WikiLeaks has denied that it received the emails from Russia -- and President Obama's outgoing intelligence chiefs presented no real evidence to support the allegations -- but the conspiracy theory of the Trump campaign somehow colluding with the Russians to sink Clinton has become a groupthink among many Democrats as well as the mainstream U.S. media.
So, rather than conducting a serious autopsy on how Clinton and the national Democratic Party kicked away a winnable election against the buffoonish Donald Trump, national Democrats have created a Zombie explanation for their failures, blaming their stunning defeat on the Russians.
This hysteria over Russia-gate has consumed the first several months of the Trump presidency -- badgering the Trump administration into a more belligerent posture toward nuclear-armed Russia -- but leaving little incentive for the Democrats to assess what they need to do to appeal to working-class voters who chose Trump's empty-headed populism over Clinton's cold-hearted calculations.
The current conventional wisdom among the mainstream media, many Democrats and even some progressives is that the only way to explain the victory by p*ssy-grabbing Trump is to complain about an intervention by the evil Russians. Maybe Maddow and the other Russia-did-it conspiracy theorists will now denounce Shattered as just one more example of "Russian disinformation."
The Times' View
The New York Times' review by Michiko Kakutani also notes how Shattered details Clinton's dysfunction, but the newspaper inserted a phrase about "Russian meddling," presumably to avoid a head-exploding cognitive dissonance among its readers who have been inundated over the past four months by the Times' obsession on Russia! Russia! Russia!
However, the Times' review still focuses on the book's larger message: "In fact, the portrait of the Clinton campaign that emerges from these pages is that of a Titanic-like disaster: an epic fail made up of a series of perverse and often avoidable missteps by an out-of-touch candidate and her strife-ridden staff that turned 'a winnable race' into 'another iceberg-seeking campaign ship.'
"It's the story of a wildly dysfunctional and 'spirit-crushing' campaign that embraced a flawed strategy (based on flawed data) and that failed, repeatedly, to correct course. A passive-aggressive campaign that neglected to act on warning flares sent up by Democratic operatives on the ground in crucial swing states, and that ignored the advice of the candidate's husband, former President Bill Clinton, and other Democratic Party elders, who argued that the campaign needed to work harder to persuade undecided and ambivalent voters (like working-class whites and millennials), instead of focusing so insistently on turning out core supporters."
So, perhaps this new book about how Hillary Clinton really lost Campaign 2016 will enable national Democrats to finally start charting a course correction before the party slams another Titanic-style campaign into another iceberg.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
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