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Business Insider Editor Zings Vox's Ezra Klein's Weak Sauce Reason For Why Hillary Lost In 2016

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  March 22, 2018 3:20 PM

We all know that Hillary Clinton supporters are still sour over their 2016 loss. I mean it’s still festering. Some of these people simply cannot move on; they’re still mad about Russia, sexism, misogyny, the FBI, the media, etc. and the supposed role they had in sabotaging her majesty’s presidential hopes. Frankly, Hillary was a terrible candidate. We all know this. And the one issue that sunk her on character issues was trustworthiness and honesty. Her email fiasco, in which she used an unauthorized and unsecure home-based server for all her officials State Department business, defined her over a year prior to Election Day 2016. Her inability to answer for it only exacerbated the problem. It festered in the primaries and by the time we entered the general, recovery was not an option. 

Some say the media was at fault for making it such an issue, a point made by the former secretary of state. Please—if this were a Republican candidate, it would have received just as much, if not more, scrutiny. A presidential candidate has been accused of mishandling classified information. That’s a story. What made it an even bigger story: Hillary’s serial failure to explain why she had such an email system, a system that got a U.S. ambassador fired—and one that skirted federal records regulations. The optics suggests she was trying to hide something, which was later confirmed in an email scrubbed from the server in June of 2016. Once again, her issues with trustworthiness and honesty were thrust back into the limelight. As USA Today’s Susan Page said at the time on CBS’ Face The Nation:


“An important disclosure for two reasons; number one it showed she was concerned about letting—she gave a different explanation for why she had a private email server. She was concerned about the personal being accessible; it wasn’t a matter of convenience, which is what she told the world. Secondly, she didn’t turn it over. She deleted this email apparently and it came up because it came through the aide that she had sent it to—so it goes right to those questions about honesty, trustworthiness, and transparency

It was a bad throwback to the 1990s, where the power couple faced similar criticisms, which is that they’re secretive and play by a separate set of rules. 

Still, some think the media, instead of Hillary’s awful qualities as a candidate, were more to blame for Trump’s election win.

Vox’s Ezra Klein tweeted about it after it was revealed that tens of millions of Facebook users had their data taken by researcher, Dr. Aleksandr Kogan of Global Science Research, which had a contract with Cambridge Analytica, the firm that helped the Trump campaign. GSR used an app to siphon data off the user who took it, along with all of the user’s friends as well without their consent and passed that information off to Cambridge to build voter profiles.  

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“Unpopular opinion: the way the media covered Hillary Clinton's emails did much more to make Donald Trump president than anything Cambridge Analytica, or even Facebook, did. And it was less defensible on the merits,” tweeted Klein 

Enter Business Insider’s Josh Barro, who picked this view apart. 

“This is not an unpopular opinion. The Clintons and their acolytes have spent decades insisting their negative public image was everyone's fault but their own,” he said.

He then went line-by-line over the ethical and trustworthiness aspects that were totally avoidable for the Clinton campaign. If they didn’t want an emails scandal, “maybe she shouldn't have used a private server to shield her public-record emails from FOIA such that the Associated Press had to sue for access.”

What about conflicts of interests? Yeah, remember the Clinton Foundation?

“If the Clintons wanted to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest maybe, for example, Huma Abedin should have not been simultaneously on the payroll of the State Department, Teneo, and the Clinton Foundation. The media didn't do that to them, though it did report it,” Barro added.

Needless to say, liberals were triggered and incensed over yet another thread showing how flawed of a candidate Hillary was—and that’s a lot since Trump was not the strongest candidate, but the only one the Republicans had who could have won with the 2016 electorate. Hillary was flawed. It’s time for the Left to recognize this. It’s time for them to realize that she had no political skills. She was not a good campaigner. And that she will never be president. All of this not being the fault of the media, though they’ve stepped on a rake many a time in covering this White House.