I am not big on post mortems. Living through that 2015 – 2016 campaign season was painful enough one time around. In her Candidate Confessional podcast for HuffPo, Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for Hillary for America, revisits the difficulty she encountered trying to get the press to buy into the seriousness of the Russian meddling. There is a lesson here, especially for the press.
The most ignored story of the 2016 presidential campaign is the press corps’ unwillingness to focus on Russia’s election meddling before election night, according to one of Hillary Clinton’s former top aides.
After all, the circumstances that led to the accusations of collusion that continue to dog President Donald Trump were visible during the campaign itself. The same Trump associates who are currently being questioned for potential ties to the Kremlin had senior positions on his election team.
But to the eternal frustration of Clinton’s camp, the press never seemed interested in the Russian-meddling angle during the campaign.
In the latest episode of “Candidate Confessional,” Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s campaign communications director, recounts how she tried to repeatedly get reporters to write about Russia, to little effect.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Hillary Clinton’s campaign team was frustrated the press wouldn’t focus on potential Russian meddling in the election until after Election Day.
This is why to my dying day I will maintain that President Obama should have addressed the nation about what the IC had learned and continued to learn about Russian active measures in our election. Mitch McConnell be damned! The media was horribly biased against Hillary and her campaign. They viewed anything coming from them with a jaundiced eye. If President Obama declared a national security emergency before the election and laid out all the facts, the media could not continue to ignore the crisis. Instead, the president gave McConnell veto power over any attempt by him to alert the nation. Sure, the Republicans would attack Obama. Sure they would accuse him of trying to “rig” the election for Hillary. But what were THEY doing by disputing the intelligence agencies?
The number one duty of every president is to protect the nation. It is a solemn obligation which no one ever said would be easy or without obstacles. In this instance, Barack Obama failed us all. Badly. It’s possible that alerting the nation to what was transpiring would not have made a significant difference. Still, I believe that the president of the United States was duty bound to try. And it isn’t as if this particular president was not blessed with the rhetorical skills to persuade Americans that we were under attack by a foreign adversary. He was, in fact, made for the moment.
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This is why to my dying day I will maintain that President Obama should have addressed the nation about what the IC had learned and continued to learn about Russian active measures in our election. Mitch McConnell be damned! The media was horribly biased against Hillary and her campaign. They viewed anything coming from them with a jaundiced eye. If President Obama declared a national security emergency before the election and laid out all the facts, the media could not continue to ignore the crisis. Instead, the president gave McConnell veto power over any attempt by him to alert the nation. Sure, the Republicans would attack Obama. Sure they would accuse him of trying to “rig” the election for Hillary. But what were THEY doing by disputing the intelligence agencies?
The number one duty of every president is to protect the nation. It is a solemn obligation which no one ever said would be easy or without obstacles. In this instance, Barack Obama failed us all. Badly. It’s possible that alerting the nation to what was transpiring would not have made a significant difference. Still, I believe that the president of the United States was duty bound to try. And it isn’t as if this particular president was not blessed with the rhetorical skills to persuade Americans that we were under attack by a foreign adversary. He was, in fact, made for the moment.
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Well said, Brassy, and I agree 100%.
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I also agree. Thanks Still for posting this info.
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