THE BIG DOG CAN STILL BARK

THE BIG DOG CAN STILL BARK

So, there I was on Saturday, walking into my favorite independent bookstore in Pleasantville, NY.

And there he was at the check out counter,  buying a hundred bucks worth of books and . . .

Holding forth.

This was surprising at two levels.  On the one hand, it's not very often that you run into  Bill Clinton dressed down for a lazy Saturday afternoon sauntering about the local bookstore.  And on the other, given that we know the soon-to-be President doesn't even read books, I'm certain I will never run into Trump in that bookstore . . .

Or any other.

Bill Clinton is approachable.  And he is smart.  And he likes to chat.

So for about forty-five minutes that day, a group of us -- maybe a dozen or so in number -- did that.

Here's what he said.

(Caveat emptor -- I wasn't taking notes and nothing that follows is a quote (unless it is). It's my memory, now three days old, of the basic sense of what was said.)

Why did Hillary lose?

My take on his take is that there were basically three reasons -- Comey, a media that ignored policy in favor of emails, and the larger problem that we now live in a "fact free" world.  

Comey violated Justice Department policy when he announced ten days out that the FBI was looking at new evidence on the email front. And he set a dangerous precedent.  Clinton thinks that mattered big time. People believe the FBI plays it straight.  So when they don't, it hurts. And that, Clinton thinks, is why Hillary didn't do as well as she should have in the Philadelphia suburbs, especially with women, or in Michigan and Wisconsin and Florida and Ohio.  

It's also something we all need to worry about going forward.

Because the day law enforcement stops being politically neutral is the day we start down the slippery slope to illegitimacy.

I agree.  

On both counts.

Ten days out, Hillary was seven points up in the polls and poised to go positive.  In other words, instead of telling us why Trump shouldn't win, she was going all in on why she should.  Her policy menu -- which so many said sounds canned but in fact is real and do-able -- would have been manna from heaven in that last week. 

Because increasing the minimum wage, making college affordable, expanding health care and forcing hedge funds and the mega-rich to pay taxes would have spoken to exactly the concerns all those struggling members of the middle and lower middle class claim went unnoticed.  

Comey upended all of that.  Instead of being able to tell us what she would do, her numbers tanked and the only remedy was to remind voters of how bad Trump was.  Most of us got that message and voted for her. 

About a hundred thousand strategically placed fellow citizens did not.

The larger problem, and President Clinton spoke on Saturday to this as well, was that the whole email issue was made entirely too much of.  As Clinton put it, the issue was a "nothin' burger."  Hillary's use of a non-state.gov email was the same thing two of her predecessors -- both Republicans -- had done, and no one ever complained.  She also didn't imperil national security.  Indeed, some of the after-the-fact "classified" material turns out to have been  attachments of articles from the New York Times, and the rest seems mostly to have been more or less a matter of agencies -- and some politicized Inspectors-General in those agencies -- protecting their own turf vis a vis their perceived competitors. In short, it was more about bureaucratic in-fighting than anything else.

So why did it matter?

Here, I think, was Clinton's largest point of the day, one that counts far beyond its effects on a single election.  We now live, says the President, in a "fact free" world.  People read fake news.  Media outlets report it. Would be candidates can now thrive on it.  

This is what Trump did. 

His lies never mattered because facts no longer matter.   It's a pretty basic point.  If facts don't exist ... or can be made to not exist . . . or are so malleable that they may as well not exist . . .

The first casualty is truth.

You can, as Casey Stengel would say (this part is me, not Bill Clinton), look it up.

The dictionary says a  lie is a false statement of fact.  If there are no facts, there can be no lies.

At the same time, the media-- easily played by the endless charge of "liberal" bias-- often ignore lies in their ostensible search for balance, which largely means reporting something bad about one candidate if you report something bad about the other one. 

Trump relied on this as well.  His reported negatives, which were endless and easy to ignore given their sheer volume, always had to be served up with one of hers, and since she had so few, the email "nothin' burger" became the media's go to staple. 

The media do not work this way because they favor one or the other political party.  

They work this way because a close election is an inherent part of their business plan.  

Or, as the President more or less put it, they aren't interested in a blow out. 

That's also why there was so little coverage (32 minutes as it turns out) of policy by the three major networks during the campaign, and why Hillary-as-wonk got so little traction.  A politician who talks about policy and getting issues resolved is boring.

A politician who curses is not.

Where to from here?

Clinton is careful.  And, despite the current cultural fad, he won't speculate or make judgments that extend beyond the facts. 

Thus . . .

Whether the Democrats should oppose all the extreme right wingers making their way into Trump's cabinet, or just pick a couple and focus their energies, he won't say.  He doesn't know all the people and won't speculate.  Whether the Democrats are ready to do battle, he also won't say.  In his opinion, the Senate's new minority leader, Chuck Schumer,  thinks he, Schumer, can negotiate with Trump because he knows Trump.  Clinton does not appear convinced.

The real push-back, Clinton thinks, could come in the courts.  

He believes there may be numerous legal challenges to the new Administration, especially if it goes the fact-free route on policy.  He also believes there are many judges more than up to the task of keeping Trump honest.

The other real push back could come from Republicans.  In fact, Clinton thinks the two most important Senators these days are Republicans Lindsey Graham and John McCain.  Neither likes Trump and both have standing among their fellow Senators.

On policy, he's not entirely anti-Trump.  Infrastructure was a big piece of Trump's campaign.  The Trump approach is to get private equity to pay for it.  If that happened, it would amount to a two-for. The roads, bridges, airports, railroads and broadband would be re-built, but the deficit wouldn't go up. So Clinton understands why Trump wants to do it this way, and thinks it's not entirely a bad approach.  In other words, it can work in some places.  The only problem, and the President pointed this out as well, is that it won't create new infrastructure in rural communities or in sparsely populated ones because the projects can't be monetized in those areas. Meanwhile, we'd be fools not to go all in here, especially on improved broadband, which creates enormous economic growth.

On jobs, his eyes rolled when the Carrier deal was mentioned.  He negotiated deals like that "every month" while he was Governor of Arkansas.  The real key is to get the economy zooming.  He thinks we are on the cusp, but I did not get the impression he thought GOP trickle down would provide the energy to push us over the edge.  It certainly hasn't in the past.

As he was leaving and half way out the door, one of our group shouted out that he should stay involved.  He turned back with a last piece of advice -- "You stay involved, that's what's necessary." Among those 65 million plus who voted for Hillary on November 8, that's a big ask.  Most of us are still in shock.

And, frankly, pessimistic.

But not Bill Clinton.

He still does believe . . .

In a place called Hope.