As I write this, I’m with some friends watching two women, one from Brazil and the other from Canada, fight for my entertainment. I’m not thinking about the fight on TV, though – and UFC 206 had some great fights. Instead, I’m thinking about Russia. Namely, yet another secret report leaked from our intelligence community, this time indicating that the CIA believes that Russia intervened in our election process on behalf of the President-Elect.
I probably shouldn’t have looked at Twitter during the commercials.
The leaked report came on the heels of the President directing the intelligence community to do a full investigation of the election related hacking that led to internal DNC emails, among others, being leaked on the Wikileaks site throughout the 2016 election campaign. It’s likely that this was a planned leak, providing political cover to the President for calling for the investigation, although it is still alarming how often “secret” reports seem to find their way into the press these days.
The resulting one-two punch of the Presidential investigation coupled with the leaked CIA report has resulted in an explosion of anger and concern from a variety of sources, from the national security intelligentsia to angry Democrats. Some of it is legitimate, some of it is concern trolling. Much of it seems to indicate that many people – including a number of people who should know better – believe that absent this interference, Hillary Clinton would have been elected president.
It seems as if we’ve moved backwards in the stages of grief – denial is supposed to come first, and I thought we’d finally gotten through this after the various absurd recounts Jill Stein inflicted on the taxpayers of Wisconsin and Michigan finally wound down. But no – thanks to this leaked CIA analysis, Democrats who are desperate to find anyone to point the finger at for 2016 except themselves and their candidate have found another target: Russia under Vladimir “Pooty Poot” Putin. I suppose it’s easier to live with the loss if there’s a plausible reason to take away the win from Trump and his team and hand it to Pooty Poot.
Granted, I understand why so many people are concerned with Russia. Apollo Creed didn’t take Russia seriously, and we all know what happened to him.
To be clear, if the CIA thinks Russia interfered in our election, then we should all want that investigated, and we should all want to know to what extent it happened. I think many people, including me, have felt they were behind the Wikileaks business in the first place, so the CIA confirming what many assumed already happened isn’t really news. And yes, it’s a huge deal that Russia tried to influence our elections and I don’t appreciate it.
Yet at the same time, it seems to strain credulity to argue what some people have been arguing. For instance:
If you’re convinced that Hillary is corrupt, flawed, unlikable, dishonest, that was EXACTLY the goal of Russian tampering. Congratulations.
— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) December 10, 2016
It makes me wonder if these observers were watching the same election that I was.
The idea that Hillary Clinton’s high negatives, the view many people had that she was corrupt, flawed, unlikeable, and dishonest was fueled by Russia’s tampering seems to ignore that people felt this way long before the GOP nomination was locked up by Donald Trump, and long before there was any evidence of Russia’s influence on the campaign.
Clinton’s high negatives, starting with the email scandal and flowing from there, were the hallmark of the campaign from almost the beginning.
You can see for yourself that the trend line on her negatives started right after Benghazi in December 2012, and finally crossed underwater territory around April of 2015, after the email scandal broke. She never got back in positive territory after the email scandal, and her negatives remained high – and stable – for almost the entire campaign. After all, the Sanders campaign itself was fueled by Clinton’s high negatives – Bernie’s fans argued long and hard that Clinton was weak because of them. That was true, and from March 2016 through the end of the election, Clinton maintained about a 15 point deficit in her favorables. Nothing put a dent in that, including Trump’s equally bad numbers and whatever the Russians did, whether it was Wikileaks or fake news, didn’t change those numbers at all.
But if you don’t believe me, here’s an anecdote. While we’re watching these fights, I asked my friends what they thought about the scandal. One of them responded, “do I have any doubt that Russia influenced the campaign? No, I don’t. Do I suddenly like Hillary Clinton more than I did before? No, I don’t.”
The Russia narrative is frustrating, because it looks like yet more DC group think. Those who have been predisposed to believe that he couldn’t win are still desperate to prove they weren’t wrong, and that he didn’t actually win. This has taken a number of twisted turns to wind up where it is now. First, it was Trump didn’t win the popular vote. Then it was that he couldn’t possibly have won the campaign fair and square so there must have been fraud. That fraud claim led to Jill Stein’s pointless recounts. Those went nowhere, because Trump did win fair and square, so now another convenient excuse for Clinton’s loss has arrived in the form of Russia. It’s likely that this one will stick, if only because there is bipartisan concern about Russia, and this fuels those fires.
Given everything we saw during 2016, it just doesn’t make sense to argue that Clinton’s loss was the result of Russian hacking. The Wikileaks and fake news stories did little to change the overall narratives of these campaigns, which had been baked in from the beginning.
I fully admit that I could be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that the leaking of some internal emails that provided little actual news (does anybody remember any of them?) was the deciding factor in Trump’s victory. Even if we’re only talking about the 80,000 or so margin in the three unexpected win states, I still find it hard to believe that Russian influence had that much of an impact. All Wikileaks really did was reinforce to those who already disliked Clinton why they disliked her.
After all, how many people are saying “I voted for Donald Trump, but if I’d known he was backed by Russia, I wouldn’t have” after all this news has come out? I have yet to see anybody.
Trump voters were going to vote for him, regardless of Russia’s influence. They were with him long before Russia got involved. Sure, Russia reinforced Trump’s message about Clinton’s unlikability, but how many mainstream media outlets ran with stories based off of Wikileaks? All of them? Russia could not have influenced the election without our media. If anybody owes the American people a mea culpa, it’s the outlets who ran with those stories – on the left and the right.
I’m also surprised at the reaction of some who should know better about the specter of foreign interference in our campaigns. While I agree with many that Russia’s interference is a problem that needs to be investigated, the level of concern is slowly reaching hypocritical levels. We’ve interfered in foreign elections before, and others have interfered in our elections before, too. This isn’t new – it’s something the framers specifically foresaw, after all, and it’s one of the reasons the electoral college exists. Why is it suddenly so big a deal?
The answer I would expect to hear from the left is “because it’s how Trump won,” but that statement is an insult to the tens of millions of Americans who cast their ballot – whether for Trump or against Clinton – and Wikileaks and fake news had no bearing on their decision. It’s essentially calling them Russian dupes, when there’s no evidence that Russia’s influence made an ounce of difference. That’s akin to insulting the voters, which any candidate can tell you is a path to losing.
So far there is no evidence that Russia’s influence went beyond fake news and leaked emails. No voting machines were hacked, no ballot boxes tampered with. The election accurately reflected the will of the American electorate operating through the existing, time honored institutions that have governed our electoral process since the ratification of the Constitution. Trump won the same way most Presidents get elected (there have been a few exceptions) – he won more states and locked up an electoral college victory. It may not have been a knockout, but a split decision is still a victory and he will be the next President.
That was a decision made by the American people, not Vladimir Putin.
There should be consequences for Russia from the Trump Administration for what they did, and if this focuses more attention onto cybersecurity, there may be a silver lining in this cloud.
None of that, however, changes the result of our election. Donald Trump won, and no amount of finger pointing and blame casting is going to change that.
