Clinton’s honeymoon phase with the establishment is over

Liberal pundits, anxious over Clinton’s recent poll numbers, are looking for something to blame. Their two prime targets are young voters — for not supporting Clinton at the same high rates they supported Obama — and Bernie Sanders — for daring to say some negative things about her during the primary. But young voters are Clinton’s best age demographic, while the older age groups of most of the aforementioned pundits are far more favorable to Trump. And Sanders was an astonishingly restrained and polite primary opponent. He denounced the email story completely, never brought up any Clinton Foundation scandals, and never attacked her character.

Another problem with these excuses, especially the Bernie one, is that they’re attempting to explain a phenomenon that began at least as far back as 2013:

What happened in 2013? Did a surge of millennials suddenly become old enough to be included in favorability polls? How did Bernie Sanders, an obscure Senator from Vermont that very few had heard of in 2013, manage to hurt her reputation back then? Ok, enough rhetoric — the answer is obviously that she left the State Department in 2013 to, as everyone assumed at the time, begin preparations for another presidential campaign.

Liberals understand that timing, but they have yet to figure out why her favorability decreases when she’s running for office. They want to believe she’s the most qualified candidate ever, that she’s always been a tireless advocate for the vulnerable and an outstanding public servant, that she’s experienced and wise and most of all smart. It’s a little strange, because as members of the pundit class they should know some things about public relations and marketing, but they seem incapable of imagining that such pervasive influences may have affected their perception of Clinton.

She is one of the two most disliked presidential candidates in the history of favorability polling, the other being almost indistinguishable from a Manchurian Candidate trying to throw her the election and destroy the Republican Party for a generation — who she is still having a hard time defeating. And, as the graph above shows, her poor and decreasing favorability began long before Sanders became her primary opponent. Might he have contributed to the decline? Maybe. It’s possible. But that strikes me as a bit too much theory than required to explain the phenomenon.

If Sanders hadn’t mentioned her Goldman Sachs speeches, would the story have just been ignored? When he said, “I’m sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!” — was he not being sincere enough? And if he’s so influential, then after endorsing her, speaking at length about the importance of voting for her during the convention, and sometimes joining her on the campaign trail, why haven’t her numbers gone up?

Liberals are looking for an explanation- anything other than the obvious truth that she is a highly flawed candidate. She voted for the Iraq war, she has many close and lucrative ties with both of the most reviled sources of corruption in America (Wall Street and D.C.), and she has a very checkered history with no shortage of subject matter for attack ads. Just check out some of the ones Obama ran against her in 2008, they were brutal:

If that’s not enough evidence already, yet another thing these pundits fail to mention when they blame the left is that in the last few weeks the tone has changed against Clinton in the (establishment) media. Causation can be a pretty philosophical topic, but it’s pretty intuitively obvious at least that such recent trends would be more to blame for her recently sinking matchup poll numbers than Bernie’s criticism which ceased in early June, or the existence or purported fickleness of young people.

I’ll end with a quick hierarchy of the causes of electoral difficulty for moderate Democrats:

1. People actually voting for Republicans, working on their campaigns, or funding them
2. The wise and just establishment which legalized and normalized the political corruption that allows billionaire super-villains to fund Republican campaigns
3. Corporate, for-profit, capitalist news media who love Trump for the ratings he gets them, and strongly prefer horserace reporting to substantive debates on the issues
4. The personal/policy/campaign faults of the moderate Democrats themselves
5. The “silent majority” of moderate/swing voters who are less interested/educated about politics and, as a shortcut, just assume that the truth is always somewhere between the viewpoints of any two disagreeing parties, or that their vote doesn’t really matter anyway
6. A bunch of other stuff, including probably the weather on election day
7. And then way below all of those, the dreaded left. “Bernie Bros,” socialists, peace/privacy/environmental/poverty/BlackLivesMatter activists, Ralph Nader, college students, Glenn Greenwald, etc. This demographic is far more politically active and actually supports moderate Democratic candidates at higher rates than the “silent majority”/moderates/swing voters/pundits. But anything less than 100% conformity is grounds for scapegoating and left-punching

So if you are a liberal pundit type of person and you’re on the verge of saying something like, “And she would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling millennials!” please stop and consider your priorities.