Of likability and exploding skulls (Updated)

Well, the TPM electoral spread is back down to 1.3% Clinton, and Trump will no doubt pull ahead soon. The map at Electoral Vote puts Florida and Ohio in Trump's column, which means that he simply has to flip North Carolina and Michigan, where he is behind by only a couple of points. Five Thirty-Eight gives Ohio and Florida and North Carolina to Trump but places Nevada in the just-bare-Dem category. Virginia is in play again.

Update: TPM now has the race exactly even. I predict that Trump will be on top tomorrow. My last prediction was proven wrong a week ago (thank God); I fear that this time I will be right.

Pro-Democratic sites keep printing stories telling us: Don't panic. Relax. This was to be expected. You don't want to demoralize Democrats. I'm reminded of Jack Lemmon's line in The Great Race, when he is told that their iceberg is sinking, and that he should keep this bad news to himself: "Of course I'm going to keep it to myself -- until the water reaches my lower lip, and then I'm gonna mention it to somebody!" 

Vox explains:

Lambasting Trump while being unpopular herself would be a clear winning strategy in a zero-sum head-to-head race. But in a four-sided race, where the two lesser candidates aren’t receiving much scrutiny from the press or the campaigns, it tends to have the side consequence of pressing a lot of people to Johnson or Stein. The fact that there are two different third-party candidates in the race — one for people who think Clinton’s too left and one for people who think she’s not left enough — makes it really difficult to avoid bleeding voters.

But the fact remains that her basic problem in this race is almost painfully simple. Over the course of her winning primary campaign she became a deeply unpopular figure. And it’s hard — indeed, unprecedented — for such an unpopular person to win the presidency.

This analysis leaves out one all-important fact: Hillary was quite popular just a short while ago. The single most important chart of the race comes from Huffington Post, which has aggregated the many polls on Hillary's popularity:

By contrast, here is Trump's chart:

The reversal of Hillary's popularity fortunes had nothing to do with anything she actually did: It's not as though we saw photos of her sleeping with a horse or sacrificing a baby to Satan. She is the same woman she was in 2013, when most people liked her just fine. The change did not come from within but from without. The reversal has everything to do with propaganda.

I'm not just talking about mainstream media coverage, although it doesn't take much money to pay a few journalists to come up with stories falsely portraying Clinton's entirely laudable charity as a slush fund. The troll armies on social media made an enormous difference. People do get badgered and bullied into going along with the mob, even though we all like to pretend that we are ornery independent thinkers.

The Bernie movement played a special role here. For quite a while now, I've argued that Bernie was (wittingly or unwittingly) the puppet of the Stone/Manafort operation -- an opinion I formed before it came out that Bernie's campaign manager, Tad Devine, was part of the Manafort effort in Ukraine. (He also worked for a whole lot of other really awful people.)

Let me hammer home one point that nobody seems to have noticed heretofore. When Bernie brought Devine onboard, the main item on Devine's resume was the Ukraine effort. To vet the guy, all one needed to do was to spend a few minutes researching what happened in Ukraine during those years. A little Googling would have revealed the awful truth: Bernie's "eminence greasy" previously worked for the political campaign that used dioxin to poison a rival candidate.

Devine (if confronted) would no doubt claim that he did not sanction the use of dioxin personally. Nevertheless, he continued to work for Yanukovych for years after the world learned of the dioxin. Tad knew the score. Undeniably, he didn't mind working for a dioxin-based political movement -- and Bernie didn't mind hiring That Dioxin Guy.

And yet our easily-propagandized left still considers Hillary impure.

They castigated her for giving boilerplate speeches at Goldman Sachs -- yet they devoured anti-Hillary pieces published by Salon, a media empire run by a Goldman alum and kept financially afloat by a Wall Street hedge fund. They also passed around many stories published by Breitbart, run by another Goldman Sachs alum who has strong ties to the racist right.

What infuriates me most about young progressives is their hubris. They all think that they are so smart that their skulls may soon explode. In fact, they are so damned dumb that they routinely accept right-wing talking points at face value. The easiest person to bamboozle is the smirky young twerp who thinks he's the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

The video below proves the point. I don't know much about David Caul, the young man being interviewed here, but when he smugly proclaims his generation to be the most intelligent in all of human history, even the gentlest of souls will want to pick up a pipe wrench and make him eat his own fucking teeth.

Which is pretty much what Thom Hartmann does, as the clip goes along. Here we have a perfect illustration of the principle I'm trying to explain in this essay: Whenever the right has poison lemonade for sale, arrogant young hipsters are the first to say "Fill my glass!" They, not Hillary, are the reason why Hillary will soon lose.