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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17695 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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Hillary said back in the day that Trump was a Pied Piper.

He wasn't their only candidate, and the strategy still gets trotted out: build up the extreme opponent so they take or split the vote from the more moderate guy who would be harder to beat. I still enjoy this piece from Politico where it is claimed the Clinton campaign expected she'd be running against Jeb Bush, and the problem was that his policies were doing better than they expected. So they needed someone on the Republican side to weaken him, by forcing him to move more to the right and thus adopt positions that would alienate moderates, but nobody imagined that Jeb would drop out and Trump would end up as the candidate, much less win against Hillary:

Six months later, Clinton associates' wariness of Bush and his likely financial firepower was still acute: Democratic pollster Celinda Lake wrote to Clinton adviser Minyon Moore to warn her that she’d been testing Bush’s economic message for a client. “It has been remarkably strong. Getting even half of african americans and democrats and two thirds of latinos. Some thought it ended too harsh. But the perspective on the economy has really worked. Now we didn’t tell people this was from bush. But it’s a warning."

So to take Bush down, Clinton’s team drew up a plan to pump Trump up. Shortly after her kickoff, top aides organized a strategy call, whose agenda included a memo to the Democratic National Committee: “This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field,” it read.

“The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo.

“Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:
• Ted Cruz
• Donald Trump
• Ben Carson
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."

Salon was equally shocked and disgusted about his victory:

Republican Donald Trump, a far-right demagogue who campaigned on a slew of bigoted, xenophobic policies, has won the 2016 presidential election in a shocking victory few people predicted.

...On April 23, 2015, two weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a group message with information for a “strategy call.” The email included as an attachment a “memo for the DNC discussion.”

The memo, which was addressed to the Democratic National Committee, outlined “the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field.”

The document stated, “Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper.”

It continued, “Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.”

The memo articulated a three-point strategy. Point 1 called for forcing “all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election.”

From the memo itself:

Friends,

This memo is intended to outline the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field. Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper.

Our Goals & Strategy

Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-­‐in-­‐the-­‐same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate. We have outlined three strategies to obtain our goal:

  1. Force all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election;

  2. Undermine any credibility/trust Republican presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or independents;

  3. Muddy the waters on any potential attack lodged against HRC.

To be fair, the strategy worked great! They sure showed Jeb! 😁

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