“What went wrong” in 2016? Are they kidding?

Going where the denial is thickest–in the news media

As a rape survivor myself*, I believe Juanita Broaddrick. I listened to Ms. Broaddrick when she was interviewed on Dateline NBC back in 1999. I listened carefully to everything she said, and–as a lifelong registered Democrat myself–I believe her with all my heart. Her accusation was that Bill Clinton assaulted her, in Arkansas, years earlier, when he was State Attorney General and widely believed to be a rising political star and a local political wunderkind. This was a rape allegation–different in degree from the several sexual harassment allegations also leveled against Clinton, and in 2016 against Donald Trump, and very different from Clinton’s compulsive philandering. Broaddrick accused Clinton of forcible rape, on national television–network, not cable–credibly, with detail, not concealing or denying her own errors or her anger at Clinton. Yet after the Clintons left the White House, Broaddrick’s name was scarcely mentioned in what are often called the ‘elite’ media. As the highly respected late columnist William Blackberry commented, it was mystifying that a credible accusation of such magnitude could be passed over. This while The Washington Post deemed that President Clinton’s affair with an intern warranted a special pull-out section titled “Presidency in Crisis”( temporarily), and Republicans in the House were voting to impeach Clinton.

It is an unanswered question, now, how many people even know who Juanita Broaddrick is. Many younger people who voted in 2016 would not have recognized her name in 2015. The fact that she became part of the public discourse largely through some rightwing outlets and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a source of regret for me personally.

The Democrats who should have acknowledged her story dropped the ball. So did the GOP, of course. Neither major party moved constructively to address the issue of rape, in the 1990s or under the George W. Bush administration. President Obama and Vice President Biden did more than any previous White House, addressing sexual assault on college campuses and problems such as the backlog of unprocessed rape kits in the criminal justice system. But much remains to be done.

Our top media outlets did far too little. Millions of words have been written about the 2016 election, with more to come; hundreds of opinion polls were taken, countless models predicted the outcome–wrongly–but so far as I know, no major media outlet polled the public on awareness of Juanita Broaddrick’s accusation against Clinton, or even on her name recognition.

A couple of points here. First, rape is a difficult topic, grim and painful, and difficult things by definition are harder to deal with than easy things. Fewer people will deal well with something difficult than with something easy, including people in the news media. Second,  as mentioned above, few people in large media outlets tried to deal with the Broaddrick story well. This gap is not consistent with a belief in Clinton’s innocence, which would have emphasized accuracy. It sweeps an issue under the rug instead of addressing it.

Third, a media focus on horse-race politics shed too little light on rape as an issue. Thus if Broaddrick’s name was mentioned at all, it was usually through the prism of possible effect on the campaign of Hillary Clinton for president. Those media personalities are now consumed with the question of ‘what went wrong’ with the 2016 election, and what went wrong with their predictions.

Conceding defeat in 2016

Conceding defeat in 2016

Democrats are also addressing the question of ‘what went wrong’, especially since the Clinton campaign is not telling.

And the Clintons are of course being faulted for not telling. On this narrow point, I can help them. This is a question they will not answer fully, because they cannot.

‘What went wrong’ is that the wife of a rapist ran for the White House.

Unthinkable? One would think so. But it wasn’t. There was no one to advise the Clintons, effectively, that Clinton should not run.  A deadly simple timeline resulted. The Clinton team decided to try the run and accumulated all the money not going to the GOP. Meanwhile, Republicans salivating at the prospect of running against ‘Hillary’ lined up, and money or no money, the GOP field was self-destructively large. Trump was the cue ball. Wham. He broke the rack on the table wide apart. And while Trump was breaking things open on the Republican side, the Clintons and their media allies were shutting out every better candidate on the Democratic side–Vice President Biden first, before the primary season even began; then Senator Bernie Sanders in the primaries.

So on one side Trump benefited from the arithmetic of the field, and on the other Clinton, with no essential constituency or platform except narrow self-interest, shut out the field.

Net result: 1) A small cadre of Democratic insiders decided to paste in a nominee before any votes were cast, and 2) they picked the worst possible candidate. The Clintons with their greed problem, their old-time insider status, their treatment-of-women problem, their ties to Wall Street, etc., etc., etc., were the worst possible choice to run against Donald Trump. Not that they knew enough to take Trump seriously, any more than they knew enough to take Sanders seriously. (So much for ‘electable’.) So much for the high-paid expertise with which they theoretically surrounded themselves.

I believe that even the quiet Lincoln Chafee would have done better than Clinton. Joe Biden would have crushed Trump. Bernie Sanders would have crushed Trump. But every political and/or media insider was convinced that Clinton was a shoo-in. And not content with being convinced themselves, they exerted pressures huge to tiny, broad and narrow, to exclude any contrary voice or dissenting opinion.

On a small scale, I saw a little of the action even near my own neighborhood. (A realistic pre-election poll might have taken into account how many millions of Americans witnessed unbecoming behavior by individuals who thought they were going to have the upper hand come Election Day.)

By the weekend before the election, I for one was wondering about the much-touted ‘landslide’. I was not very surprised at the outcome but was disappointed that Russ Feingold lost the Wisconsin senate race. Knowing the Clintons, Feingold’s appeal is probably one of the reasons they neglected Wisconsin. Much of their joint public career for forty years has consisted of playing keep-away, and much of their appeal has been to media insiders who play keep-away themselves. (A realistic post-election investigation might try to examine how the Clintons went about rewarding or enticing favorable media coverage.) No wonder they were so surprised: they shut out the very people they should have been listening to.

These issues connected to the Clintons and to the Democratic Party establishment extend to the news media which confidently predicted a big-time Clinton victory. For now, space and time constraints preclude my going into the media issues. Suffice it to say that we are now hearing self-serving commentators mutually affirming their moral superiority to the unwashed masses. Largely these are the people who went along with Bush’s invasion of Iraq. As with sexual assault, it saddens me to see Iraq swept under the rug. On top of the loss of blood and treasure, in all that (temporary) emphasis on sexual assault during the campaign, no one mentioned that rape follows war.

One last point: owing to the experience I suffered, I felt pummeled throughout the 2016 election cycle–beginning with the smug, complacent assertions of Clinton’s being the inevitable nominee, in 2015 and before. The reaction is difficult to write about, even now. Several media theories about election 2016 have addressed the wrongness of the opinion polls–silent Trump voters, distrust of pollsters, faulty polling methods. I have another theory to add: that I am not the only one in my position. Few Americans would have wanted to share an intensely private perspective on Bill Clinton with pollsters. Even fewer would have wanted to volunteer their private opinion–for example, believing Juanita Broaddrick–with pollsters, without being asked to do so.

And no pollsters asked.

*This was a childhood incident. I was in elementary school at the time, an undersized fifth-grader walking alone through a big park in Houston, to a Brownies meeting. The perpetrator was not someone I knew, and the police never caught him. But at least there was none of that nonsense about not believing me. Everyone knew I could not have made it up, and anyway I was taken to the ER of the local charity hospital–Ben Taub–for an exam.

 

 

Secretary Clinton all smiles at newest Trump tape; will media mention Juanita Broaddrick?

For that matter, will they mention the invasion of Iraq?

The 2016 primary elections in Maryland, by the time we actually got sort of a chance to vote, were a mixed bag. Full disclosure–I myself voted (early voting) for Bernie Sanders and Sanders delegates, a Democratic senate candidate who won, a House candidate who didn’t, and some local judgeship challengers as well as incumbents. Not everybody made it. We had an overflow of good candidates in Maryland’s 4th district. Maryland’s 8th had a similar problem.

We did not have an overflow of good candidates in the presidential race. I supported Sanders heartily, but the fact remains that the Clinton team worked for years behind the scenes to shut out better candidates including Vice President Joseph Biden. Indications are that Clintonistas have spent more time playing keep-away, over almost eight years, than on producing public benefit. Thus the Clinton gravy train continues, and its big-money appeal looks to be the Clintons’ pattern of shafting labor. Note the boost for “open trade and open borders” in Secretary Clinton’s Wall Street-friendly and Wall Street-compensated speeches, as in recently hacked emails. Cheap labor is the Clinton track record.

Will they mention U.S. labor?

The behind-the-scenes domination and the lack of open participation were not small-d democratic. I was and am disappointed in Clinton ‘super-delegates’, who stacked the deck before a single vote was cast. Ditto media commentators who often referred to Clinton’s ‘delegate total’ without clarifying that it was padded by super-delegates. Predictably, an undemocratic process produced an undemocratic candidate. But given the stakes, it is frightening that a bunch of Democratic insiders, dominated by mega-donors, joined beforehand to boost any one candidate. Going forward, we need to make the nominating process more democratic. It would help if we had more clarity about what happened in the run-up to this ‘election’–but we don’t seem to have many news reporters available, to tell the public about it. (What is the good of all that access to individuals of prominence, if you burn the access any time you actually report something?) I am still curious to know whether the Clinton inner circle green-lighted Mitch McConnell’s opposition to President Obama from day one.

Senator McConnell

Senator McConnell

Envy and jealousy do a lot of harm when people are willing to act on them, especially insiders. I still think that President Obama has not gotten enough credit. I wish Mrs. Clinton had strongly supported and defended him, wish she were the Sanders or the Elizabeth Warren she sometimes channeled in the campaign, wish she would actually ‘fight for us’, wish she were solid on economic justice. But that’s not who she is. One of the recent Clinton flaps is Bill Clinton’s trashing Obamacare. We can only hope it’s not a glimpse of the future, under another President Clinton–a Wall Street agenda come to life–of undoing everything the Obama White House has accomplished.

It may be noted that the Democratic Party ‘nominated’ someone who openly speculated about assassination, when Barack Obama was her opponent in 2008. She does not handle being behind in a campaign well. She does not handle being ahead well, either. Right now, Clinton is openly jubilant about Trump’s difficulties with GOP biggies following the leak of his repugnant tape-recorded remarks. But then, Clinton’s most consistent appeal is to big-time Republicans, whom she has been working hard to attract.

Neither major party has given us much good regarding the major crime of sexual assault. The GOP does not seem to have much problem with the might-makes-right outlook. The Democratic Party should be better, and often is, but anyone focused on Election Day 2016 is not going to bring  up rape–given Hillary Clinton’s decades-long joint public career with her husband.

For the record: I listened very carefully to Juanita Broaddrick on national television in 1999, and I believe her. It would be wrong not to say so. Sexual assault is the least reported, the least prosecuted, and the least convicted of all the major crimes. (The Obama administration has begun moving on the issue of sexual assault, including Vice President Biden’s public statements; the Clintons do not mention it.) But when I raised questions on social media, immediate responses from Clinton supporters were the usual troll litany–calling me “bitch” (naturally), “scumbag,” and “psychotic”–none of which I am–ridicule, shaming over my alleged lowly status or lack thereof’, advice to quit, counterfactual claims about Bill Clinton, and dismissing the issue because ‘he was not convicted’.

Not that I am crushed. Unlike the Bush family, I actually am from Texas, and doing that stuff to me is like the old joke about Have you got the wrong vampire. For what it’s worth, I also have a doctorate in Renaissance literature, and in an invective contest, I wouldn’t necessarily lose. But I prefer that we educate the public better about sexual assault. These bullies, after all, may be summoned for jury duty some day.

Back to the present

We can probably look forward to a new release of some sort, weekly, about both Trump and Clinton, over the next few weeks.

In the most recent release about Trump, some vulgar language came out on tape–rather than behind closed doors or on the Internet, where it usually appears. If you listen to the tape recording, you will also hear the jollification supported by Billy Bush, cousin to our 43rd president, nephew to our 41st president, successful entertainment host on NBC, which for years was in the tank for the Bushes. (Lauren Bush has recently appeared evidently supporting Hillary Clinton.) No question, Trump’s language was garishly offensive. (No wonder Hillary Clinton is all smiles nowadays. It is rare for the Clintons to have even the faintest,most tenuous claim to the moral high ground on any topic, let alone that of sexualized grossness.) Billy Bush sounds pretty appreciative on the tape.

Trump’s language was rich-guy locker-room talk. It was crude machismo, partly boastful and partly not. It may even have been Clintonesque. But I am not going to pretend that I was shocked by it. I wish I were. In any case, Joe Biden is wrong to call it “sexual assault.” There are some words that should not be used as metaphors–rape or sexual assault, lynching, mob, riot. They should characterize only the deeds themselves, not be trivialized to characterize discourse, however offensive.

If commentators and candidates now shocked, shocked about Trump feel resistant to my statement, then I invite them to try a single test. Here it is:

When was the last time you, major candidates or media commentators, et al., figuratively called someone a ‘child molester’? How about you, ladies of the WaPo? When was the last time you called someone a ‘child molester’ metaphorically?

No? So that means you know that there are some terms that should not be used metaphorically.

Makes me wonder why you don’t know that about rape. Has sexual assault been trivialized so successfully that it now ranks as mere scurrility?