Millennials are starting to realize that Clinton is not the same as Trump

GRIST/Raw Story

Hillary Clinton got one piece of good news this week: An increasing number of young voters can tell her policies apart from Donald Trump’s.

For Clinton, that’s no small feat.

In July, Tom Steyer’s group NextGen Climate released the first battleground poll of millennial voters this election cycle. The takeaway was a startling number: roughly four out of 10 voters age 34 and younger saw no difference between the two candidates on the issues most important to them.

Now a new follow-up poll by NextGen Climate/Project New America in 11 swing states has found some improvement in Clinton’s numbers in just the month since the last poll was done. More see a difference between the two candidates:

Clinton also gained five points since July among likely millennial voters who say they intend to vote for her: 48 percent now back Clinton compared to 23 percent for Trump in a four-way race.

Her gains among Sanders’ most die-hard voters are worth looking at. Around the time of the Democratic National Convention in July, one in five millennials were still devoted Sanders supporters, and most of them didn’t see a difference between Clinton and Trump. Now, the Sanders holdouts have shrunk from 21 to 16 percent, and slightly fewer Sanders supporters still claim there’s no difference between the two major-party candidates.

While Clinton’s numbers have improved, Trump’s have stayed about the same, despite his repeated attempts to reboot his campaign.

“Millennials’ views of Donald Trump haven’t changed — but their awareness of the differences between Trump and Hillary Clinton on the issues has,” Jamison Foser, a strategic advisor to NextGen Climate, said in a statement. “Clinton’s lead has grown and favorability has increased as young voters learn more about the candidates’ policy positions, suggesting that as bad as things are for Trump, they can still get worse.”

The polling firm Global Strategy Group asked voters which candidate represents their views on issues like equal pay and debt-free college. Clinton pulls ahead on these issues and also has stronger favorability on climate-related questions — like moving away from fossil fuels to clean energy and protecting families’ health with clean air and water.

Still, 28 percent of likely voters see no difference between Clinton and Trump on protecting air and water and 30 percent don’t think there’s a difference on moving away from fossil fuels. That’s still a lot of voters who don’t see the point in choosing between the two.

Clinton at least has a few more millennial-whisperers working in her corner from now until Election Day. This weekend, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren will campaign in Ohio to convince this historically unreliable voter demographic that she’s their best bet.

Washington Post Laments Clinton Email Coverage, Leaves Its Own Errors Uncorrected

Adam Peck/Think Progress

On Thursday, the Washington Post ran an editorial calling for a cease-fire in the media’s endless barrage of breathless coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails. The final straw, it seems, was Matt Lauer’s singular fixation on Hillary’s inbox during NBC News’ Commander in Chief forum earlier this week.

“Ms. Clinton’s emails have endured much more scrutiny than an ordinary person’s would have, and the criminal case against her was so thin that charging her would have been to treat her very differently,” writes the Post editorial board, beseeching the media to put this election into context. “Imagine how history would judge today’s Americans if, looking back at this election, the record showed that voters empowered a dangerous man because of . . . a minor email scandal.”

It’s a fair point, albeit one that has been made over and over and over again for months. But if the Post is looking for the media’s worst offenders, they would do well to start inside their own walls.

Take the team at The Fix, the Post’s rapid-fire politics blog. Chris Cillizza and his team have for months been poking and prodding at the email story, seizing on the tiniest of revelations and plugging it into their proprietary formula that converts scandals into electoral math in order to explain what it all means for the November election.

Except, as often as not, Cillizza gets the story wrong. Here he is last monthwriting about Colin Powell, who was dragged into the middle of this saga when it was revealed he engaged in similar email practices as Secretary of State:

Colin L. Powell wasn’t too happy that Hillary Clinton laid her decision to use a private email address at his feet during her interview with the FBI. And he made that annoyance plain over the weekend in the Hamptons.

…

Powell is not an enemy Clinton needs or wants — but she may have turned the former secretary of state into one with her seeming attempt to use him as a shield against any wrongdoing in the eyes of the FBI.

And here’s Cillizza just this week, after new emails between Clinton and Powell were released that showed Powell offering advice on how to obfuscate correspondence using some nifty technological workarounds:

What Powell was doing was simply telling Clinton about a workaround he found to avoid the cumbersome State Department bureaucracy and outdated technology. Seen that way, all Powell is doing in his email is explaining to Clinton the way in which he figured out how to do the best job he could given the impediments he faced.

That’s the exact point Powell made in a statement sent to The Fix. “Secretary Clinton has stated that she was not influenced by my email in making her decisions on email use,” he wrote. “I was not trying to influence her but just to explain what I had done eight years earlier to begin the transformation of the State Department’s information system.”

One day Clinton is using a Colin Powell-shaped shield to deflect criticism, the next Powell himself acknowledges that Clinton said no such thing. Cillizza has been downplaying the Powell connection for weeks, often defending his actions as entirely unrelated in the process, until finally, he couldn’t anymore.

The nature of journalism is that stories change. New information comes to light that causes reporters to course correct while covering a beat. But merely adjusting for future coverage—and neglecting to thoughtfully rexamine all those stories left in the wake—does very little good to readers.

Several weeks ago, the Associated Press published a story about the Clinton Foundation, and how several donors were also able to schedule meetings with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. The AP shared the story with a highly dubious teaser, wildly inflating the facts and settling on a deeply misleading tweet.

The AP went as far as admitting their tweet was “sloppy,” but still refused to delete it. Until:

By the time it was scrubbed from the internet, thousands of readers had retweeted or otherwise shared it with friends. The false implication—that half of Sec. Clinton’s private meetings were with Clinton Foundation donors—metastasized long before the AP’s social team finally hit delete. The damage was done. Deleting the tweet wasn’t for the benefit of readers, it was for the benefit of the AP, who would rather not be associated with something so demonstrably false.

Still, a correction is a correction, and that is more than was has been offered by Cillizza or the Washington Post. They continue to produce dozens of stories a day about the campaign and about Hillary Clinton, but even after their previous work has been refuted or contextualized, it lingers unedited. Did they intentionally mislead readers? Of course not. But as Cillizza likes to write so often of Clinton, failure to acknowledge past mistakes may cause the Post to find itself in a place on the honest/trustworthy question from which it may not be able to recover.

There’s a well-worn saying that goes: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”

It was true when it was penned by Jonathan Swift in 1710, and even more so in 2016 to describe the tendency for unsourced, exaggerated or outright fabricated stories to be shared millions of times before anyone takes a step back to think critically about it.

Newsrooms and their inhabitants are supposed to be our firewall, though. Journalists are supposed to be the adjudicators — slowing, not accelerating, the pace of falsehoods.

Fox's Katie Pavlich Accuses Hillary Clinton Of "Race-Baiting" For Support Of Expanded Voting Access

From the June 8 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom:

 

 

Previously:

Noise Machine Fumes As Its Hillary Clinton Caricature Collapses

ERIC BOEHLERT/Media Matters For America:

Reacting this week to the news that NBC had announced it's going to produce a four-hour, primetime miniseries dramatizing the political life of Hillary Clinton, Rush Limbaugh dismissed the simmering controversysurrounding the programming decision. Announcing that he was bored of talking about the Clintons, Limbaugh then spent a good chunk of his first hour on Monday's show discussing the Clintons.

Limbaugh insisted the former First Couple amuse him and he mocked the premise of the NBC miniseries; that there's widespread interest in Hillary's life story. The talker insisted that outside of Democratic circles the Clintons are viewed as "jokes."

Indeed, the NBC press release unleashed all kinds of bitter right-wing commentary about Hillary Clinton and the alleged biases that will be in play in the production. (How dare NBC cast a beautiful actress, Diane Lane, to portray Hillary??) The attacks were laced with angry demandsthat as part of the miniseries, NBC devote all kinds of time exploring the numerous "scandals" that have allegedly plagued Hillary's career, and especially the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic outposts in Benghazi.

"NBC and the Hillary 2016 Bandwagon: Will Miniseries 'Forget' About Benghazi?," a Fox Nation headline demanded to know. The same question was asked endlessly online. 

Based on 11 months worth of robotic and increasingly fantastic allegations about Benghazi, the Fox crew seems to actually believe that Clinton was part of a nefarious White House plot to let Americans die last September in an effort to secure President's Obama's re-election.

There are any number of ethical questions raised by NBC Entertainment producing a miniseries while NBC News continues to cover the production's topic. None of those questions have to do with whether the final product fails to cover "Cattle Futures-gate."

The indignant denunciations of NBC illustrate just how detached from reality the conservative press has become in terms of how it views Hillary Clinton, and the assumptions conservatives make about her image in America and around the world. (i.e. She's a joke.) Lashing out at NBC, one right-wing blogger claimed the network was "delusional" to think anyone cares about Hillary's life story.

The right-wing media have invested years (decades?) trying to define Hillary Clinton in the most ugly and mean-spirited way possible, and don't seem to understand the futility of their ways.

Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others really have dedicated incalculable hours trying to permanently brand the former First Lady as an angry, power-hungry hag whose political career has been a colossal failure. And with the allegation of a Benghazi "cover-up," they've tried to portray the former Secretary of State as having American blood on her hands.

That's the caricature of Hillary that the right wing holds near and dear and tries desperately to pretend that everyone else does, too. But the announcement from NBC suggests that portrait of Hillary as a political monster is not widely shared.

The programming decision to make the series, whatever the final product looks like (and certainly similar past productions have come in for widespread criticism), implies that Hillary's fame and stature transcends politics. Rather than seen as a shrew, Hillary is viewed as a figure compelling enough to attract the interest of a major TV audience.

In other words, conservatives are losing control of Hillary's image and with the NBC miniseries they fear losing even more. Outside of the radical confines of Fox News and other right-wing hot spots where she's universally viewed negatively, Clinton enjoys widespread respect. And as speculation mounts about Clinton's presidential aspirations for 2016, that failure to define her is only going to fuel even more resentment.

We certainly got a peek of that this week.

Actually, we've been getting a preview of that resentment for months now. Recall the behavior of the Clinton Crazies late last year when the State Department announced Hillary had suffered a concussion after becoming ill and fainting. The health scare was greeted with open guffaws on Fox News and elsewhere as her dedicated foes laughed it up about how the Secretary of State had faked her concussion in order to get out of testifying before Congress about Benghazi. (Who does that?!)

Here was the parody produced by Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard, making fun of Clinton's concussion:

Weeks later when doctors revealed they had found a potentially life-threatening blood clot in Hillary brain, the right-wing laughter died down a bit. Nonetheless, the sorry episode revealed not only a lack of common decency, but also the warped prism through which the conservative press views Clinton - as a national punch line.

So of course her obsessed critics objected to the NBC announcement. Via the American Thinker blog [emphasis added]:

In "Unfaithful," Diane Lane played an adulterous wife whose jealous husband, Richard Gere,bludgeoned her lover Olivier Martinez to death with a snow globe, which is what many Americans feel like doing to themselves when Chillary Hillary starts talking.

See? "Many Americans" want to kill themselves when the former First Lady starts talking.

In truth, according to recent polling data, Hillary Clinton remains among the most popular political figures in the country. And when pitted against prominent Republicans in hypothetical presidential match-ups for 2016,Clinton wins easily.

That's likely among the reasons NBC green-lighted the Hillary movie: She remains a political and cultural star, and one who is possibly still ascending to new, historic heights.

And that's likely why her critics are so upset this week.

National Security Brief: Poll Finds Americans Aren’t Buying GOP Benghazi Witch-Hunt

By ThinkProgress

Public Policy Polling released a poll on Monday finding that more Americans trust former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over Republicans over the GOP-ginned up Benghazi controversy.

Forty-nine percent trust Clinton, versus 39 percent for Republicans. Meanwhile, PPP finds, “Congressional Republicans remain very unpopular with a 36/57 favorability rating.” Americans also think Congress should be focusing on more pressing issues such as immigration reform and gun control:

Voters think Congress should be more focused on other major issues right now rather than Benghazi. By a 56/38 margin they say passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill is more important than continuing to focus on Benghazi, and by a 52/43 spread they think passing a bill requiring background checks for all gun sales should be a higher priority.

A whopping 41 percent of Republicans polled think the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi is the greatest scandal in U.S. history. “One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history,” PPP adds, “is that 39% of them don’t actually know where it is. 10% think it’s in Egypt, 9% in Iran, 6% in Cuba, 5% in Syria, 4% in Iraq, and 1% each in North Korea and Liberia with 4% not willing to venture a guess.”

In other news:

Reuters reports: A video of a Syrian rebel commander cutting the heart out of a soldier and biting into is emblematic of a civil war that has rapidly descended into sectarian hatred and revenge killings, Human Rights Watch said on Monday. The BBC has more.

The Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank, said in a report released on Monday that the Pentagon could save $1 trillion over the next ten years without eroding combat capabilities — or double the amount of cutsmandated under sequestration.

The Washington Post reports: After failing to halt Iran’s nuclear advances with harsh economic sanctions, a group of U.S. lawmakers and analysts is proposing a more drastic remedy: cutting off Iran entirely from world oil markets.

McClatchy reports: Disagreements among the countries backing the rebels in Syria have led to a drop in weapons shipments, leaving rebels vulnerable to a government military offensive.

Clinton Scolds GOP Senator For Focusing On Whether Protest Sparked Benghazi Attack

By Ben Armbruster/Think Progress

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shot back at a Republican senator during today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Benghazi terror attacks, arguing that the Republicans’ focus on whether there was a protest against an anti-Muslim video at the time of the attack is irrelevant.

Much of the politicization surrounding the Benghazi affair centered on Republicans attackingthe Obama administration’s initial assessment that the Benghazi attacks may have been sparked by the video protest, a determination that the administration later backed away from.

When Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) asked Clinton why she didn’t make “a simple phone call” to the evacuees to find out, the Secretary of State shot back: “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans!” she said, “What difference does it make?”:

JOHNSON: Madam Secretary, do you disagree that a simple phone call to those evacuees to determined what happened would have ascertained immediately there was no protest? That was a piece of information that could have been easily, easily obtained. within hours if not days.

CLINTON: Senator, you know, when you’re in these positions, the last thing you want to do is interfere with any other process.

JOHNSON: I realize that. I realize it’s a good excuse.

CLINTON: No it’s a fact. [...]

JOHNSON: Again, we were mislead there was supposedly protests and something spraying out of that, assault spraying out of that. That was easily ascertained that was not the fact and the american people could have known that within days and didn’t know that.

CLINTON: With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans! Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans?! What difference at this point does it make?! It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.

Watch the clip:

The Return of The Clinton Crazies

ERIC BOEHLERT/Media Matters for America

At least most of them aren't snickering about the blood clot.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was recently hospitalized after doctors found a blood clot in her head, a condition that ABC News reported was "potentially 'life-threatening.'" The hospitalization came in the wake of the news in December that Clinton had suffered a concussion after catching a virus, becoming dehydrated, and fainting.

The news of Clinton's blood clot condition simply highlighted the cavalier and uncaring way her critics reacted to the concussion news, insisting itwas fabricated to keep her from testifying before Congress about the terrorist attack in Benghazi. But the blood clot disclosure has done little to spark introspection or remorse among her detractors.  

Maybe they're still busy laughing about Clinton's head trauma?

It's true. That story was marked by an unusual amount of laughter and merriment among conservatives. It's not often (ever?) that news of a United States cabinet member suffering a concussion elicits widespread delight in partisan media offices. But that's what happened when the State Department revealed the facts about Clinton's condition: right-wing guffaws.

The unhinged concussion response seemed to mark the unofficial return of the Clinton Crazies, that marauding mindset among conservatives who spent the 90's launching endless attacks against the Clintons; vicious and wildly personal attacks that went far beyond partisan debate. (i.e. Accusations of killings and mass murder.)

With Bill Clinton out of office and Hillary Clinton retreating from domestic politics in her role as Secretary of State, the Clinton Crazies temporarily shelved their hate of the former First Couple and focused their misguided attention on President Obama and his family.

But with Hillary Clinton's overseas term coming to an end and growing speculation about her future political plans in America, we're witnessing the unsightly resurrection of the Clinton Crazies, or Clinton Derangement Syndrome. Now there seems to be a conservative competition to see who can be the most offensive while operating under the guise of "political debate."

What else explains the conservative media's decision to treat Clinton's head trauma as being side-splittingly funny? There's something very disturbing about how it coalesced around its strategy to make fun of her health. I'd suggest there's also something very distasteful about gleefully mocking the health of a woman in her mid-sixties.

But boy, Fox News' Laura Ingraham thought the story was a hoot:

Ingraham loved the tasteless "Immaculate Concussion" quip so much she went on The O'Reilly Factor that same night and shared it with a national television audience, delighting in the phrase. Host Bill O'Reilly couldn't contain his laughter. "I haven't heard that! That's good!" roared O'Reilly.

Still laughing, Ingraham responded, "Did she really have a concussion? Maybe she did. I mean, who knows."

In truth, it might be easier to list the Fox talkers who didn't laugh out loud while discussing Clinton's faltering health last month. On The Five, Dana Perino chortled when co-host Greg Gutfeld joked Clinton couldn't have a concussion since she'd been "ducking everything" regarding Benghazi. Later that same night, Sean Hannityshared a chuckle with Fox's Charles Krauthammer for mocking Clinton's "acute Benghazi allergy." (A "good line," Hannity assured his guest.) It was noteworthy that Fox host Greta Van Susteren went out of her way, via her blog, to distance herself from the "sarcastic" and "snarky" Fox News comments about Clinton's health.

The topic of Clinton's faltering condition became a running joke for weeks. Right up until the day the troubling blood clot news was revealed, National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg was still making light of her condition:

In the December 31 issue of The Weekly Standard, readers were encouraged to laugh at the news of Clinton's head trauma. The magazine produced a parody in the form of a fake Washington Post sports page article, pretending Clinton was being tested for a concussion the way athletes are. (Apparently the topic of head injuries in general is one big joke at The Weekly Standard.)

Blogger and USA Today columnist Glenn Reynolds recently made sure to share with readers a photoshopped picture of Clinton (with her head attached to a burly man's body) that suggested she was "drunk as skunk" when she fell and suffered a concussion:

Reynolds also hyped the blatant lie that that Clinton had flown to a "Caribbean resort" for New Year's Eve.

Reynolds' baseless behavior was not unexpected. Two weeks earlier he had treated the concussion revelation as one big joke, writing, "HELP, I'VE FALLEN AND I CAN'T TESTIFY ABOUT BENGHAZI"

When Clinton's doctor recently announced a blood clot had been found during an exam, Reynolds quickly linked to right-wing conspiracist Ann Althouse, who in a pair of blog posts wondered if the "oddities" surrounding Clinton's health reports stemmed from "fakery." When critics lampooned her rumor mongering, Althouse insisted she'd been sponsoring "political debate" by raising baseless doubts about the Clinton story.

In the New York Times report about Clinton's blood clot, the newspaper quoted David Rothkopf, an acting Commerce Department under secretary in the Bill Clinton administration, who noted the heated politicization of Hillary Clinton's health. Beseeching common decency, Rothkopf urged partisans to stop the unseemly behavior and to just act like "human beings."

For the Clinton Crazies, that's not always an option.