Last night’s debate was an incredible blowout — yet both candidates were pretty much who we already knew they were. This was the Hillary Clinton of the Benghazi hearing confronting the Donald Trump we’ve seen at every stage of the campaign.
But this then raises a question: how did the race get so close? Why, on the eve of the debate, did polls show at best a narrow Clinton lead? What happened to the commanding lead Clinton held after the conventions?
You might say that Clinton ran a terrible campaign — but what, exactly, did she do? Trump may have learned to read from a TelePrompter, but was that such a big deal?
Well, my guess is that it was the Goring of Hillary: beginning in late August, with the AP report on the Clinton Foundation, the mainstream media went all in on “abnormalizing” Mrs. Clinton, a process that culminated with Matt Lauer, who fixated on emails while letting grotesque, known, Trump lies slide. Here’s a graphic, using the Upshot’s estimate of election probabilities (which is a useful summary of what the polls say):
The thing is, it was all scurrilous. The AP, if it had been honest, had found no evidence of wrongdoing or undue influence; if meeting a Nobel Peace Prize winner who happened to be a personal friend was their prime example … But dinging the Clintons was what the cool kids were supposed to do, with normal rules not applying.
And this media onslaught pushed the race quite close on the eve of the first debate. It was feeling like 2000 all over again; and I think Jamelle Bouie got this exactly right:
But it all went off script last night, partly because HRC did so well and DJT so badly — but also, I think, because pressure from progressives ensured that there was a lot of real-time fact-checking.
Whether it turns out to have been enough to turn the tide remains to be seen. But anyone in the media who participated in the razzing of Hillary Clinton should think about what we saw on that stage, and ask himself what the hell he thought he was doing.