‘I Gotta Pay Our Bills’ Hillary and Bill Clinton Appear Oblivious to the Power of Modern Media. Daniel Henninger
http://www.wsj.com/articles/i-gotta-pay-our-bills-1430953025
Staring at identical Rorschach blots of the Clintons’ now-famous foundation, their 24-karat speeches, the missing emails and nonstop nonanswers about all of it, Republicans and Democrats come to separate conclusions.
Republicans keep asking: Will she get away with it? Democrats alter one word in this question: Will she get by with it? Conservatives think the liberal media will cover for Hillary. Liberals expect the Clinton machine will beat the rap, again.
Some bipartisan advice for aging elephants and donkeys: You’re not in 1993 anymore.
The media environment in which this new edition of Whitewaterish stories is appearing didn’t exist when Bill and Hillary lived in the White House. Back then, the Clinton sagas about all those things gone missing or unremembered would get published in this newspaper, the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and the wire services, with a late-day kicker from evening newscasts. In terms of message-carry, the Clinton years might as well have been the age of the telegraph.
The World Wide Web, the oxygen of life now, was just coming to life when Bill Clinton was president. Google appeared in 1998. The opinion-transmission monster called “social media” didn’t arrive until 2004, with Facebook. Twitter hit in 2006. And it wasn’t until the Obama presidency that every single person with a political ax to grind owned the modern version of the frontier equalizer—a smartphone.
Today, these electronic elements have reached critical mass: The people paying really close attention to political news at such an early stage of a presidential campaign are vastly more numerous than ever.
So when Bill Clinton tells an NBC reporter somewhere in Africa, “I gotta pay our bills,” it flows instantly into a complex political ecosystem that reinterprets what he said, and not in a good way. James Carville and the rest of the Clinton surrogate crew don’t have enough spin time in their lives to offset this torrent. Type “I gotta pay our bills” into Twitter’s search window, and the screen will fill with tiny blue birds cackling about the Clintons’ family wage slave.
Stories describing Hillary Clinton’s missing State Department emails started to appear in early March. The Clinton response was classic 1994: stonewall. Today, stonewalling is catnip to social media. The Clinton phalanx can erase her servers to stonewall Trey Gowdy’s House committee, but it can’t erase the zillions of opinions sent, received and read about the erasures and excuses.
Which raises the question: Why don’t the Clintons reduce the volume of negative opinion flow by coming clean, or at least cleaner, some of the time about what they do? Instead, they let stories like the missing emails or grants to the Clinton Foundation from a Kazakhstan-connected donor continue to feed on themselves and self-multiply via the electronic galaxy that is Twitter, Facebook, blogs, newspaper websites, Politico, Instapundit, RealClearPolitics, TV and radio talk shows.
Skeptics will say most of this activity is just being recycled through the already convinced right and left. And that many of these people are political trolls with no life beyond outputting snide remarks. Could be, but no one knows that for sure.
What we do know is that along with the snark, they have also been posting the URL links to all the major Clinton newspaper stories the past two months.
Those stories have been forwarded to and read by people who normally would never see them. And the takeaway from the experience isn’t terrific for Hillary or the Democrats.
In Wednesday’s print version of the New York Times/CBS poll, a chart announced that a wondrous 82% of Democrats think Hillary is “honest and trustworthy.” Excavate your way through the Times’ online tabs, though, and you discover that among independent voters, 41% think she’s honest. That number is close to the red zone for candidates.
The Clintons didn’t know what hit them in 2008, when Barack Obama’s progressive techies used barely understood social media to run over them. Not much seems to have changed. Bill, we learned during the email mess, doesn’t use email, and Hillary’s explanations of how she used cellphones as secretary of state sounded like something your grandma would come up with.
It’s not clear that anyone fully understands how social media shape opinions or how long they last. But in their power and volume, the new political media that will drive the 2016 presidential contest are like the surface of the oceans—huge, always moving, unpredictable and potentially destructive. The Republicans are out there bobbing, too. Their time will come.
The irony, on the evidence of the campaign so far, is that the social media that defeated the Clinton machine in 2008 could do it again. But this time there won’t be an organized intelligence at the controls, not even the vast right-wing conspiracy. That, too, was so 1990s.
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