Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald has a fascinating little piece out overnight about a telling goof in the Russian propaganda channel that has played such a role in the 2016 election.
It’s a rather convoluted story – not the article but what actually happened. So let me try to summarize it briefly. We have another of those apparently Russian-sourced email thefts which ended up on Wikileaks – this time emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. In those emails there’s an email from Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal in which he appends an article by Eichenwald himself about Benghazi and other matters. When the Russia-state owned news and propaganda outlet Sputniknews got a hold of it they apparently got confused – intentionally or not – and ascribed Eichenwald’s copy to Blumenthal.
It’s just like it was in the Spring when the GOP party apparatus devised feverish plans to deny Donald Trump the nomination at the convention and then caved without a fight. The great GOP disengagement from Donald Trump, after the emergence of a video in which Trump bragged about assaulting a women, is over after little more than 48 hours.
Paul Ryan told members of his caucus a short time ago in a full caucus conference call that he would no longer defend Donald Trump and focus solely on saving the House Majority. A short time later NBC/WSJ released a poll showing Clinton with a 14 point lead over Trump in a two way race with Trump down at 38% percent support. Even the always cockeyed Rasmussen tracking poll out this morning showed showed Clinton with a 7 point lead, a huge move from Clinton’s 1 point advantage on Friday. Certainly GOP party committees and campaigns have been in the field as well showing a similar electoral earthquake.
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I am no good at deciding who won or lost debates. I react to them as a voter and not as a journalist. And I tend to fasten on things that don’t necessarily upset or thrill other voters. Here are two things that bothered me – not because they’ll determine the election, but because they could foreshadow trouble after the election.
A just released NBC/WSJ poll puts Hillary Clinton 14 points ahead of Donald Trump (52-38) in a two way match-up and 11 points up in a four way match-up.
Live blogging a debate is a curious experience. You’re not really watching it in the way one might watch a news show or a sports events. Because you’re watching with a very focused level of attention and also writing at the same time. That means you pick up almost everything and yet sometimes miss things that are right there – sort of like a hyper- or over-focused driver. For me the effect was compounded with this debate because so many normally impossible, norm-shattering things happened in such a rush.
I spent the last 45 minutes or so going back through the video and rush transcripts to get a precise version of what I think was one of the key passages in the whole debate: Cooper’s questioning of Trump about the ‘grab’ tape and Trump’s denials. Specifically Trump insisted that Cooper had misunderstood what was said on the tape, that what he was describing was not sexual assault. Here is the back and forth. I’ve bolded the portions where Trump addresses the tape and left unbolded the parts where he switches back and forth to talking about crushing ISIS.
This was a very, very different kind of debate. Let me begin with a few general observations.