in those states suggested, many there would have preferred a more sane alternative like Sanders, something the Democrats, once Clinton became the nominee, weren't offering anymore. Winning a primary is, of course, very different from winning a general--something that shouldn't be understated--but Sanders had, in these states, won huge, lopsided majorities among those demographics in which Clinton so badly underperformed. He'd already defeated Clinton in contests in two of these three states. Sanders was performing better than Clinton in the head-to-head polling vs. Trump in all three states as well. The final Michigan poll to match both Democratic contenders against the Republican was conducted by the Detroit News. In it, Clinton was statistically tied with Trump, while Sanders was beating him by 19 points. In Pennsylvania, it was a Quinnipiac poll that had Clinton statistically tied with Trump, with Sanders beating him by 6 points--3 above the margin of error. In Wisconsin, the last was a Marquette poll that had Clinton beating Trump by 9--4 points over MoE--and Sanders beating Trump by 24--19 points over MoE.

For obvious reasons, Clintonites who maintain that Sanders would have lost to Trump retreat from the hard data, preferring, instead, to rely on nebulous, unquantifiable assertions. Americans, it's said, would never vote for a candidate who, like Sanders, identifies himself as a "socialist." And, indeed, one can point to polling data wherein people say as much. The only thing such polls really measure, though, is respondents' reaction to a contentious word. This is a phenomenon well-known by pollsters. One of the most remarked-upon examples in recent years occurs in polling on the Obama healthcare law. If pollsters ask about "the Affordable Care Act," the name of the law, it draws much better numbers than if, instead, they refer to it as "Obamacare," a word that causes the numbers to go down, even though it refers to exactly the same policy. For many years, there were few more demonized words in American political discourse than "liberal." As a consequence, the number of people who self-identify to pollsters as "liberal" was anemic. Today, it's difficult to find a single issue of major import on which Americans don't hold to a liberal view by overwhelming margins, yet the overwhelming majority of that same public--76% in Gallup's 2016 survey--identifies as either "moderate" or "conservative" (and "conservative" has significantly outnumbered "liberal" for decades). The one word in our political discourse that has been more demonized than "liberal"--both much more intensely and for much longer--is "socialism." What really matters here isn't in-the-abstract public reaction to a word. What Sanders defines as his "democratic socialism" is a slate of policies, one with, for the most part, immense public support. Last year, co-writer/researcher Mitch Clark and I put together a fairly extensive article about the polling data on Bernie Sanders' major issues and found that most of his top agenda items are supported by huge majorities of the public, often even by majorities of Republicans.

Hold that thought.

Another of these fuzzy Clintonite claims--a sort of corollary to the first, really--is that Sanders never faced any real political attacks and that his campaign would have withered in the face of them. For anyone who lived through the 2016 campaign cycle, the first part of that amounts to a "don't believe your lying eyes" claim--ludicrous on its face. Clinton, who, herself, mercilessly pounded Sanders with constant--and mostly scurrilous--attacks, contributed to it, saying, "I don't think [Bernie Sanders has] had a single negative ad ever run against him," a claim Politifact debunked. Adam Johnson at Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting tackled the wider claim in even more detail, pointing out that it's an empty, unfalsifiable assertion, outlining only a sample of the savage attacks Sanders had weathered and noting the obvious:

"Is there some undiscovered bombshell waiting to blow up about Sanders? Of course, it’s possible he murdered someone with his bare hands in a Calcutta bazaar in 1991—we can’t know for sure. What one has to believe in order to accept the entirely theoretical assumption that a damning piece of news about Sanders awaits to be revealed is that the Clinton team, armed with $186 million dollar warchest, either A) can’t find something the GOP will or B) found something but is just too darn nice to expose it. Neither of these scenarios seems plausible."

With commanding leads over the Republican, Sanders' campaign would have to do a lot of withering--and his meteoric momentum throughout the campaign would have to be blunted then reversed--to pull defeat from the jaws of victory, and there just didn't seem to be much out there with which to beat him back. And who was going to do it? Well...

Donald Trump's numbers throughout the presidential race were abysmal, his favorables typically even worse than Clinton's. From Day 1, a majority of Americans disliked him. On election day, his RCP average stood at 39.4% favorable, while Clinton's was at 41.6% --a tie that meant the two finished the general-election race as they began it: as the two most disliked major-party presidential candidates in the history of polling.[5] Just as with Clinton, a majority of respondents consistently told pollsters they didn't consider him "honest and trustworthy." In a Quinnipiac poll, for example, only 37% thought he was. But in that same poll, only 30% would say the same of Hillary Clinton. In fact, of the 7 different candidates then in the race about whom that question was asked, Clinton scored the lowest.[6] The highest-scoring candidate, on the other hand, beat everyone else in a rout. Matching a pattern that continued throughout the campaign, a whopping 68% said they found Bernie Sanders honest and trustworthy. Even 54% of Republicans said so. That poll was conducted on Feb. 10-15, 2016, only days after the primary/caucus contests had started.

Something to keep in mind while you're sitting in front of the evening news tonight watching the protofascist buffoon in the White House trying to dismantle the liberal society with strokes of the pen. It didn't have to be this way.

Hillary Clinton's followers, who backed a weak candidate who went on to lose, now tell you Sanders couldn't have beaten Trump. Consider what goes into that claim. Those offering it insist we ignore all the actual accumulated data (all of which suggests there would have been a significant Sanders win) and accept the proposition that, by the end of a Sanders-vs.-Trump contest, most voters would have decided to vote against a candidate they like and whose policies they love because of a word (SOCIALISM!) that candidate uses to describe those policies and would, instead, cast their ballots for a candidate they hate--the most disliked candidate in the history of polling, against whom Sanders would somehow do worse than did the 2nd-most-disliked candidate in the history of polling.

Yeah.[7]

I'm sure this will be argued--and fulminated over--endlessly but history's final word on the subject comes from a privately-commissioned Gravis poll that was conducted in November only two days prior to the general election. It asked likely voters for whom they would vote if the looming presidential contest were between Sanders and Trump. Readers will no doubt be shocked to learn that it, too, showed Sanders destroying Trump. Margin of victory: 12%.

The election is now a few months in the past and many would prefer to stop talking about Hillary Clinton, put aside the divisions of that ugly campaign and focus on the problem the U.S. has inherited as a result of it. It's a legitimate perspective. Whether or not his reactionary fanbase yet recognizes it, Trump is a threat to every American, to American society and to the entire world. Not just an embarrassment or the butt of a joke: a threat. A protofascist Twitter troll running the most powerful nation in the world is dangerous. This business of how he got there, however, is a matter that needs to be hashed out and it's not a distraction from dealing with Trump, it's a critical part of it, because if any of these false Clintonite narratives are allowed to harden into a Conventional Wisdom, nothing will have been learned. The Clintonites who brought about this calamity won't be held accountable for their part in it, won't be pushed aside in disgrace and will only try to do it again. And again. And there's an unreformed system still in place that would allow them to do it. Trump doesn't present an ordinary political situation that can afford to tolerate that.

--j.

---

[1] And to cut off the knee-jerk implication, that's not necessarily because of any unfair bias; much more likely just a quirk in the methodology.

[2] Clinton favorability ratings bottomed out at just a hair about 36% in late May 2016 before stabilizing in the low 40-percentile, where it remained for the rest of the campaign. Her "honest and trustworthy" ratings bottomed out around 27%, though some anomalous polls put it even lower.

[3] The Morning Consult and Ipsos/Reuters material is archived, with details and links, at HuffPost Pollster.

[4] CNN maintains a handy archive of exit poll data from the 2012 race, the 2016 primaries and the 2016 general.

[5] On election day, Gallup, the Grand Old Man of polling, reported that "the 2016 election is the only one in Gallup's polling history to feature two broadly unpopular candidates... Trump and Clinton are the two most negatively reviewed U.S. presidential candidates of the modern era, and probably ever."

[6] Pollsters sometimes directly pitted Clinton against Trump on this question. CNN did so in September and found that by a 50-35% split, respondents said Trump was more honest and trustworthy than Clinton.

[7] Trump certainly knew better. He said repeatedly he'd rather face Clinton than Sanders. Reince Priebus, then the head of the Republican party and now Trump's chief-of-staff and right hand, did as well.


Post-Credits Scene - The obvious caveat. Campaigns ain't static--it's are always about how you get there. Probabilities are just that.

Journalism in the Era of the Alt-Facts Administration [UPDATE BELOW]

It's entirely expected that the newly-sworn-in protofascist regime in the capitol is likely to have significant problems adjusting to holding power within a liberal democracy wherein it can't entirely control the press, the internet, the other branches of government--the other power-centers that are theoretically there to keep such a regime in check. The corporate press is going to have some problems adjusting as well.

After aerial photos of Donald Trump's Friday inauguration suggested a smaller audience for the event compared to those of the past, Trump dispatched his minions to wage war on this notion. On Saturday, Sean Spicer used his first official appearance as White House Press Secretary to offer up a demagogic tirade against the press, calling it dishonest, saying it was "sewing division" and in particular raging against any reporting that the inauguration was anything less than heavily attended. "No one. Had. Numbers," he huffed, "Because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out." Embarrassingly, an anti-Trump march on the capitol Saturday appeared to draw several times the crowd as the inauguration; Spicer was on that case too, adding, "By the way, this [the lack of any numbers] applies to any attempts to try to count the number of protesters today in the same fashion." Get it folks? No numbers! And then, only moments later, No Numbers Spicer boldly asserted that

"This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe."

After ranting and raving for a little over five minutes, Spicer then stomped out of the room without taking a single question from the assembled reporters. Ladies and gentlemen, your new White House Press Secretary!

Politifact tackled Spicer's claims on this subject and found nearly every one either entirely false or grossly misleading--rating: Pants On Fire.

For NBC's Chuck Todd, this crowd-size thing was completely ridiculous, Spicer's fiction appearing to have been advanced for no real reason at all. Mainstream press commentators like Todd still haven't quite figured out that whole protofascist thing. They never figured it out during the campaign either, and their failure was, in fact, a not-insignificant factor in how this regime was inflicted upon the U.S. Fortunately, Chuck had Kellyanne Conway, the Counselor to the new President, to explain it to him. The two engaged in a rather comical rhetorical dance on Meet the Press Sunday morning.

"The presidency is about choices," said Todd, "so I'm curious why President Trump chose yesterday to send out his press secretary to essentially litigate a provable falsehood when it comes to a small and petty thing like inaugural crowd-size. I guess my question to you is, why do that?"

Conway tried to deflect on to other issues, went into a long, irrelevant commentary that tried to make Trump's performance in the election sound like some sort of major popular win--I'll come back to that in a moment--then said of reports of the relatively small size of the inaugural crowd, "I think it is, I think it is a symbol for the unfair and incomplete treatment that this president often receives." She went on about how the Nielsen ratings showed that more people watched Trump's inauguration on television than watched Obama's 2013 inauguration.[1]

Todd persisted; Conway's response was to threaten to cut off access to the White House for those questioning the administration:

"If [you're] going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think that we're going to have to rethink our relationship here. I want to have a great, open relationship with our press."

Dynamite. Todd continued to seek an answer to his question and Conway gave him another headline item:

"You're saying it's a falsehood and they're giving-- Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that."

That phrase "alternative facts" is likely to get a lot of play in the press.[2] Todd, to to his credit, clearly couldn't believe his ears. "Alternative facts are not facts," he noted. "They're falsehoods."

The correct word, of course, is "lies" but applying the "L" word to even the most blatant lies by the president--any president--is a longstanding taboo in the press. The Cult of Objectivity likes to pretend that deploying that particular characterization is some sort of breach of professional ethics, an inappropriate editorial judgment.[3] It's going to be interesting, then, to see how those in the press are going to cover a president who utters massive lies as a matter of daily routine.[4] On this point, Todd at least seems to be heading in the right direction; while he still refuses to call a lie by its proper name, his formulation--a "provable falsehood"--is as strongly worded as anything we ever get from any of his mainstream colleagues and he didn't back down from it, even when threatened.

What Todd doesn't seem to understand is that to this administration--and to its fans--things like the size of the inauguration crowd aren't at all inconsequential. While trying to dodge Chuck Todd's questions, Kellyanne Conway offered this:

"On this matter of crowd size, I mean, for me, I think the most quantifiable points of interest for Americans should be what just happened a few months ago that brought him [Trump] here, the 31 of 50 states he won, the 2600 counties, the 200 counties that went for President Obama that now went to President Trump and the fact that 29, 30 million women voted for Donald Trump for president, they should be respected, somebody should cover their voices as well."

Some "quantifiable points" Conway neglected in her irrelevant spiel: Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million, with 58% of women voting against him. Trump had an explanation for the former back in November:

Though the idea of widespread "voter fraud" is one of those "alternative facts" persistently peddled by the right-wing Rage Machine as rationale for Republican voter suppression efforts, it's a fiction, one that has been debunked by every serious examination of the question. Every scrap of reliable information says this kind of in-person voter fraud is virtually non-existent and the idea that it's not only real but extends to millions of people falls into the same category as Trump's claims about "thousands and thousands" of American Muslims celebrating in the streets of New Jersey when the 9/11 attacks occurred. These were lies that, like so many that emanate from Trump, aim at demonizing powerless minorities (Trump identified those he claimed were voting illegally as illegal immigrants). Trump's politics are protofascist in nature--basically fascism minus the more extreme commitment to violence--and the corporate press is simply going to have to accept this and understand the implications of it. One of those implications is that Trump must, at all times, project an image of a strong and beloved leader, standing up for the people while besieged by an evil Establishment. He can't bear to let stand the fact that he lost the vote or, in the current dust-up, even a hint of anything that can be interpreted as mockery of his small, er, crowd size.

What lurks behind Conway's alt-"facts" is the extraordinary social damage wrought--and nascent fascist movement birthed--by the right-wing Rage Machine. For better or worse, the U.S. is a fundamentally liberal nation. There's simply no significant popular support for conservative policies. To maintain power in the face of this, the American conservative elite have aggressively labored, through their massive media apparatus, to reduce "politics" and the larger social discourse to the level of a simple good-vs.-evil tale, encouraging their followers to side with them not because their policies are more sound or they have any sort of better argument--any serious examination of such things is, in fact, discouraged--but because they've conjured a pleasing narrative in which they've positioned themselves as the virtuous heroes and everyone else as the evil villains. Nearly every major rightist outlet in the United States has spent a few decades making open war on both reason and on reality itself. Because objective facts would equal an agreed-upon yardstick against which claims can be assessed--and because conservative and reactionary claims can't withstand that scrutiny--breaking down confidence in them has been a major project of the Rage Machine, which attempts to indoctrinate its followers in the belief that the truth or falsity of any proposition can be judged entirely by its temporary political utility. Facts, via this conditioning, become things that can be used as propaganda on the rare occasions when they serve the cause and can be otherwise discarded; the only "fact" is the Machine's narrative. The Machine tells its followers they're persecuted, feeds them a steady diet of manufactured outrages and utterly dehumanizes and demonizes liberals, minorities and anyone else who may stand against the hero of the tale. Liberals, in this fantasy, aren't those who may have a legitimate disagreement. They're an evil, lying, cheating, stealing, weak, moronic enemy actively seeking to do you harm, that have control of the levers of power by illegitimate means and that need to be defeated, destroyed, eliminated. When all reason, all serious thinking, all confidence in institutions has been burned away, all that's left are a bunch of fearful, rage-filled reactionaries who have been taught that though they're right, they're good and they represent The People, they're persecuted by this foe, whom they've been taught to despise. The American conservative elite hope those reared in this atmosphere will show up on election day and vote Republican, which is exactly what has, for some years, happened, but their smog has now given rise to something they didn't anticipate and can't control: a Trumpenstein monster, an angry, ambulatory representation of every bad impulse the Rage Machine has ever projected, with the fascist's promise of national renewal by means of the authoritarian dismantling of the liberal society.[5] Trump's hardcore supporters were reared in this environment and it's to them all this fuss over things like crowd-size is directed. For this particular group, there are no genuine facts anymore, just a narrative to which they've been conditioned to respond. Those alt-"facts" are there to feed that narrative and, perhaps more importantly, to try to widen the range of those infected by it.

Something that perhaps shouldn't need to be so overtly stated is that governance isn't a game to be played between an authoritarian reality-show star and his admiring viewers. There are real people, both in the U.S. and abroad, who can be hurt by Trump and that will be hurt if he governs as he says, real civil liberties that can be crushed and that will be crushed if he has his way. The government of the most powerful nation in the history of the world is now in the hands of a protofascist Twitter troll. That's a problem. The "evil Establishment" Trump stands against isn't the actual political Establishment; it's the institutions of liberal democracy and ultimately, liberal democracy itself. In this particular matter of news media, the press is, at least in theory, a check on Trump and Trump's goal is to completely destroy public confidence in it as an institution--to get rid of that watchdog. He has the presidency and he can do an incredible amount of damage.

His administration presents journalists with something many of them may initially perceive as a crisis. In reality, it's an opportunity, a chance for the press to clean its own house, a chance to shine. While that idea that there are no facts, only narratives, seems self-evidently stupid and dangerous, it's also exactly how most of the corporate press covers political issues. He said/she said "journalism," reporting competing claims as if they were equal while making no effort to adjudicate which, if either, is true. Mainstream commentators may be horrified by that characterization of lies as "alternative facts" but they've implicitly incorporated that same notion into their own work for decades. That needs to stop. Lazy equivalence only ever privileges the lie and in this age of Trump, that's something journalism--and America itself--can no longer afford. And speaking of that, reporters and commentators need to stop trying to come up with some creative way to call a lie something other than a lie. Talk straight. Grow the fuck up. Become that watchdog you're supposed to be, instead of the lapdog you usually are. Since everything in the corporate press seems to come down to profits and demographics, the good news is that Trump is widely despised. He just entered office with the lowest approval rating of any new president on record and that means there's an audience for serious journalism that challenges this administration, something the press should offer with every administration anyway. That can, of course, have a negative effect as well. In the Confirmation Bias Nation, reporting that is false and inaccurate but that plays to public anxiety about Trump can also draw a big crowd. That kind of irresponsible work would only feed Trump's own narrative though, and help further undermine the institution. These are the paths open to journalism now. Shape up, serve your country and maybe this becomes your finest hour or continue down the road of prevarication and/or click-bait-chasing and be rendered even more irrelevant.

--j.

---

[1] This is entirely dishonest--second-term inaugurations from established administrations are always more sparsely watched than first-term ones. According to Nielsen, Trump's inauguration drew 30.6 million viewers, which puts him well behind Obama's 37.7 million viewers in 2009, Reagan's 41.8 million in 1980 and Jimmy Carter's 34.1 million in 1977. He was even behind Richard Nixon's second inaugural, which drew 33 million in 1972. The good news for Trump is that he did at least manage to barely squeak by both Bill Clinton in 1993 (29.7 million) and George Bush Sr. in 1989 (29 million) but if one adjusted for the population growth in the U.S. over those years, he would be well behind them as well, and probably the lowest on record. 

[2] Or maybe not. It's a silver platter item but if those in the corporate press ignore it, it wouldn't be the first time when it comes to dealing with Trump. Or even the 10,000th.

[3] Earlier just this month, Janine Jackson of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting wrote about this.

[4] On Saturday, for example, Trump made a rambling speech to CIA employees in which he asserted that reports about tension between himself and the U.S. intelligence community were a fabrication of an out-to-get-him press. "I have a running war with the media," he declared. "They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth. Right? And they sort of made it sound like I have this feud with the intelligence community." In the real world, Trump, only days earlier, had compared that same intel community to Nazi Germany.

[5] Trump's emergence caused a split inside the Rage Machine, with some embracing him as a virtual messiah while others were horrified. It's been particularly amusing to watch the latter. The National Review's Jonah Goldberg just couldn't believe Republicans would embrace a Trump--the Jonah Goldberg who once wrote an entire book on the premise that fascists were "liberals." Glenn Beck, who sat on television for years preaching anti-rational conspiracism, displaying his infamous board on which he labored to visually connect President Obama and any prominent liberal to dictators, evil Jewish plotters, communists, etc., was aghast at Trump's rise. Unlike most prominent anti-Trump rightists, Beck correctly recognized his own responsibility for this development and was even apologetic about it.


UPDATE (24 Jan, 2017) - From the New York Times:

"President Trump used his first official meeting with congressional leaders on Monday to falsely claim that millions of unauthorized immigrants had robbed him of a popular vote majority, a return to his obsession with the election’s results even as he seeks support for his legislative agenda."

The Times' headline for this story: "Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers." Progress, fellahs, progress.

A Memo To The Press: Get the Clinton Loss Right

In one of my other hats (one I wear here on occasion), I'm a bit of a political analyst. It has been offered to me by several friends and acquaintances that I'm pretty good at this and that this is probably because I'm a radical, a guy who doesn't have a dog in partisan battles. I'll defer to others on the matter of whether my analysis is of any merit. Some months ago, I did predict the likely outcome of yesterday's presidential contest. On days when I should probably be doing something better with my time, I haunt various message boards and Facebook groups and talk politics. The weakness of Hillary Clinton as a candidate has been a constant theme of mine throughout this campaign season, just as it was back in 2008. On 3 June, I wrote a post I threw up on several Facebook groups--and that's how it was often treated, as if I'd thrown up--noting that, from a long-term perspective, it could be argued that

"The best possible outcome of a Clinton/Trump general is to simply let the GOP have the presidency and allow that to become the rock on which that party in its present form is finally broken. That's also the most likely outcome of such a race. But that's a story for another time."

That post eventually evolved into an article here, "A Trump Win the Best Possible Outcome?" Late last night, Donald Trump won the presidency.[1] In the coming days and weeks, I imagine we're going to be hearing all kinds of spin from Democratic insiders in the press trying to explain this. Or, more to the point, to explain it away. Late last night, I wrote some thoughts on this:

As I’m writing this, the outcome of the presidential contest hasn't yet been settled but it’s clear Donald Trump has performed solidly and is probably on his way to winning it. However that turns out, what should have been a one-sided massacre of a joke of a Republican candidate has become a razor-thin contest and before the usual Democratic spin-cycle starts, it’s important to get some things straight.

Hillary Clinton didn't perform badly because of the presence of third-party candidates in the race. Clinton didn't perform badly because of Bernie Sanders. She didn't perform badly because people didn't want a woman for president. It certainly wasn't because she wasn't conservative enough, and moving the party even further right is certainly no solution. It isn't the fault of young people or of James Comey. Hillary Clinton has performed so badly because of Hillary Clinton. She's a weak, loser candidate who began the race more disliked than liked, ran a terrible campaign that made that even worse, a bought-and-paid-for shill, the ultimate Establishment politician in a year in which that was an anathema. She's behind and probably going to lose because she was, yet again, another pol who offered nothing to those who have been harmed by the decline of America and have been left behind by the political Establishment. In the absence of constructive politics that address their concerns, people will inevitably turn to whatever is available, even a faux-populist protofascist campaign.

This didn't have to happen. The Democrats had a solid candidate who drew all the enthusiasm within the party and who would have rolled right over Trump. And Clinton and the party Establishment burned every bridge in order to screw him over and foist Clinton on the public instead, at a time when most people openly told pollsters they despised her. It worked. Hope was broken.[2] And now, the U.S. is likely to be saddled with a dangerously incompetent protofascist half-wit.

There's a certain element of unappealing braggadocio in told-you-so-ism but in this case, it's some salt that needs to be vigorously applied to this particular wound, because this outcome was utterly predictable. I assembled the below graphic in October 2015[3] and used it to accompany this analysis, which I'd been offering in various venues even before that, and had, in fact, offered back in 2008 as well. The good news is that a Trump win will probably finish off the GOP and lead to the revitalization of an opposition party.

It will, that is, unless the expected Democratic spin I've tried to prematurely disentangle is allowed to substitute for a genuine autopsy.

Showing the same lack of class that helped defeat her, Clinton declined to speak to her followers gathered at her campaign headquarters in New York last night, offering no public concession. It fell to Trump to note, during his own victory speech, that she'd called him and conceded.

It will be interesting to see if Democrats get this right and, for the purpose of this blog, even more interesting to see if the press holds them to account rather than letting them spin it away. Trump's win also presents a  major problem for the GOP, as the populist views he's adopted on things like "free trade" and jobs clash rather spectacularly with those of the party and its elected officials and the coverage of that will be a whole 'nother can of worms. But that's a can of worms for another day...

--j.

---

[1] In recent days, I've been overwhelmed by the feeling that I've seriously dropped the ball on the Trump phenomenon. Trump is the latest manifestation of trends I've been covering for a couple decades now and though on various message boards and debate groups I've written perhaps entire books about his candidacy and, much more importantly, what's behind it, I've written almost nothing in the way of formal articles on it (and certainly no books). His campaign could be seen as a culmination of so much work I've done. Now that he's won, I guess I'll have the opportunity to play catch-up. I note this for no particular reason. Maybe it's just that this piece sounds like I'm crowing about getting the election right, so I'm feeling overly compelled to point out a personal shortcoming as counter.

[2] Bernie Sanders saw the likely outcome of a Clinton/Trump contest as well. In a speech to the Democratic National Committee's Summer conference on 28th August, 2015, he warned:

"Let me be very clear. In my view, Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate, will not gain the House and will not be successful in dozens of governor’s races unless we run a campaign which generates excitement and momentum and which produces a huge voter turnout. With all due respect, and I do not mean to insult anyone here, that will not happen with politics as usual. The same old, same old will not be successful. The people of our country understand that — given the collapse of the American middle class and the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality we are experiencing — we do not need more establishment politics or establishment economics. We need a political movement which is prepared to take on the billionaire class and create a government which represents all Americans, and not just corporate America and wealthy campaign donors. In other words, we need a movement which takes on the economic and political establishment, not one which is part of it."

[3] To clarify, this was an existing image of Clinton; I only applied the word to it.

Unrigging Rigging The Election IV

On Wednesday, right-wing con-artist and self-styled "journalist" James O'Keefe released the fourth video in his "Rigging the Election" series, purporting to allege wrongdoing in the ongoing presidential race by the Hillary Clinton campaign. The first three videos, examined here, here and here, were a swampy mess, any legitimate issues they raised being hopelessly consumed by O'Keefe's trademark brand of obfuscation, misdirection and falsehood.

O'Keefe's latest offering begins with a sort of greatest hits package, recycling material from the previous installments. Through the course of all of these releases, O'Keefe has been updating his narrative to keep it in-the-now. It's worth noting, in light of this, that he continues to repeat many of the falsehoods from those prior projects, rather than correcting them.

--The series' opening title sequence continues to include Aaron Black's assertion that he's "deputy rapid response director for the DNC for all things Trump on the ground," a claim that was exposed as false by Time on 18 Oct., right after the release of the first video.

--"In April," says O'Keefe, "we started uncovering the aggressive birddogging that was secretly done by the Clinton campaign. It's an underhanded nationwide operation to foment violence at Trump rallies." In reality, bird-dogging, which O'Keefe presented in his first video as some sort of innovative code, is merely the longstanding practice by activists of publicly asking candidates questions, usually ones that are politically tough for them to answer, and trying to get them on the record as either responding or dodging the issue. It has nothing whatsoever to do with fomenting violence. As this blog documented at the time, a simple Google search would have explained the tactic and provided endless examples of groups employing it. David Weigel in the Washington Post also pointed out its true nature. O'Keefe didn't really even need a search engine or the Post--Scott Foval of Americans United For Change correctly described the practice in footage used in O'Keefe's first video, but O'Keefe simply ignored that footage in order to construct his own false claims. Here, O'Keefe clings to that earlier falsehood by showing a clip of Foval referring to bird-dogging as "conflict engagement." As for the "done by the Clinton campaign," Foval isn't employed by the Clinton campaign.

--O'Keefe takes a step back from his claim in his third video that the Clinton campaign was violating federal campaign coordination laws repeats with regard to the Donald Ducks campaign (covered here), but without noting he's doing so. There, he'd flatly said the campaign was "breaking federal campaign coordination laws" and that "the campaign law violations" are "undeniable." Here, those previous assertions have disappeared, replaced by weasel-wording: "We were also growing gathering evidence that the Clinton campaign was violating the federal election campaign coordination laws." And he shows a brief clip of Bob Creamer of Democracy Partners attributing the duck idea to Clinton. But that previous video explained the origin of that comment--someone had told Clinton about the idea and she'd loved it. It wasn't her idea, the Clinton campaign never fielded the duck and those who did manage it weren't employed by that campaign.

--"Scott Foval gave us a primer on how to commit massive voter fraud," says O'Keefe, then shows a clip of Foval talking about "bussing people in." This comes from O'Keefe's second video, but as covered here, there's no indication in the footage of what Foval is even describing with that comment. If it was actually connected to the voter fraud scheme O'Keefe had alleged, O'Keefe would have certainly shown the full context illustrating this.

With that, O'Keefe is on to the subject of his new video, which proves to be the easiest one to address. It's about an O'Keefe operative posing as a donor who, in order to keep his foot in the door so O'Keefe's undercover antics could continue, gives a $20,000 donation to Americans United For Change.

That's it. That's all. It's as if O'Keefe ran out of steam. After making the donation, O'Keefe says, "Creamer, Foval, Jenna Price from the DNC, Brad Woodhouse from AUFC, Cesar Vargas and others had opened the door to their smoke-filled rooms of illegal and dirty campaign dealings," without ever outlining any "illegal and dirty campaign dealings."

As O'Keefe tells the story, he set up a dummy corporation and associated bank account in Belize, for decades a haven for shady money and transfers of same. "This is typically the actions of drug dealers and tax-dodging white-collar criminals," O'Keefe explains. "We used it as a cover." The subhead O'Keefe slapped on the video says "$20k Wire Transfer From Belize Returned," a reference to the fact that AUFC head Brad Woodhouse, upon learning of O'Keefe's operation, returned the donation. "Woodhouse told a journalist that AUFC was going to return the $20,000--he was concerned it might have been an illegal foreign donation. We were happy to get the wire transfer showing the $20,000 was returned but we wondered why it wasn't a problem for the previous month that Woodhouse had the money."

This entire narrative, it turns out, is an utter fraud. A Thursday article from Time picks it apart:

"As a non-profit under section 501(c)4 of the tax code, Americans United is not barred from taking foreign cash, much to the dismay of good government advocates. It might not look good, but it’s not illegal.

"The money transfer... appears to have come in much differently than O’Keefe describes, one reason it did not set off any red flags with Americans United... [O'Keefe] says he used a shell corporation from Belize to move the cash to Americans United, which shares a consultant with the DNC. An emergency internal audit at Americans United, which for the last week has been the target of O’Keefe’s videos, pulled the receipt for the transfer. The money was received from The Bank of New York Mellon, incorporated at the same address as TIME Magazine’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. Americans United allowed TIME to review these documents.

"What’s more, the Sept. 9 transfer receipt shows that the customer who ordered the money moved is registered in Stamford, Conn. The exact address is used by Veritas executive director Russell J. Verney as his residence on his Connecticut voting registration forms. Verney also lists that address on forms filed with the state of Virginia incorporating Project Veritas. And that shell corporation? It lists its address these days as Verney’s Connecticut home—a far cry from the colony formerly known as British Honduras.

"(O’Keefe, however, did route the cash through Heritage Bank in Belize to justify his claims. But the cash was sent from an American address, via an American bank, to an American political group. Even though it’s not illegal, O’Keefe is definitely trying to get his headlines here by claiming this is foreign cash. The documents he released to back up his claim appear to black out the Stamford, Conn., address.)"

Woodhouse didn't say he was returning the donation because of any concern over it being foreign. His comment, reproduced in that same Time piece: "We returned the money because the last thing we want to be associated with is a character like O'Keefe who has been convicted and successfully sued for his illegal tactics and fraudulent activities."

This writer discovered O'Keefe had outright altered a screencap in the vid in order to further his narrative. At one point in the video, O'Keefe is building up Creamer's status as a Democratic insider. "Bob Creamer was listed as AUFC's general consultant until our stories about their shady activities were released," he says, and offers this screencap:

"Now," O'Keefe continues, "his name is nowhere to be found." But as O'Keefe's screencap of that same page shows, the entire "Our Staff" sidebar is absent from the current version of that page, not just Creamer's name. In O'Keefe's "before" screencap, Creamer is prominently listed just below AUFC executive director Caroline Ciccone. Thanks to the good ol' Wayback Machine, we can visit previous cached versions of that same page. In the version of it from 11 Oct., only days before O'Keefe began releasing his videos, Creamer is still there alright but he's at the very bottom of the "our staff" list:

That's also how this appears in every iteration of the page cached by the Wayback Machine going all the way back to 9 July, 2015, when Creamer first appeared in the list. O'Keefe simply did a cut-and-paste, elevating Creamer from the bottom of the pile and slapping his name over that of Communications Director Jeremy Funk.

Creamer's role as an AUFC consultant is plainly stated on his profile at Democracy Partners: "He is General Consultant to Americans United for Change where he helped coordinate the campaigns to pass President Obama’s landmark jobs and economic recovery legislation."

---

--j.

Unrigging Rigging the Election III

On Monday, right-wing con-artist James O'Keefe released the third video in his "Rigging the Election" series, purporting to allege corrupt campaign practices by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. In the first two vids, examined here and here, O'Keefe and his operatives adopted a pose of "investigative journalists" yet conducted no real investigation into the charges they were making, charges based on a mess of O'Keefe-proferred misinformation, misdirection and obfuscation aimed at low-information viewers who pay little attention. His latest opus fares little better.

"In this story," says O'Keefe, "we'll show an illegal dark-money conspiracy between the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC [Democratic National committee] and the non-for-profit corporation Americans United For Change." The video follows an amusing bit of street theater conducted first by the DNC then by AUFC wherein activists dressed as Donald Duck dogged Trump campaign appearances as a reminder that Trump has repeatedly ducked calls to release his tax returns.

"It turns out the duck was Hillary's idea," claims O'Keefe[1] but his own footage shows this not to be the case. In fact, in the hidden camera footage, Bob Creamer--a target of all of O'Keefe's videos in this series--clearly explains the actual origin of the idea and he does so more than once. In one segment--the important one--Creamer relates at length,

"Originally, this guy Skalar, who... did the Chicken George in 1992, came to Lux and I with the idea of Donald Ducks. And I ran it up the flagpole in New York and put it down... and then it came up and they just said, uh, we'd rather do, what do you call it, Uncle Sam--'I want you to release your tax returns.' And Uncle Sam suits are easy to find for adults. Uh, but then I get a call, actually on the plane about to go to London last week, Christina Reynolds called and says 'I've got good news and bad news. The good news is the candidate would like to have a mascot following around... Trump but the bad news is she wants it to be Donald Duck.'[2] And that's because Skalar is an old Clinton hand, he had gone to some buddy of his who is one of her body people and she had explained, explained the idea to Hillary. And Hillary just loved it... So my answer to Christina was, if the future President of the United States wants ducks on the ground, we will put ducks on the ground."[3]

To unpack all of this, "Lux" is a co-founder of Creamer's own firm, Democracy Partners. O'Keefe makes no effort to explain this. Christina Reynolds is the Deputy Communications Director for Hillary For America--the Clinton campaign. "Chicken George"--also entirely unexplained by O'Keefe--was a campaign similar to Donald Ducks that was run against George Bush Sr. during his 1992 reelection effort--at a time when Bush was ducking debates with his presidential opponents, a guy  in a chicken suit dogged his public appearances. "Chicken George" was invented by John O'Meara and Derrick Parker in Michigan and grew from there. Presumably, "Skalar" was someone involved in that campaign or perhaps Creamer just got a name wrong. O'Keefe, trying to sell that false notion that "the duck was Hillary's idea," makes absolutely no effort to identify this person,[4] the actual source of the idea.

O'Keefe's central premise throughout this video is that Clinton dreamed up the duck idea and was secretly directing the duck campaign all along and he uses that footage of Creamer, just quoted, to sell this. In a different clip earlier in the vid, Creamer repeats his comment about the future president wanting "ducks on the ground," strengthening the impression O'Keefe is trying to convey. As Creamer tells the story, his conversation with Reynolds is the origin of that line. In another pair of later clips from a different context, Creamer talks about Clinton wanting the ducks. Cumulatively, this becomes the basis of the subhead O'Keefe slaps on the video, "Creamer Confirms Hillary Clinton Was PERSONALLY Involved," but, of course, the only thing any of it actually shows is that Clinton (apparently) once said she liked the idea--an idea that, contrary to O'Keefe, wasn't her own.

It isn't possible to deduce, from this video, how long it took for the events in Creamer's rundown of the origin and progression of the Donald Ducks idea to play out but other items in the video suggest it had been around for a while. O'Keefe's propensity for obfuscation leaves viewers with no timeline for any of his footage but some minor detective work answers some questions. Creamer was in that meeting with Brad Woodhouse--the head of Americans United For Change--and others.[5] O'Keefe never says when this meeting was held. Fortunately, it's possible to deduce it occurred in mid-August.[6] In another clip from the same meeting, Woodhouse says,

"We did Donald Ducks in May... we put out a whole blast and a release around the idea that he [Trump] was ducking... The key here is to have the visual and to have the costume and have the sign. We got so much shit for that blast. Reporters thought it was silly."

In still another clip elsewhere in the video (and not from this meeting), Scott Foval of the AUFC--the star of O'Keefe's previous videos in this run--says "the whole duck thing... the actual idea was hatched way back in May." So while O'Keefe has Clinton behind all of this, Creamer, in that meeting, says he got that call from Reynolds "last week," marking early- to mid-August as the point at which Clinton first entered the picture, at least three months after the idea had been floated, a form of it had even been launched and the decision to have Trump dogged by a mascot had already been made.

The Donald Ducks campaign from August was initially managed by the DNC but in September, the DNC abandoned it and the AUFC picked it up. This was reported in the press at the time, among other places, in a story in the Wall Street Journal referenced by O'Keefe:

"A DNC spokesman wouldn't say why it cut ties [to the duck campaign]. But the decision could help the political party's governing body avoid potential legal complications.

"Law Blog previously reported that Donald Ducks could pose trademark and copyright issues by running afoul of Disney's intellectual property rights."

 In O'Keefe's hidden camera footage, Creamer explained that the transfer of the duck "had to do only with some problem between Donna Brazile and ABC, which is owned by Disney, because they were worried about a trademark issue." Donna Brazile, who, from 24 July forward, was the interim chair of the DNC, is also an ABC News Contributor.

O'Keefe tries to slip in a call-back to his allegation in his first video that Democratic operatives were trying to incite violence at Trump events. "Creamer and Foval even expected there to be violence following the duck," he narrates, "and it sounded like they wanted it to happen." O'Keefe then plays a clip of Creamer and one of Foval, neither of whom express anything remotely approximating a desire for this to happen.

The big scandal here, according to O'Keefe, is that all of this constitutes illegal coordination between the campaign and entities that are, legally speaking, supposed to be independent of it. At that point, a real journalist would find some experts in campaign finance law and put them on camera to lead viewers through the legal aspects of this matter. Instead, O'Keefe just asserts that entirely unnamed and unseen "federal campaign law experts" have told him "the ducks on the ground are likely 'public communications' for purposes of the law. It's political activity opposing Trump, paid for by Americans United For Change funds but controlled by Clinton/her campaign." Though O'Keefe apparently couldn't find a single such expert willing to put his face and his name behind that assertion, the Business Insider had no trouble finding a pair of them willing to offer an analysis:

"Two election law experts told Business Insider that the rules against this type of coordination generally only apply to paid media advertisements — for example, TV, newspaper, or internet ads.

"'The word coordination in the English language means something very different than what it means to the Federal Election Commission,' said Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California at Irvine who specializes in campaign finance regulation and election law.

"Hasen, who said he did not see the video and could not speak specifically to it, other than what was described to him, added that the laws are 'generally for media advertising, which this doesn't sound like [the video] necessarily is.'

"Brendan Fischer, associate counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, agreed that FEC rules typically apply to media advertising. The example he gave was of a campaign asking a Super PAC to run an ad in a certain media market. That, he said, would be in violation of the FEC regulations.

"'Groups can talk to one another,' he said. 'That's not covered by the coordination rules.'"

On Monday, Fox News' Special Report offered a report that badly distorted the issue but host Bret Baier did talk to Elliot Berke, an expert in campaign finance law,

"The first thing we need to look at is whether or not there's a public communication and it's not clear to me from the video they put out that there actually is a public communication. That really means a paid political advertisement, so something in the newspaper, broadcast, satellite, something like that. Here, it looks like there just were protesters dressed up as Donald Ducks that had appeared. I doubt the FEC would see that as a public communication."

However, when Baier asked about the ducks being Hillary Clinton's personal idea, Berke replied:

"Well, that's a different question, because any time a candidate, committee or political party is working with an outside group, you get into possible in-kind contributions and here, the allegation is that the candidate herself may have directed an outside group to engage in this behavior, and if so, that could be an in-kind contribution. In-kind contributions can be permissible but they need to be reported, but because we're dealing with an outside, third-party group here, that group may also take corporate contributions, and if that's the case, then it clearly would be illegal."

The rules regarding these matters are outlined on the Federal Election Commission's website. This writer has no expertise in these issues, so the question of legality isn't going to be settled here, but it isn't settled by O'Keefe either, who is also without any expertise--on the matter of the legality of the duck, strictly a quack--but confidently proclaims "the campaign law violations" are "undeniable."[7]

O'Keefe says, "representatives of Hillary's campaign run daily conference calls, we witnessed, with Creamer, AUFC managers and their operatives. They were talking about where to send the duck and the duck's message." O'Keefe offers no footage of any of this, though he certainly has it if, as he says, his operatives were present. The timeframe in which any such conversations happened is important too, because the DNC originally ran the duck campaign--if they're talking about it during that period, it's a non-story and what they say about it after that period is crucial. O'Keefe shows a clip of Scott Foval:

"So the operation is to insert and get the duck message in there if we can, or the extremist message, depending on... we have to clear this with DNC... We have to clear which message we're going to be targeting at each event."

Again, no timeframe, but in another clip elsewhere in the video, one that appears to come from the same conversation, Foval talks about the AUFC taking over the duck campaign. Obviously, the substance of those conference calls with the DNC takes on even more importance. Though both the specific content of any such exchanges and their timing are central to O'Keefe's claims, he leaves all of that information on the cutting-room floor.

The DNC cut ties with the duck in September, "but behind the scenes," O'Keefe extravagantly asserts, "the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign was still running the show, breaking federal campaign coordination laws." To buttress this, he shows a clip of Jenna Price, an assistant press secretary for the DNC. An O'Keefe operative asks her, "why aren't you taking credit [for the duck]?" She replies,

"Just 'cause there were issues. There were, like, it's a long story, ask Bob about it... [I]t wasn't party politics, but we just have to be careful about these things and the way we talk about them and who knows about certain things."

O'Keefe infers this is because the duck operation was illegal but in footage shown elsewhere in the video (because why be clear when you can obfuscate, right?), O'Keefe's operative did ask Bob Creamer about this and, as noted earlier, Creamer explained it was over Disney's grumblings over their intellectual property relating to the use of the Donald Duck character in light of Donna Brazile's employment by ABC (Disney). Obviously, a thorny matter and one the DNC didn't want to discuss in public because of the legal ramifications if Disney decided to make an issue of it (the DNC didn't offer any explanation in that Wall Street Journal article either). Despite there being an obvious reason for Price to be tight-lipped, O'Keefe just runs right past it, turning her into more grist for his conspiracy.

O'Keefe is, here, very much repeating the same tactic he employed in the "voter fraud scheme" he alleged in his second video. He builds his entire case on innuendo and obfuscation when, if the accusations he's peddling are true, he would have footage to directly prove it, yet that footage somehow never makes it into his video. O'Keefe's big target here is the Clinton campaign--his intro calls this "part 3 of our undercover investigation into the dark backroom dealings of the Hillary Clinton campaign"[8]--but the only significant connection he's able to make to it is Creamer describing a single phone-call from Clinton's Deputy Communications Director, who, in Creamer's telling, relates that Clinton loved the duck idea and then some other comments deriving from that phone conversation. Where's the footage of those conference calls wherein the duck is discussed and that O'Keefe claims his operatives witnessed? Barring that, where's an account of them? Where are the legal experts O'Keefe claims to have consulted and if they exist, why do their conclusions contradict those of the named experts the press has consulted?

Hanging over all of this is another really obvious question: why would any of these parties, operating at the highest levels of American politics, go so far as to intentionally violate federal election laws in order to carry out this amusing but utterly silly and inconsequential campaign involving a duck that few ever saw anyway? That it seems so unlikely doesn't mean they wouldn't do it but it really is an extraordinary claim and there's precious little here to substantiate it. O'Keefe's operatives spent at least five months on this operation. If this is the worst they've found, it says something about those whom they've targeted alright, but it's something very different from what O'Keefe claims.

--j.

---

[1] The Project Veritas website suggests Clinton is "the originator of the Donald Ducks scheme."

[2] As Creamer explains elsewhere in the vid, this was "bad news" because unlike the plentiful Uncle Sam costumes, it's very difficult to find Donald Duck costumes for adults.

[3] Creamer offers a truncated version of this same story to one of O'Keefe's operatives in a clip that appears earlier in the video.

[4] O'Keefe the "journalist" does nothing with that information--information that falsifies one of his central claims--except talk right past it, offering a version of events that directly contradicts it while apparently hoping no one will notice.

[5] O'Keefe correctly identifies Woodhouse as the head of Americans United For Change but the identity of the others, where they are and when this meeting is happening are all details O'Keefe declines to share.

[6] There are other clips from this same meeting scattered around the video. O'Keefe, with his usual lack of specificity, doesn't say these clips are from the same meeting but in the footage, it's taking place in the same room, shot from the same camera angle, Woodhouse is wearing the same shirt and so is the woman beside him--the same woman in each clip. In one, Creamer makes reference to Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence appearing at the Iowa State Fair "this week"; Pence appeared at that event on Saturday, 20 August.

[7] It would be interesting to hear counselor O'Keefe's legal opinion on whether there are any legal questions involved in his taking thousands of dollars from the Trump Foundation then, in the final stretch of this presidential campaign, creating a series of hit-pieces using one of Trump's own favorite themes--"the election is rigged"--to attack Trump's opponent.

[8] It must be hard to keep a straight face when describing the duck campaign as in any way "dark," but at least O'Keefe still has his ominous music to try to sell it. Looking at his effort as a filmmaker, the phrase "tone-deafness" immediately leaps to mind.