Who Was Poppin’ Champagne Aboard The Clinton Campaign Plane?

Michael Tracey
mtracey
Published in
3 min readNov 13, 2016

One of the juicier bits to come out since Tuesday— the most stunning electoral collapse in the entire history of the United States, mind you — is that smug Hillary aides literally popped champagne aboard the campaign plane on Election Day. You could understand if some low-level staff did something foolish like this, but if you’re on the plane, you are senior-level staff. So this gives insight into just how deluded these people were, at the highest levels.

Let’s pause and note that the Clinton campaign and their media allies are supposed to be the most amazingly “data-oriented” operators of all time. They’re just interested in the data, folks. (“Just the facts, ma’am.”) And yet there was all kinds of data showing that the electorate had shrunk among key demographics that would’ve been necessary for any Clinton win. They ignored this data and instead pre-emptively celebrated.

How come I was able to see this data, but these highly-paid political professionals were not? Maybe they deluded themselves. Maybe they were so blinkered by a cultish devotion to Hillary that they selectively ignored data that contravened their assumptions, certain as they were about her inevitable triumph. Who knows. Either way, they’re failures, they’ve been repudiated, and they should be banished. They shouldn’t be allowed to rehabilitate themselves in two months, and then earn big fees to go around giving talks on “The Lessons of 2016.” They didn’t learn any lessons. They ignored them.

Neera Tanden is now on Twitter spreading rumors and conspiracies to try to de-legitimize the election. Remember when the entire pundit class spent a full week ferociously denouncing Trump for merely suggesting that he might do something similar? Where’s the comparable indignation about Neera’s explicit attempt to undermine faith in our cherished democratic institutions?

These people are liars and frauds. They’ve been permanently discredited. They are responsible for nominating one of the worst presidential candidates in the entire history of the United States, Hillary Clinton, and paving the way for the most blockbuster electoral collapse ever. She was nominated because of her alleged “electability,” but she couldn’t beat the guy from “The Apprentice.”

The idea that Neera Tanden should ever again be able to present herself as some kind of “expert” on politics is a sick joke. Don’t let her do it. There need to be actual consequences for the people who facilitated this wreck. Here’s a good place to start: ask Neera if she tasted that champagne.

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