The Donald Chronicles: The Gore-ing of Hillary

Would you get a mortgage from this man?
(Maybe that's why the business failed.)

Everybody wants to know what outrageous statement or incredible lie Trump has come up with today, and most days there's plenty.  He feeds the beast.

Hillary Clinton also happens to be running for President, and when the media remembers her, they often trot out the emails, or something else negative.

Sound paranoid?  Thomas Patterson in the LA Times finds that since the conventions the media has been fixated on the emails, accounting for 11% of Clinton news, and it was over 90% negative. Coverage of her character and personal life also more than 90% negative.  Her policy proposals are hardly ever covered--unless Trump criticizes them, and then only his critique makes the news.

This is just an update.  In June Jeff Stein (Hi Jeff) wrote: Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy released a report this week that says the top news outlets hammered Clinton in 2015 far more than any other presidential candidate. According to the report, eight of America’s most influential news outlets wrote coverage "negative in tone" about Clinton 84 percent of the time — compared to just 43 percent for Donald Trump, and 17 percent for Bernie Sanders."

(It should be noted that Thomas Patterson also conducted this study.)

I don't follow enough of mainstream media to sense if this is broadly true, but in my small sampling it comports, especially about the emails.  This is pretty much what the media did to Al Gore in 2000.  It seized on a story (true or not) that created a simple image, and it stuck with that image.  With Hillary it's the emails.  It's much easier to make too much of one thing--and create a simple image--than it is to follow the blizzard of lies and outrages perpetrated by Trump.

One of these days that could change--Trump could do or say something so compellingly crazy in such a photogenic way (say, at a debate) that he will finally get that simple image.  But it's not certain it will happen, and it's not very comforting to think this is what we have to depend on.

Revisiting the birther issue (which he says Trump has un-recanted), Josh Marshall puts his finger on the Trump personae:

"As I noted last week with video of the 2011 interview we did with Trump, at his most candid moments Trump has been open about the roots of his birtherism: it sells. He saw early that conservative Republicans had a rabid appetite for it and he meant to feed it. Whether the whole idea was true or not, I suspect never really entered into Trump's calculus. It's not a salesman or a con man's way of thinking. But with Trump, once Trump says it, it's absolutely true and never won't be."

Campaign news of the day: NBC/Wall St. Journal poll has Hillary up 6 points among likely voters in a 4 candidate race, and by 7% in head to head with Trump.  The latest Pew Poll has her up four points, and finds that the strongest reason people are voting for their candidate is that they strongly oppose the other one.

Early voting: The Clinton campaign is out there working it but Trump depends on the RNC. Early votes in North Carolina are reportedly trending Hillary.

In August Trump raised a shitload of money (and spent a nice chunk of it on his own companies) but Hillary raised a bigger shitload. And that's all I have to say about that shit.