The headline says it all, no?
Maybe not quite all. Jonah Goldberg’s right about this, of course:
Even though [Hillary’s response] was [a] gaffe, it won’t get treated as one by the media because it doesn’t sound like one to their ears (for all the obvious reasons). But you can be sure that if Ted Cruz had said that the Democrats are the enemy he is most proud of (instead of, say, the “Washington cartel”), the usual suspects on Morning Joe would be horrified. The concern trolling columns by Eugene Robinson and E.J. Dionne virtually write themselves.
Right, and Cruz would take a beating not just for treating partisan politics as war but for being a “chickenhawk” or whatever because he didn’t serve in the military as Webb did. Hillary, by contrast, is being buried today underneath bouquets from the media about how stellar she was last night and how she might even have run Biden out of the race with her performance even though she was up against an ultra-left crank, two nobodies, and a guy in Webb who’s running for the nomination of a party that ceased to exist decades ago. (As lousy as Ken Vogel’s reaction to Webb’s comments was, I’ll bet it reflects the opinion of a lot of people watching last night.) Charles Cooke thinks this is an opening for the GOP in the general election insofar as Republicans can use it as proof that Hillary, for all her yadda yadda about bipartisanship and working with the other side, has no intention of compromising with the “enemy.” Perhaps, but that’ll be a hard sell in the midst of a heated election campaign in which both sides are treating each other as monsters. Besides, if most of the press finds Hillary’s “enemy” comment unremarkable this morning, why would they be willing to call it troubling next summer?
And let’s be real. The whole reason why no one onstage came after her over the e-mail scandal last night is because they know many Democrats share this attitude. That’s why Sanders laid off, right? Despite how easy it would have been for him to incorporate her server shenanigans into his own campaign narrative, he calculated that making an issue of it would be seen as treason — giving aid and comfort to the Republican enemy — by many liberals and that would hurt him. Hillary knows her audience, media and otherwise. Webb palpably does not.
Speaking of which, we’re in a bad place in America, I think, where there’s no constituency on either side for a man as impressive as Webb. I joked on Twitter last night that he’d make a great VP for Trump, but it was only a half-joke: He’s a war hero, a former secretary of the Navy under Reagan, an accomplished author, and a retired Democratic senator. He’s obviously a bad fit in some ways — he said he’d be fine with extending ObamaCare to illegals in line for Obama’s amnesty, which I’m pretty sure Trump wouldn’t be — but he’s the sort of heterodox centrist populist that I think a lot of Trump’s middle class fans would respect, even when they disagree with him. As it is, he’s at one percent in national polls against an avowed socialist and a renowned liar whom everyone acknowledges is a terrible candidate. Depressing.
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