@blatham,
OK, so now for the monster post ... you were warned
blatham wrote: Second, in this site you've noted (precisely as in the ones I investigated) there is a constant refrain of rightwing radio/Fox ideas, framings, and talking points. There's almost no forwarding at all, previously or now, of Hillary's policy preferences or political ideas [..].
Have we been watching the same primary campaign?
First, of course there's no sophisticated debate about "policy preferences". The overwhelming majority of voters doesn't research policy proposals. A large share of the vote is moved by passion and prejudice, by visceral responses to the various appeals the candidates put out, coded or not. They like hope and charisma and someone who speaks intelligently, or they like a fighter who'll be able to show 'em all, or they like someone who says "bipartisan" and "moderate" and "reaching across the aisle" a lot, or they like someone who seems like someone they can do a shot with and seems to understand where they're coming from.
Posters on Hillaryis44 are not policy wonks, obviously, they're not like Ezra Klein commenters. But they sound no different from commenters on political vids on YouTube. So I'm afraid the lack of "policy preferences or political ideas" doesn't tell me much.
So that leaves us with the main question: are the Hillaryis44 commenters showcasing the coded appeals and prejudices and fearmongering of the McCain and Limbaugh campaigns -- or the ones the Hillary campaign itself put out? Well, unfortunately it was rather hard to distinguish the two for a long time there. Especially after Super Tuesday, Hillary's attack ads made all the insinuations and allegations that Steve Schmidt would try again in cruder terms in the generals. But most of them didn't need crude terms to get across in the first place.
Now in a way I'm grateful to Team Hillary for that. What they said at the time turned out to be true: they weren't harming Obama's general elections prospects, they were testing them, and if anything making him a stronger candidate should he win the primaries. Wright, Rezko, bitter gun owners, do we know who he really is, not ready at 3AM - none of that stuff would stick anymore, cause everyone had heard it all before from Hillary, and it didn't stick then either.
So the tough primaries turned out to have done a real favour for Obama. But it does mean that a lot of the code words you point out in no way necessarily betray their users as conservatives - because the very same words were put out there, directly or through insinuation, by Team Hillary in its hard-fought last four or five months.
I mean, come on - the notion of the "stolen election" for example - after McAuliffe and co spinning furiously for months on end to any talkshow and TV reporter they could find that the caucus states didnt really count somehow, that the results from there were grossly unrepresentative, that Hillary won the states that really counted ... the endless manipulation of raw vote counts, if you exclude these but include those, Hillary has more ... the unending faux outrage ginned up about Florida and Michigan ...
The Clintons and their team are pros, when the fight is over and the last primary state is in, they pack up their allegations, Hillary makes a gracious concession speech and they both move on with the business of helping to elect Democrats. But are you really surprised that a bunch of her most hardcore supporters would have really
believed all that, really believed that somehow Hillary "really won", and that their election was thus "stolen", by those darned caucus activists, the media, the "disenfranchisement" of FL + MI?
Personally, I would have been surprised if there hadn't been a group like that -- especially among constituencies where the fervour for Hillary was at least partly edged on by simmering racial reluctances about a black president.
Or take the ubiquitous outrage about the biased media, the media that anointed The One even before the voters had spoken, that was in the tank for Obama all the time? Yes, you hear the same on conservative talk radio -- but you also heard the same from the Hillary campaign, furiously so, throughout the last six months. So how does this stuff constitute "evidence of rhetoric" that the people echoing these points can't be "actual Dem members/liberals" and must just be conservative agents? Rather than just, you know, people who rallied for Hillary in those same months and were left repeating her campaign's complaints embittered afterwards?
And on an aside, where did the equation "actual Dem members/liberals" come from? Of course they're not liberals. Hillary mostly stopped trying to appeal to liberals after Super Tuesday. Since the high-education, liberal, coastal and urban voters had become mostly lost to her, she instead focused her efforts on rallying constituencies that seem eerily similar to the impressions these posters make - low-education, small-town and suburban, moderate-to-conservative Democrats, who could potentially be fearmongered into believing that Obama was quite possibly a dangerous/dilettantist, black/leftist radical.
Which brings us to this:
blatham wrote: Sixth post... "Racist as in all the aa’s voted for themselves, they were the racists in this."
How is this an example showing that the speaker must just be a conservative agent provocateur, rather than an actual embittered Hillary supporter? Have you repressed your memories of the posts here on this forum by some Hillary supporters? By Rable22, by Maporsche, and to some extent BPB? They made the exact same points. And obviously they're not Republican agents provocateurs. So how do similar remarks on Hillaryis44 constitute "evidence of rhetorics" that the posters in question must just not be real Hillary supporters, but conservative operatives?
You acknowledge that race played a major role and that this partly explains the map I referred to, which showed where formerly Democratic voters moved to McCain. I mean, McCain did pick up a fair share of extra white voters in the South and Appalachians who in 2004 voted for, of all people,
John Kerry, but now bucked the national trend to go for McCain. So there seems to be a contradiction here; on the one hand you acknowledge the role race played in turning some white Democrats against Obama, and on the other hand, when you come across distasteful racial stuff against Obama, you conclude that it shows that it must just be agent provocateurs from the other side.
I dunno. This smacks to me of an instinctive knee-jerk response of sorts. One which makes someone automatically explain away any evidence of distasteful stuff existing amongst Democrats as somehow not possibly being real or sincere. As if "Democrats" really does equate with "liberals", instead of being a group that still includes plenty of voters in the West and South that are more conservative than your average New England Republican. Instead of being a group that still, even 35 years after Nixon, has a fair share of older voters with strong racial fears and resentments. (And as if, for that matter, undercurrents of prejudice dont do their work even among those urban, middle class liberals as well.)
I'd say that if there's a significant enough number of Democrats out there who voted for Gore and even for Massachusetts John, but now went for McCain because they could not stomach the thought of President Obama, most of them definitely
would have voted for Hillary. And a fair number probably supported her pretty strongly. So why would they
not appear on the Internet and find their own niche at embittered pro-Hillary sites?
Which brings me, rather belatedly, to perhaps my main point of criticism. Again, I dont dispute the belief that these sites and organisations like PUMA have probably been supported, both financially and organisationally, by conservative players. But the notion that the posters themselves - not a few of them, but effectively the whole lot - are just all Republican campaign operatives and/or Operation Chaos-inspired Rush Limbaugh dittoheads?
blatham wrote: One can explain this with either your thesis (ideologues) or mine (agents provocateur). I find mine more compelling here, particularly given the Limbaugh project.
My beef here is the classic one with conspiracy theories. Why in heaven's name would a couple of hundred Limbaugh posters muster up the stamina and discipline to spend months just talking to each other while pretending to be Hillary supporters?
- There is no electoral or strategic accomplishment to be had here. If all or most of them are Republican agent provocateurs anyway, the net number of votes they're winning (by pulling real embittered Hillary voters over to their side) is close to nil.
- Hillaryis44 has, at least since the days of the primaries and immediately after, zero media impact. Seriously - PUMA at least became a name of sorts, and even it sank into oblivion in the broader media after the Democratic Convention revealed its impotence. Hillaryis44 has had zero PR or image impact for at least 5 months. And yet these 300 posters keep enthusiastically posting dozens of posts a day in order to fake being embittered Hillaryites?
-
Even after the elections were already over? Even on election night, when they could have been commiserating with their talk radio buddies without the effort of pretense, without having to sneak in praise of Bill and Hill every other post?
Sorry, but even as conspiracy theories go this one makes no sense whatsoever. You are conjuring up a group of hundreds of conservative agent provocateurs, spending all day talking to each other all pretending to be something they're not, while reaching close to zero actual swing voters, effecting close to zero impact, and without anyone accidentally betraying their real ID other than through code messages people like you are sleuthing?
Hmmmm.
And this all is a necessary explanation because it is somehow inconceivable that after what was an extremely bitter primary fight, a couple of hundred actual Hillary supporters, edged on by the Hillary campaign's then-rhetoric which made Obama sound like a dangerous, untrustworthy radical, and edged forward by widely existing racial resentment and prejudice, would act like, well, unhinged, embittered and racially prejudiced holdouts? Why? You've seen the electoral map -- the very strongholds of Hillary support, her home state of Arkansas the top example, have bucked a strong national trend and moved
to McCain on balance.
Again, I would have been very surprised if, after that primary campaign and some of the fears the Hillary campaign whipped up among the "hardworking" small town working class whites it targeted, there would
not have been a couple of thousand folks round the country who failed to find their way back to the party anymore once the "all clear" sign was sounded from on high.
Okayyyy that was waaaaaay too long.
But making it shorter again would only take more time still, so uhm ... sorree...
