In his New York Times column Paul Krugman explores what seems to me a remarkably implausible theory of why Hillary Clinton hasn’t dispatched Donald Trump’s candidacy summarily. The press is just too darned unfriendly to her:
As I’ve written before, she got Gored. That is, like Al Gore in 2000, she ran into a buzz saw of adversarial reporting from the mainstream media, which treated relatively minor missteps as major scandals, and invented additional scandals out of thin air.
In other words even the most tepid of negative reporting is enough to deflate her. My recollection is somewhat different. I think the mainstream media has been fawningly obsequious to Sec. Clinton and, when it has reported a negative story about her, only did so because it was forced to by events.
I do think that the media is partially to blame but not because of “adversarial reporting”. They’ve consistently given far too much free advertising to Donald Trump, part and parcel of the culture of celebrity they’ve cultivated.
Krugman’s framing overlooks that Clinton’s negatives far predate this campaign. Looking at Gallup polls she’s had moments of relative unfavorability going back to 1992, and polled at above 50% unfavorability going back to 1996. In particular, she was also viewed poorly during her contest with Obama.
On these same metrics, Gore was never viewed unfavorably until after the 2000 election in the Dec. 2-4 poll (52% unfavorable), which probably has to do with the recount controversy. He had a 56% favorability rating at the time of the election.
So, these are not really like each other. What they have in common is Clinton fatigue.
Presumably, he would respond that adversarial press coverage predates this campaign, too, and point to the 2008 campaign. It’s sort of a Theory of Everything. You can always point to nonexistent adversarial coverage as an excuse.
The press has spent the whole week obsessing about whether or not Hillary once called a Mexican drug cartel’s girlfriend fat, after coordinating extensively with the Trump campaign for weeks if not months in order to do the most damage.
Oh, wait, that’s not what happened at all. I guess I can be as easily confused as Krugman. Where’s my (sorta) Nobel Prize, bitchez?
It’s sort of a Theory of Everything.
It works well with his Theory of Recovery, namely that if the recovery isn’t robust, the government didn’t spend enough.