Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Children's Health Fund

In (partial) defense of Hillary Clinton.

I’m going to do something unpopular now. I’m going to defend Hillary Clinton.

EZRA KLEIN, VOX

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Why did Clinton lose? And there, factors like Comey, Russia, and the media’s email obsession have real explanatory power. But the harder question — the one this blame game is designed to obscure — is why was the election close enough for Clinton to lose?

Clinton does herself no favors when she suggests that criticism of the paid speeches she gave to Goldman Sachs was motivated by sexism. There was sexism in the 2016 election, as I discuss below. But in 2013, amid an economy wracked by the aftermath of the financial crisis, and after Clinton served in a government that bailed out the financial sector, you didn’t need to be a political genius to recognize that taking $675,000 from the vampire squid might look bad.

Nor is Clinton’s complaint that the Democratic Party lacked campaign infrastructure convincing. You know who lacked campaign infrastructure? Donald J. Trump. His field operation was a joke. The RNC’s efforts were a shaky backstop. The 2016 election didn’t prove the Democrats needed a better ground game. It proved a better ground game wasn’t enough.

Clinton made mistakes. All candidates do. But the question in elections is ... compared to what? Take the criticisms made of Clinton and turn them around. Trump surely did not run a smoother campaign than Clinton. His team featured more infighting, leaking, and churn. He made more obvious mistakes in a week than she made in a year. His finances were far shadier than Clinton’s, his foundation far less ethical, his behavior far more erratic. He walked into the debates unprepared, ran a bizarre and ineffective convention, and appears to have been saved from defeat — albeit narrow defeat — by the twin interventions of Russia and James Comey.

And Clinton was, in ways people have rewritten since her Electoral College loss, an effective candidate in nontraditional ways. After she captured the Democratic nomination, I wrote a piece about the political skills that made her the first woman to achieve that feat. I occasionally see the article thrown back at me as a laughable analysis disproven by her eventual loss, but I think it’s absolutely correct:

She won the Democratic primary by spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and winning over allies. Today, 208 members of Congress have endorsed Clinton; only eight have endorsed [Bernie] Sanders.

[...] In order to do something as hard as becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major political party, [Clinton] had to do something extraordinarily difficult: She had to build a coalition, supported by a web of relationships, that dwarfed in both breadth and depth anything a non-incumbent had created before. It was a plan that played to her strengths, as opposed to her (entirely male) challengers' strengths. And she did it....

 David McNew/Getty Images

 Similarly, Clinton really did crush Trump in the debates. As I wrote then, most presidential debates have little effect on the polls. Clinton’s performances were unusual in that they transformed the race. On the eve of the first debate, Trump and Clinton were basically tied. By the close of the third, Clinton had opened up a massive lead — a lead that, if retained, would certainly have won her the election.
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By the end of the campaign, the public had enough information to make basic judgments about who Clinton and Trump were. Trump’s flaws weren’t hidden by Clinton’s mistakes — if she was good at anything, it was goading Trump into error and overreaction. Voters knew what he was when they voted for him. They had seen him lash out at a Gold Star family and at Alicia Machado. They knew he suggested, repeatedly, that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination. They had heard him say Mexico was sending us rapists and criminals and call for a ban on Muslim travel. They had watched him babble incoherently about policy, say he could shoot someone in broad daylight without losing support, and brag, on tape, “when you're a star, they let you do it.”

And it’s worth remembering that before Clinton ran against Trump, 16 other Republicans ran against him ... And every one of them was routed. At some point, the record of talented politicians lying at Trump’s feet requires more explanation than “they all screwed up.”

Imagine a slightly alternate universe. Let’s take Nate Silver’s estimate that the Comey letter cost Clinton about 3 percentage points in the election. Imagine it never happened. Now Clinton wins the Electoral College, and lands a bigger popular vote victory than Barack Obama did against Mitt Romney.

In that world, are we talking about what an awful race President Clinton ran? We aren’t. But that is a world in which Trump — with all he revealed during the campaign about his lack of discipline, his casual cruelty, his disinterest in policy, his penchant for conspiracy theories — still won about 44 percent of the vote.

That is a world, in other words, that should still trouble us.

Trump to pull U.S. from historic Paris climate agreement, breaking ranks with more than 190 countries

President Trump will make good on a campaign promise to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement, officials say, breaking away from a global effort to reduce greenhouse gases. The decision followed an intense struggle within the administration over the fate of the agreement, with Ivanka Trump, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and business leaders urging the president to remain a party to the accord, and conservatives such as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt calling for an exit. [Vox / Brian Resnick] 

• The process could take four years to complete, meaning a final decision would be up to the American voters in the next presidential election.  

• This was expected; here’s our section on it in yesterday’s newsletter, if you need a refresher. [Vox / Dara Lind and Dylan Matthews] 
• But it’s still a dramatic, and globally consequential, decision. In his speech explaining the decision, Trump condemned it as a "massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries," leading to "millions and millions of families trapped in poverty and joblessness." Without the deal, Americans "won't lose our jobs. We're going to grow. We're going to grow rapidly." [Vox / Carly Sitrin] 

Shutterstock)

• Basically all of that is nonsense. The legal implications of the Paris deal are minimal; the Trump administration could still have worked to roll back clean power plant rules without exiting the agreement. Leaving mostly just serves to piss off our allies. [Niskanen Center / David Bookbinder] 
• Trump declared in his speech that he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” which makes it all the more striking that Bill Peduto responded by saying, "As the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future.” [Bill Peduto] 

Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

 HOW TRUMP GOT BOXED IN ON THE CLIMATE PACT: "[Trump's] chief strategist and EPA administrator maneuvered for months to get the president to exit the Paris climate accord, shrewdly playing to his populist instincts and publicly pressing the narrative that the nearly 200-nation deal was effectively dead - boxing in the president on one of his highest-profile decisions to date.” Politico’s Andrew Restuccia and Josh Dawsey report: "Steve Bannon and Scott Pruitt have sought to outsmart the administration's pro-Paris group of advisers, including Trump's daughter Ivanka, who were hoping the president could be swayed by a global swell of support for the deal from major corporations, U.S. allies,

Trump never liked the Paris accord, which he viewed as a “bad deal” and vowed to “cancel” during his presidential campaign, Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, and Michael Birnbaum report. “[Trump’s] final, deliberative verdict was the same as his initial, gut-level one … Even [as he] moderated months of often heated, and at times downright contentious, discussions among his own advisers, as well as scores of outsiders. Nonetheless, the debate over what Trump should ultimately do — stay in the deal to push for changes or fully pull out — roiled the administration.

  Getty

“During meetings, Steve Bannon and Scott Pruitt and other allies came armed with ‘reams of documents’ -- filled with numbers and statistics showing what they claimed would be the negative impacts on the U.S. economy if the U.S. remained in the climate deal. ‘They were presenting facts and figures’ [Kellyanne] Conway said. Some of those opposed to pulling out of the pact, however, said much of the data the other side presented was either erroneous, scientifically dubious, misleading or out of date.”

Some of the efforts to dissuade Trump from withdrawing actually had the reverse effect, further entrenching his original position. When Trump heard advocates arguing that the era of coal was coming to an end — something Cohn told reporters on last week’s foreign trip … Trump only became more adamant that pulling out of the Paris pact could help rescue the U.S. coal industry, said a Republican operative … ‘When he hears people make comments like ‘Coal jobs don’t matter anymore’ or ‘Those are going away,’ he thinks of all those people who got the election wrong and didn’t realize that, no, these people are important to us,’ the operative said.”

 Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

NEW YORK

Everything Conservatives Said About the Paris Climate Agreement Is Already Wrong

By Jonathan Chait

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It is worth recalling the principal argument that Republicans made against the Paris agreement from the outset was that it would have no effect on developing countries like India and China. “And you know what passing those laws would have — what impact it would have on the environment?” insisted Marco Rubio in 2016. “Zero, because China is still going to be polluting and India is still going to be polluting at historic levels … these other countries like India and China are more than making up in carbon emissions for whatever we could possibly cut.”

Why was the right so certain that India and China would continue to ramp up their carbon emissions regardless of what they said in Paris? Because, they insisted, dirty energy was and would remain the best path for them to raise their standard of living, which was and is well below American levels. National Review editor Rich Lowry, writing in December 2015, dismissed plans to steer the developing world onto a cleaner energy path as “a naive belief in the power of global shame over the sheer economic interest of developing countries in getting rich (and lifting countless millions out of poverty) through exploiting cheap energy — you know, the way Western countries have done for a couple of centuries.”

But this analysis has proven incontrovertibly false. Rather than lagging behind their promised targets, India and China are actually surpassing them. According to Climate Action Tracker, India, which had promised to reduce the emissions intensity of its economy by 33–35 percent by 2030, is now on track to reduce it by 42–45 percent by that date. China promised its total emissions would peak by 2030 — an ambitious goal for a rapidly industrializing economy. It is running at least a decade ahead of that goal.

Why are these countries blowing past their targets? Because the cost of zero-emissions energy sources is plunging. In India, solar energy not only costs less than energy from new coal plants, it costs less than energy from existing coal plants:

The virtuous cycle of political will and innovation is proving more potent than expected. As more governments bind themselves to emissions reductions, business creates the technology to meet those goals, which brings down the cost of reducing emissions, which in turn emboldens governments to raise their ambitions further still. The factual predicate upon which the American right based its opposition to Paris has melted away beneath its feet.

Likewise, the scientific basis for the right’s skepticism of the theory of anthropogenic global warming has collapsed. Conservatives used to dismiss the scientific consensus on heat-trapping gases on account of the fact that 1998 saw an anomalously big spike in global temperatures in the midst of an overall warming trend. For years, conservatives would triumphantly point out that there had been no warming since 1998, as if the data from this one year nullified decades’ worth of rising temperatures. In the meantime, 2014, and every year since then, has since exceeded the 1998 record, rendering the old, misleading talking point outright false. But no rethinking has followed on the right. As justifications for inaction are falsified, new ones take their place, while the conclusion remains the same.

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 A crude tribalistic impulse overrides any reckoning with the problem. The proximate issue in conservative minds is not climate change itself but the fact that liberals are concerned about all these things. Disintegrating ice shelves, extinctions, or droughts are abstractions.

It is similar to the predominant response to liberal terror over the prospect of handing the most powerful office in the world to an impulsive congenital liar with authoritarian tendencies. Conservatives on the whole devoted less attention to pondering the risks Trump might pose to their own country and party than enjoying the liberal tears.

“Everybody who hates Trump wants him to stay in Paris,” argues conservative activist Grover Norquist. “Everybody who respects him, trusts him, voted for him, wishes for him to succeed, wants him to pull out.” Here is an argument that approaches, even if it does not fully reach, complete self-awareness: The Paris climate agreement is bad because it is supported by people who oppose Trump. Therefore, the opposing position is the correct one.

Trump, The Russian Candidate.

Eliot Blondet/AFP/Getty Images; Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

NEW YORK

Over the last several days, the Russia scandal has taken a darker turn. Friday night, the Washington Post reported that Jared Kushner tried during the presidential transition period to set up a secret communications channel with Moscow. Tuesday morning, CNN reported that, during the 2016 campaign, Russian officials discussed having leverage of a financial nature over Trump, which could be used to manipulate the Republican nominee. The exact nature of this relationship remains as yet unknown, but its parameters have shifted. The most innocent explanations of Donald Trump’s shadowy relationship with Russia have grown increasingly fanciful, while the most paranoid interpretations have grown increasingly more plausible.

Indeed, in another one of dramatic juxtapositions that would have seemed ham-handed in a spy thriller, the latest scandalous revelations came out just as Trump could be seen carrying out what looks for all the world like his end of a pact with Moscow. If the president did have an objective on his trip to Europe — a premise that, it goes without saying, cannot be assumed — it was to crack up the American alliance with Western Europe. That happens to have been Russia’s primary diplomatic objective since the end of World War II. In Brussels, Trump refused to publicly affirm the Article 5 guarantee of the NATO charter — the foundation of the anti-Russian alliance, and the basis for Europe’s defense against Russian aggression. He directed his trademark wild diatribes against Germany, accusing it repeatedly of abusive trade relations, despite the fact that the United States does not have bilateral trade relations with that country. Amazingly, he kept up the abuse on Twitter after returning Stateside, while simultaneously defending Russia over its intervention in the American election.

Read more at NEW YORK

Doug Mills/The New York Times



Jared Kushner's charmed life is about to come to a screeching halt.


WASHINGTON POST

President Trump arrived back in Washington after his first overseas trip to find that the Russia tangle has made its way into the White House -- in the form of one of the president's closest aides: son-in-law Jared Kushner. Post reporters Ellen Nakashima, Adam Entous and Greg Miller dropped a Friday afternoon bombshell when they reported that Kushner and the seemingly omnipresent Sergey Kislyak -- Moscow's ambassador to the United States -- had talked about setting up a secret back-channel communication system with the Kremlin. According to U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports, Kushner and Kislyak discussed using Russian diplomatic facilities to shield their conversations from our own country's intelligence apparatus. The move was unusual to say the least -- and it happened several weeks before Trump was inaugurated, so Kushner was acting as a private citizen.

The meeting was picked up by U.S. intelligence and is said to have occurred between Dec. 1 and 2 at Trump Tower. Another controversial figure was also there -- ousted Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is refusing to comply with a Senate subpoena demanding a list of his contacts with Russian officials between June 16, 2015, and Jan. 20, 2017. The Senate Intelligence Committee is deciding whether to hold him in contempt.

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...The report that Kushner is now a focus of the FBI probe into Russian interference in the election, brings the Justice Department investigation and recently appointed special counsel Robert Mueller into the inner sanctum of the White House. 

That is dangerous territory for the president, who could more easily attribute any problems related to Russia to rogue aides like Flynn and Manafort who are no longer advising him. But severing the tie between himself and Jared -- whose broad portfolio includes Middle East peace and "innovation" -- will not be so easy.

There was a wealth of reporting on the first son-in-law over the weekend. Most of it suggested that Kushner was readying to fight the idea that he has done anything improper when it comes to Russia. John Wagner, Robert Costa and Ashley Parker reported the president was considering setting up a war room to more quickly combat the endless drip of Russia-related stories: "Kushner has played an active role in the effort to rethink and rearrange the communications team, improve the White House’s surrogate operation, and develop an internal group to respond to the influx of negative stories and revelations over the FBI’s Russia inquiry, said a person with knowledge of the coming changes.

Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

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 The New York Times's Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman and Sharon LaFreniere reported that Kushner spent the last three days "in fretful seclusion" at his father-in-law's estate in Bedminister, N.J..: "But he emerged defiant and eager to defend his reputation in congressional hearings, according to two of his associates ... In recent weeks, the Trump-Kushner relationship, the most stable partnership in an often unstable West Wing, is showing unmistakable signs of strain ... It has been duly noted in the White House that Mr. Trump, who feels that he has been ill served by his staff, has increasingly included Mr. Kushner when he dresses down aides and officials, a rarity earlier in his administration and during the campaign."

The NYT reports that the "most serious point of contention" was the pitch by Kushner's sister, Nicole Meyer, to Beijing investors regarding a Kushner Companies condo project in New Jersey. Meyer "dangled the availability of EB-5 visas to the United States as an enticement for Chinese financiers willing to spend $500,000 or more." 

For Mr. Trump, Ms. Meyer’s performance violated two major rules: Politically, it undercut his immigration crackdown, and in a personal sense, it smacked of profiteering off Mr. Trump — one of the sins that warrants expulsion from his orbit.

In the following days during routine West Wing meetings, the president made several snarky, disparaging comments about Mr. Kushner’s family and the visas that were clearly intended to express his annoyance, two aides said. Mr. Kushner did not respond, at least not in earshot.

His preppy aesthetic, sotto voce style and preference for backstage maneuvering seemingly set him apart from his father-in-law — but the similarities outweigh the differences. Both men were reared in the freewheeling, ruthless world of real estate, and both possess an unshakable self-assurance that is both their greatest attribute and their direst vulnerability.

Mr. Kushner’s reported feeler to the Russians even as President Barack Obama remained in charge of American foreign policy was a trademark move by someone with a deep confidence in his abilities that critics say borders on conceit, people close to him said. And it echoes his history of sailing forth into unknown territory, including buying a newspaper at age 25 and developing a data-analytics program that he has said helped deliver the presidency to his father-in-law.

He is intensely proud of his accomplishments in the private sector and has repeatedly suggested his tenure in Washington will hurt, not help, his brand and bottom line.

That unfailing self-regard has not endeared him to the rest of the staff. Resentful Trump staff members have long talked about “Jared Island” to describe the special status occupied by Mr. Kushner, who, in their view, is given license to exercise power and take on a vague portfolio — “Middle East peace” and “innovation” are its central components — without suffering the consequences of failure visited by the president on mere hirelings.

Adding to the animus is Mr. Kushner’s aloof demeanor and his propensity for avoiding messy aspects of his job that he would simply rather not do — he has told associates he wants nothing to do with the legislative process, for instance. He also has a habit, they say, of disappearing during crises, such as his absence on a family ski trip when Mr. Trump’s first health care bill was crashing in March.

Mr. Bannon, a onetime Kushner ally turned adversary known for working himself into ill health, has taken to comparing the former real estate executive to “the air,” because he blows in and out of meetings leaving little trace, according to one senior Trump aide. Just as Mr. Trump does, Mr. Kushner quickly forms fixed opinions about people, sometimes based on scant evidence. But Mr. Kushner is quicker to admit when he has misjudged a situation, and to change course.

Despite the perception that he is the one untouchable adviser in the president’s inner circle, Mr. Kushner was not especially close to his father-in-law before the 2016 campaign. The two bonded when Mr. Kushner helped to take over the campaign’s faltering digital operation and to sell a reluctant Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox News’s parent company, on the viability of his father-in-law’s candidacy by showing him videos of Mr. Trump’s rally during a lunch at Fox headquarters in mid-2015.

Al Drago/The New York Times

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Mr. Kushner’s war with Mr. Bannon has been a damaging distraction. Several upper-level staff members said Mr. Kushner has made it plain to them that they needed to choose sides or be iced out from an increasingly influential team that includes Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, and a handful of other Kushner-allied power brokers like Dina Powell, a national security official.

Mr. Kushner remains infuriated by what he believes to be leaks about his team by Mr. Bannon, who has privately cautioned Mr. Trump against being “captured” by liberal, New York “globalists” associated with his son-in-law, according to three people close to the president.

Mr. Trump, however, has had enough. He recently chided Mr. Kushner for continuing to call for Mr. Bannon’s ouster, saying he would not fire his conservative populist adviser — who has deep connections with Mr. Trump’s white, working-class base — simply because Mr. Kushner wanted him out, according an administration official.

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, spoke last week to coal miners in Sycamore, Pa. He has emerged as a leading voice for withdrawal from the Paris accord.Credit  Justin Merriman/Getty Images

Mr. Kushner appears to be modifying his centrist stances. Instead of urging the president to keep the United States in the Paris climate accord, as he sought to months ago, he has come to believe the standards in the agreement need to be changed, a person close to him said.

Mr. Trump admires Mr. Kushner’s tough streak, and shares his taste for payback, especially in defense of his family. Over the years, former employees said, Mr. Kushner has quietly sought revenge on enemies whom he sees as hostile to another scandal-buffeted man in his life — his father, Charles Kushner, a New Jersey-based real estate tycoon who was imprisoned for, among other crimes, efforts to retaliate against his sister for cooperating with a federal inquiry targeting him.

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There has been lots of buzz about Trump bringing back some of his more controversial old hands. Last night, for instance:

For some insight into how Kushner works, don't miss Michael Kranish's and Jonathan O'Connell's revealing piece on how Trump's son-in-law was playing hardball way before he moved to Washington. Michael and Jonathan explain how Jared bought the New York Observer in 2006 after his father went to prison for federal tax evasion. Some former colleagues allege he aimed to use the paper to settle scores with business rivals. Kushner also took charge -- at the age of 25 -- of his father's real-estate business, paying $1.8 billion in 2007 for the country's most expensive office building. The timing was off -- the Great Recession was underway -- and the property's value plummeted to about half of what it was worth by 2010. Kushner played hardball with the investors -- one of whom was Trump friend Thomas Barrack Jr. Kushner ultimately made a deal to lower his debt and maintain majority ownership in building. Some lenders had hard feelings "but Kushner viewed it as a hardball business deal and showed that he was a tough negotiator, according to an individual familiar with his perspective. Sources familiar with the arrangement said the Kushner family got back most of its $500 million investment."

Roll Call columnist Walter Shapiro had a blistering column in The Guardian: "Even under the benign theory that Kushner thought that a secret back channel was like a small boy’s tin-can telephone, his life in the coming months and maybe years will be a study in misery. He will probably spend more time with his personal lawyer, Clinton Justice Department veteran Jamie Gorelick, than with Ivanka or his children. Whether it is an appearance under oath on Capitol Hill or the inevitable FBI interview, every sentence Kushner utters will bring with it possible legal jeopardy."

To take his White House job, Kushner resigned from the family business but "kept stakes in about 90 percent of his real estate holdings, valued between $132 million and $407 million," which troubles some ethics experts.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Sergey N. Gorkov, the chief of Vnesheconombank, in Moscow in February. The bank drew sanctions from the Obama administration after Russia annexed Crimea.CreditAlexei Nikolsky/Russian Presidential Office, via Getty Images

The NYT on Tuesday examined why Kushner met in mid-December with Russian banker Sergey N. Gorkov, a close Putin associate whose financial institution is under sanction by the U.S. government. U.S. officials now say the meeting "may have been part of an effort by Mr. Kushner to establish a direct line to Mr. Putin outside of established diplomatic channels," report Matthew Rosenberg, Mark Mazzetti and Maggie Haberman. More from their piece: "It is not clear whether Mr. Kushner saw the Russian banker as someone who could be repeatedly used as a go-between or whether the meeting with Mr. Gorkov was designed to establish a direct, secure communications line to Mr. Putin ... Yet one current and one former American official with knowledge of the continuing congressional and F.B.I. investigations said they were examining whether the channel was meant to remain open, and if there were other items on the meeting’s agenda, including lifting sanctions that the Obama administration had imposed on Russia in response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and its aggression in Ukraine."

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

VOX

• Vnesheconombank, the Russian government owned bank where Gorkov serves as chair, has a history of helping place Russian spies in the United States.   [Italics and underlining by Esco] One, Evgeny Buryakov, pleaded guilty last year to working for Russian intelligence while posing as a Vnesheconombank employee. [Justice Department
• To make matters weirder, Gorkov claims that his meeting with Kushner was not about the Trump administration at all, but Kushner’s real estate business. [NYT / Jo Becker, Matthew Rosenberg, Maggie Haberman] 
• All of these stories specify that Kushner is not a suspect in a criminal investigation. But his activities do appear to be coming under a lot more scrutiny.
• He's not the only one. Apparently Russian intelligence officials were caught on tape discussing compromising financial information they had about Trump and senior aides to him last year, information they thought they could use as leverage. Of course, the information could be fictitious, and the Russian agents could have been trying to exaggerate their intel. But if the intel is real, that's … pretty bad. [CNN / Pamela Brown, Jim Sciutto, Dana Bash] 
• Outside of Kushner, Trump's personal lawyer Michael Cohen appears to be a focus of Congress's Russia investigation. Cohen told reporters he declined to participate with the inquiry, saying, "To date, there has not been a single witness, document or piece of evidence linking me to this fake Russian conspiracy." [ABC News / Brian Ross and Matthew Mosk] 
• If all the above seems super-complicated, don’t despair. Alex Ward has a handy explainer on each part. [Vox / Alex Ward​] 

THE REPUBLICANS’ WAR ON MEDICAID

JOHN CASSIDY, NEW YORKER

AMID THE CHAOS, TRUMP’S APPOINTEES PUSH HIS AGENDA

JEFFREY TOOBIN, NEW YORKER

 Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Bernie Sanders was angry. Donald Trump was angry. Clinton didn’t want to risk it.

VOX

People wanted Hillary Clinton to be angrier on the campaign trail — about the problems facing everyday Americans, and on behalf of them — and her team knew it.

The problem was they couldn’t do anything about it, according to Clinton speechwriter Dan Schwerin, who spoke to New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister for an exposé on Clinton’s life after the election. Why were their hands tied? Because she’s a woman, Schwerin said.

“Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both excelled at channeling people’s anger,” he told Traister:

“And there was a way in which this anger was read as authentic. But there’s a reason why male candidates can shout and are called passionate, and if a woman candidate raises her voice to whip up a crowd, she’s screeching and yelling.”

Clinton understood this, says Schwerin. “So she’s controlled. She doesn’t rant and rave, she’s careful. And then that’s read as inauthentic; it means that she doesn’t understand how upset people are, or the pain people are in, because she’s not angry in the way those guys are angry. So she must be okay with the status quo because she’s not angry.”

Clinton still believes in her strategy not to get angry, despite the public outcry for her to act differently. In fact, she tells Traister that she “beat both” Sanders and Trump (likely referring to the popular vote) with this tactic. [Read more at VOX ]