Apparently following up on his Washington Post column earlier this week, the paper's Chris Cillizza appeared on Thursday's Morning Joe show and observed that Hillary Clinton has "large-scale problems on honesty and trustworthines," that "she is the status quo" and "represents the past." Because of that, and despite the conventional wisdom in much of the establishment press that Mrs. Clinton can't possibly lose in November, Cillizza argues that her Republican opponent "can win this race."
Cillizza has previously staunchly denied media bias in the coverage of Mrs. Clinton's campign. That's hard to square with what Tim Graham at NewsBusters observed on Wednesday, namely the contrast between Cillizza's take — "Hillary Clinton’s email story continues to get harder and harder to believe" — and the fact that no televsion network had "noticed this latest AP (Associated Press) story and (Mrs. Clinton's) latest (very problematic) batch of emails."
Given how he has blown off challenges to Mrs. Clinton's integrity in the past, Cillizza is apparently just now fully appreciating how vulnerable she is.
In February, as opponent Bernie Sanders and others were demanding that she release her paid-speech transcripts, Cillizza gave her a pass, deciding that he would prefer to "take Clinton at her word when she describes what the nature of her speeches were: Recounting high profile events and her role in them." Translation: I don't need any stinking transcripts. I'm going to believe what I want to believe, and no one else should care about what's in those speeches.
In April 2015, Cillizza infamously claimed that "No, the media isn’t biased in favor of Hillary Clinton." His basis was the stories generated by the mainstream media's gatekeepers like the Post, the New York Times and the Associated Press, which had indeed been covering her scandals. As Graham at NewsBusters wrote at the time, that's nice, but the negative stories about Mrs. Clinton were following a two-decades-plus pattern going back to her husband's presidential administration of seldom if ever making it to the airwaves:
... the national newspapers, including The Washington Post, have published some hard-hitting investigative pieces on the Clinton Foundation, on her speaking fees, and on the e-mail scandal. But the TV networks have barely touched the Clinton Foundation, were bored by the speaking-fees stuff, and have now lost interest in the e-mail scandal.
This was also the pattern of media coverage of the Bill Clinton era. Newspapers would break big scoops about the Clintons accepting donations from China and so on and the networks would yawn.
This pattern has also repeated itself during the Obama administration. If it doesn't get to the TV screens, many low-information voters won't ever learn about Mrs. Clinton's scandals. Thanks to New Media, that's less true now than it was during Bill Clinton's presidency. It also may be that social media, despite the speech policing by the new gatekeepers at Facebook and Twitter, is causing more relevant information to get to the low-info folks than was the case eight or perhaps even four years ago. Perhaps the poll which I will note at the end of this post demonstrates that.
Here is the video of the portion of Cillizza's Thursday morning Morning Joe appearance where he discusses Mrs. Clinton's vulnerabilities:
Transcript:
CHRIS CILLIZZA, WASHINGTON POST: What's so hard if you are Republican it is— this is a winnable race. You can argue and say very winnable race. She has large-scale problems on honest and trustworthiness, favorability, the idea that she is the status quo and the idea that she doesn’t represent the future, she represents the past. These are all things that if you focus a race on her, you can win this race.
Well, Chris, the reason "you can win this race" is because, as you're finally admitting, Mrs. Clinton has huge and largely intractable problems.
Apparently, Cillizza's opening "What's so hard" reference was to recent polling showing Mrs. Clinton ahead of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump by margins ranging from 1 percent to 13 percent.
The frustration tempered a bit for Republicans and others who oppose Mrs. Clinton Thursday. The latest polling from Rasmussen showed Trump with a 4-point lead. Rasmussen's commentary noted that for all practical purposes, even though he is the presumptive GOP nominee, "Trump is already running a third-party candidacy against the establishments of both the Democratic and Republican parties."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
