Hillary Clinton’s big problem at the moment is she only has one problem, while her opponent, former reality television star Donald Trump, has lots of them.
Clinton is currently dogged by the latest iteration of her email woes: FBI Director James Comey’s announcement last week of a resumed probe into her treatment of classified information after new (or maybe not new) emails were found on a device shared by Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, noted creeper Anthony Weiner. This development has gotten the lion’s share of election 2016 coverage over the last few days; cable news is wall-to-wall with segments on it, while the major newspapers have granted it most of their prime column inches.
Meanwhile, as U.S. News’ Robert Schlesinger noted on Tuesday, Trump was the subject of a veritable cascade of crazy stories over the same time frame: The New York Times detailed how Trump used legally dubious measures to avoid reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income; the FBI is looking into his former campaign manager’s business ties to Russia; he’s stiffing his campaign pollster (as is his wont when it comes to those in his employ); he continues to get basic facts about policy shockingly wrong; and, not for nothing, he has email deletion issues of his own.
In addition, last Friday saw the release of a new video of Trump, on stage, humiliating a former Miss Universe winner in 2011. (No, not that former Miss Universe winner, a different one.) The video is just the latest on-tape evidence of Trump’s raging misogyny and his belief that women deserve to be publicly degraded.
But did that video earn any play in the political media? Barely. What about any of the above stories? Meh. They received coverage, sure, but nothing like the sustained focus directed on Clinton and her damn emails.
And that’s the current problem for Clinton: It’s far easier to focus on her one, large, glaring vulnerability than the parade of Trump stories that come at us every single day. In fact, there’s so much ridiculous news emanating from Trump world that previous tailspin-inducing campaign moments — his attacking the family of an American soldier killed in Iraq; his ridiculous debate performances; his middle-of-the-night tweeting about nonexistent sex tapes; his now-infamous ” grab them by the pussy” video; the many women who have accused him of sexual assault; his refusal to release his tax returns — have all vanished into the dustbin labeled “yesterday’s news.”
Stuff that should be utterly disqualifying has become so normalized that it’s treated like a footnote in the tale of 2016. Stories that should be shocking are just one more bit of Trump info for the pile. Everything is crazy, therefore nothing is.
It’s not that the media haven’t done their due diligence on Trump’s huge downsides. They definitely have. It’s that there’s so much negative stuff coming out of the Trump fire hose it’s become effectively impossible to drink it all down. The noise drowns out all the signals.
Clinton, meanwhile, has one, big, easily digestible negative story that emphasizes a core vulnerability. It’s there, all the time, hoovering up clicks and eyeballs. And it drowns out not just Trump antics, but other news about Clinton, as well.
According to an analysis by the watchdogs at Media Matters, major news networks have dedicated three times as much coverage to emails as to all major policy issues in the campaign combined. A Shorenstein Center study on coverage of the 2016 race needed to make email stories a category unto itself, since it so outpaced other genres of Clinton reporting. A Gallup study released in September found that “emails” dominated what people say they’ve heard about Clinton; for Trump, people report having heard a mish-mash of other terms.
Clinton should still be fine, per the polls, though we’ll know more on that front in the coming days. And to be clear, using a private email server was a big, dumb mistake that she shouldn’t have made. But the obsession with her emails has obscured the gaping maw between the qualifications and policy proposals of the two candidates in this election.
On the one hand, there’s an eminently experienced woman who has been in public service for 30 years, with the errors that necessarily come alongside such a long career. Argue with her policies all you want, but it’s clear she believes in trying to make the country a better place.
On the other is a con man, someone who has gamed the system for his own benefit for decades — an utterly unqualified, incoherent narcissist who revels in his own ignorance, and who is dangerous precisely because he has no idea what he doesn’t know.
On character alone, Trump should be rendered unfit for office, but the policy vision he’s outlined, such as it is, would be a fundamental rethinking of what America is, and in a truly negative way. And he’s helped unleash the worst this country has to offer, empowering the facets of society that are, yes, deplorable. That’s what we should be talking about.
Or we could talk some more about emails.
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Hillary Clinton Email Obsession Stems From Donald Trump Scandal Fatigue originally appeared on usnews.com
