Don’t forget an anti-Clinton smear campaign going back over twenty years. She was, despite being objectively qualified, a terrible choice for a candidate. Republicans had decades of opposition research on her and zero compunction about making even more shit up for political theater (see the attacks over a personal email server even though it turned out their own opsec was 100x more lax, several hearings over Benghazi despite previous ones failed to find anything, or hell, even Bill’s impeachment that started as them going over the Clinton’s finances hoping to find a hint of corruption, then latching onto the affair even though Newt Gingrich, the one pushing these dirty tricks, was in the middle of an affair himself while his wife was dying from cancer).
It was yet another time Democrats ignored political reality to push someone who was at the top of their internal party hierarchy, and Republicans were more than happy to take advantage of their naïveté.
Don’t forget an anti-Clinton smear campaign going back over twenty years. She was, despite being objectively qualified, a terrible choice for a candidate. Republicans had decades of opposition research on her and zero compunction about making even more shit up for political theater (see the attacks over a personal email server even though it turned out their own opsec was 100x more lax, several hearings over Benghazi despite previous ones failed to find anything, or hell, even Bill’s impeachment that started as them going over the Clinton’s finances hoping to find a hint of corruption, then latching onto the affair even though Newt Gingrich, the one pushing these dirty tricks, was in the middle of an affair himself while his wife was dying from cancer).
It was yet another time Democrats ignored political reality to push someone who was at the top of their internal party hierarchy, and Republicans were more than happy to take advantage of their naïveté.