Live from the Journamalists' Self-Made Gehenna: Paul Krugman: How the Clinton-Trump Race Got Close:
Monday’s presidential debate was a blowout....
Yet on the eve of the debate, polls showed a close race. How was that possible? After all, the candidates we saw Monday night were the same people they’ve been all along.... So how could someone like Mr. Trump have been in striking position for the White House? (He may still be there, since we have yet to see what effect the debate had on the polls.)
Part of the answer is that a lot more Americans than we’d like to imagine are white nationalists at heart. Indeed, implicit appeals to racial hostility have long been at the core of Republican strategy.... But while racially motivated voters are a bigger minority than we’d like to think, they are a minority. And as recently as August Mrs. Clinton held a commanding lead. Then her polls went into a swoon.
What happened? Did she make some huge campaign blunders? I don’t think so.... She got Gored... 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. Meanwhile, her opponent’s genuine scandals and various grotesqueries were downplayed or whitewashed; but as Jonathan Chait of New York magazine says, the normalization of Donald Trump was probably less important than the abnormalization of Hillary Clinton....
This media onslaught started with an Associated Press report on the Clinton Foundation, which roughly coincided with the beginning of Mrs. Clinton’s poll slide. The A.P. took on a valid question: Did foundation donors get inappropriate access and exert undue influence?... It failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing--but nonetheless wrote the report as if it had.... The culmination of this process came with the infamous Matt Lauer-moderated forum, which might be briefly summarized as “Emails, emails, emails; yes, Mr. Trump, whatever you say, Mr. Trump.”
I still don’t fully understand this hostility.... Sexism was surely involved but may not have been central, since the same thing happened to Mr. Gore.... Yhose of us who remember the 2000 campaign expected the worst would follow the first debate: Surely much of the media would declare Mr. Trump the winner even if he lied repeatedly. Some “news analyses” were already laying the foundation, setting a low bar for the G.O.P. nominee while warning that Mrs. Clinton’s “body language” might display “condescension.” Then came the debate itself, which was almost unspinnable. Some people tried, declaring Mr. Trump the winner in the discussion of trade.... Or — my favorite — we had declarations [by Chuck Todd and others] that while Mr. Trump was underprepared, Mrs. Clinton may have been “overprepared.” What? But meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans saw the candidates in action, directly, without a media filter....
How much will it matter? My guess — but I could very well be completely wrong — is that it will matter a lot.... If so, it will be Mrs. Clinton’s bravura performance, under incredible pressure, that turned the tide. But things should never have gotten to this point, where so much depended on defying media expectations over the course of an hour and a half. And those who helped bring us here should engage in some serious soul-searching.
