By Don Jolly

Adult Books

It’s been a good couple of weeks for Hillary Clinton, if you read the papers.

“Papers,” in this usage, is a polite euphemism for television news, magazines, and the sometimes-unwieldy websites maintained by the surviving mass media of the last century. Since newspapers themselves are too weak to hold on to the title, I think it’s time for repurposing.

Here’s what they had to say:

According to journalist Jonathan Martin, writing in the New York Times last week, Clinton delivered a “commanding performance” at the first democratic debate of the season, offering “crisp answers to nearly every question” while demonstrating an “an aggressiveness her rivals did not seem ready for.” John Heilemann, writing for Bloomberg Politics, was less measured in his assessment. “The first Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 cycle was a complete and utter rout,” he said, in his first story on the subject. “[Clinton] didn’t just win or even win decisively. She kicked ass from here to Sunday.”

The good news kept coming. On Tuesday, October 20th, Clinton’s only serious correspondent for the democratic nomination, Vice President Joe Biden, announced he would be sitting out the race. And yesterday, in her appearance before the House select committee on Benghazi, Clinton offered eight hours of Teflon testimony to a roomful of irate and ineffective congressmen. She has emerged from these public tests not just unscathed — but stronger.

Biden, in his remarks from the Rose Garden, promised that he “will not be silent” in the months ahead, however. “I intend to speak out clearly and forcefully, to influence as much as I can where we stand as a party and where we need to go as a nation.”

Later in the speech, he did so — by swiping, “clearly and forcefully,” at Hillary Clinton. “I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies,” he said, offering a clear retort to one of those “crisp” answers Clinton offered at the debate — when she named “Republicans” as the enemy she was proudest to have, scoring enthusiastic applause.

Barring an unforeseen disaster at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines this Saturday, this may be the week that Hillary Clinton locked up her party’s nomination — leaving Biden, and the rest of her critics, to snipe from the sidelines.

On Facebook and Twitter, aggrieved Bernie Sanders supporters have been registering their dismay at the Clinton victory narrative since the debate. In its immediate aftermath, online polls registered Sanders as the overwhelming winner — including a poll posted by the hosts of the event at CNN. Sanders did better on Twitter, too — after the debate, he gained over 40,000 new followers, around double the number gained by Clinton. To some of his supporters, ignoring this data reeked of conspiracy.

There were accusations that CNN deleted their own poll to hide the truth (they didn’t), and that their parent company, Time Warner, may have been behind it all… Intriguing stuff, but not exactly Satanism and spy satellites. Today’s conspiratorial world demands a more creative class of theory.

My attempt is as follows:

Americans have a lot of blind spots when it comes to politics. The biggest, and the most obvious, is the confusion of “events” as they are instantiated in media with “events” as they occur in the world. All media is an imperfect lens, shaped by both the internal rhetoric of its content and the method of its transmission. Popular political thought, as it appears in the papers, is a literary style with centuries of history and orthodoxy and accepted wisdom. Clinton, in both her debate performance and her subsequent triumphs, has performed within the expectations of this field — embodying its perfect, polysemous and unflappable political hero. She looks like a winner, in other words, because she is behaving like those who have won before.

In explaining why, precisely, Clinton “kicked ass from here to Sunday,” Bloomberg‘s John Heilemann made no effort to disguise the aesthetic basis of his argument. When Clinton said she was a “progressive who likes to get things done,” the commentator praised the line’s concision. It “captured her political philosophy accurately, authentically, and at bumper-sticker length,” he wrote. Its craft, not its content, was the recipient of praise.

Jonathan Martin, in the Times, focused on the thread of Clinton’s debate performance which drew her closer to the sitting President. “She portrayed herself as Mr. Obama’s partner,” the journalist reported, “the candidate who would perpetuate and enhance the president’s legacy.” It was a complex strategy, Martin implied. Not only did drawing close to Obama help Clinton align herself with a President still popular among democrats, it served as a veiled dismissal of Biden. The President, Martin implied, can only have one “partner” at a time.

In the aftermath of the debate, Martin explained, “many Democrats unaligned with Mrs. Clinton or her rivals began describing the closing, if not the slamming shut, of a door on Mr. Biden.” Whoever those “many Democrats” are, it’s a sure thing that Jonathan Martin — and maybe Joe Biden — agreed with them. In any case, the door did close.

 

There is a conspiracy at work here, of course — but it’s a conspiracy of taste, not finance. Bernie Sanders, at the debate, spoke the way his supporters expected him too — he railed against Wall Street, avoided political niceties (with one significant exception) and sketched, through aggravated tones, an image of the United States as a society on the brink of catastrophe. He spoke, in other words, to the internet — and on the internet, he won.

Clinton sharpened her one-liners, perfected her double meanings and played to the pundits — and she won, too, albeit in a different and more influential arena. The Democrats are, at the moment, a far more cohesive party than the Republicans, and much more responsive to the expectations of American political rhetoric. The democratic collations of constituents are largely settled, the mechanisms of their party politics adamantine. For now, at least, they gain nothing by embracing a new rhetoric – no matter how well it’s working for Donald Trump.

Fifteen million people watched the Democratic debate on CNN. About 2 million people read (or at least receive) the New York Times John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s “With All Due Respect,” an excellent political news program, is “ranking #4 in online video viewers among all political news outlets,” according to the head of Bloomberg Television, Al Mayer. Their show for the 22nd of October, posted on YouTube yesterday, has 1,134 views as of this writing. This video, by a videogame playing Swede, has over 200,000 – and it went up two-hours ago.

There are over three-hundred million people in the United States. Most of them have no idea what kind of week Hillary Clinton is having.

It’s only ignorance if you read the papers.