What Clinton missed in ‘basket of deplorables’
Sept. 14, 2016 – By Ramesh Ponnuru of Bloomberg View
Hillary Clinton made a mistake when she put half of Donald Trump’s supporters in a “basket of deplorables.” She had already given her big speech on Trump’s ties to the alt right. And she had talked before about some of his supporters being “deplorable.”
You could even read her remarks as an attempt to persuade liberals to have more sympathy for Trump voters: Some of them, she was saying, were not racists, homophobes and so on, but rather felt let down by their government and stressed by the economy.
(Oddly, the possibility that a significant number of Trump voters might be neither bigots nor economically anxious — that they might just favor Trump because they usually vote Republican — seemed to escape her.)
This time her words became controversial and gave the Trump campaign an opening — because she assigned “half” his supporters to the bad basket. Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, said that Clinton had slandered millions of Americans.








