From the famous “basket of deplorables,” to the legion of grief counsellors now patrolling the stricken campuses of American universities, the presidential campaign, now finally behind us, was a full clothes-line of oddities, delights and curious turns. Here are just a few of the more memorable moments from a campaign that the world will not soon forget — however hard it tries.
It’s also true that many
media outlets carried their support for Clinton to delusional excess — a blot on journalism that will take a political eon to fade. On the eve of the vote, with the confidence that only
self-hypnotizing progressives can bring to a lost cause, the Huffington Post was eagerly boasting that the chances of a Clinton victory were a whopping 98 per cent.
Yet after Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey’s many interventions, all the scandals revealed by WikiLeaks, the brewing uproars over the Clinton Foundation and, of course, that pesky email server distraction, putting Clinton’s chances of winning at 98 per cent can only be explained two ways: either the Huffington Post was using the same vote probability software as the North Koreans; or it has given up on being anything resembling a “news” outlet.
hen there was Bernie Sanders. It’s easy to sympathize with the Sanders campaign. After the way the Clintons treated him, it’s easier to understand why he honeymooned in Moscow (seriously). He may want to do that again. Early on,
Clinton kidnapped all the Democratic super-delegates. The Democratic National Committee became an unofficial arm of the Clinton campaign.
Donna Brazile, interim chairwoman of the DNC and Clinton mole, was feeding the Democratic candidate debate questions that she got from her connections at CNN. And former chairwoman of the DNC,
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was practically running the campaign.
Sanders was campaigning on a shoestring budget, while
Clinton was picking up fat cheques from the Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street elite. T
he One-percenters adored Clinton, as she was, after all, a member of that fine club herself. Nonetheless, in spite of all the forces openly against him, and secretly undermining him, Sanders “coulda been a contender” — until he declared that
he was “sick of your damn emails.” He wasn’t going to talk about them, and he didn’t. It was Oscar Wilde who mourned that “each man kills the thing he loves,” but only the Sanders campaign could find a political application for that sour observation.
He gave Clinton a pass, and Trump his best weapon.
Clinton’s defeat should not be taken as proof of a glass ceiling in American politics. The only “ceiling” she met with was the one that bars a really dreadful candidate from beating a slightly less dreadful one. It wasn’t misogyny that caused Clinton’s downfall; it was all the
needless baggage that she and her husband were dragging around. Clinton was not a stand-in for all women
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