With disappointment still oozing from Hillary Clinton and most of America’s blue states following Donald Trump’s election as president, Barack Obama has pointed out where the democratic candidate probably went wrong.
Outgoing POTUS Obama has told his colleague that she was likely seen as an establishment ‘insider’, reports The Independent.
And that view was certainly not helped by the publishing of paid private speech transcripts to executives from Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley in October by Wikileaks.
Clinton reportedly banked $225,000 (£181,500) for one speech in 2013, while her balance was boosted to the tune of $22 million (£17.7 million) in ‘speaking fees’ over two years.
Obama told The New Yorker:
Hillary may have been more vulnerable because she was viewed as an insider.
And the reporting around the Goldman speeches might have reduced her advantage, the normal Democratic advantage, in the eyes of working people, that we were standing for them. I don’t think it was fair, but that’s how it played itself out.
It was a connection ‘The Donald’ used to his advantage in campaign ads as he bid to rally American citizens to stick it to the establishment…
Obama added that he thought the evolution of social media campaigning also helped Trump, with the overwhelming influx of contradicting information confusing the public.
He explained that the way information was presented meant ‘everything is true and nothing is true.’
Obama continued:
An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.
And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.
The countdown may be on for Obama’s exit from the White House, but he did offer some comfort to concerned Trump-doomsdayers.
He said:
This is not the apocalypse…I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.
Irrefutable logic.
