How the Russia Spin Got So
Much Torque
By Norman Solomon
May
02, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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A new book about Hillary
Clinton’s last campaign for president --
“Shattered,” by journalists Jonathan Allen
and Amie Parnes -- has gotten a lot of
publicity since it appeared two weeks ago.
But major media have ignored a revealing
passage near the end of the book.
Soon after Clinton’s defeat,
top strategists decided where to place the
blame. “Within 24 hours of her concession
speech,” the authors report, campaign
manager Robby Mook and campaign chair John
Podesta “assembled her communications team
at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the
case that the election wasn’t entirely on
the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with
Shake Shack containers littering the room,
they went over the script they would pitch
to the press and the public. Already,
Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the
argument.”
Six months later, that
centerpiece of the argument is rampant --
with claims often lurching from
unsubstantiated overreach to outright
demagoguery.
A
lavishly-funded example is the “Moscow
Project,” a mega-spin effort that surfaced
in midwinter as a project of the Center for
American Progress Action Fund. It’s led by
Neera Tanden, a self-described
“loyal solider” for
Clinton who also runs the Center for
American Progress (where she succeeded
Podesta as president). The Center’s board
includes several billionaires.
The “Moscow
Project” is expressly inclined to go over
the top, aiming to help normalize
ultra-partisan conjectures as supposedly
factual. And so, the homepage of
the “Moscow Project” prominently declares:
“Given Trump’s obedience to Vladimir Putin
and the deep ties between his advisers and
the Kremlin, Russia’s actions are a
significant and ongoing cause for concern.”
Let’s freeze-frame how that
sentence begins: “Given Trump’s obedience to
Vladimir Putin.” It’s a jaw-dropping claim;
a preposterous smear.
Echoes of such
tactics can be heard from many Democrats in
Congress and from allied media. Along the
way, no outlet has been more in sync than
MSNBC, and no one on the network has been
more promotional of the Russia-runs-Trump
meme than Rachel Maddow, tirelessly
promoting the
line and sometimes connecting dots in Glenn
Beck fashion to
the point of journalistic malpractice.
Yet last year, notably
without success, the Clinton campaign
devoted plenty of its messaging to the
Trump-Russia theme. As the “Shattered” book
notes, “Hillary would raise the issue
herself repeatedly in debates” with Trump.
For example, in one of those debates she
said: “We have 17 -- 17 -- intelligence
agencies, civilian and military, who have
all concluded that these espionage attacks,
these cyber attacks, come from the highest
levels of the Kremlin and they are designed
to influence our election.”
After Trump’s election
triumph, the top tier of Clinton strategists
quickly moved to seize as much of the
narrative as they could, surely mindful of
what George Orwell observed: “Who controls
the past controls the future; who controls
the present controls the past.” After all,
they hardly wanted the public discourse to
dwell on Clinton’s lack of voter appeal
because of her deep ties to Wall Street.
Political recriminations would be much
better focused on the Russian government.
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In early
spring, the former communications director
of the 2016 Clinton presidential campaign,
Jennifer Palmieri, summed up the
post-election approach neatly in a Washington
Post opinion article: “If
we make plain that what Russia has done is
nothing less than an attack on our republic,
the public will be with us. And the more we
talk about it, the more they’ll be with us.”
The inability of top Clinton
operatives to identify with the non-wealthy
is so tenacious that they still want to
assume “the public will be with us” the more
they talk about Russia Russia Russia.
Imagine sitting at a kitchen table with
average-income voters who are worried sick
about their financial futures -- and
explaining to them that the biggest threat
they face is from the Kremlin rather than
from U.S. government policies that benefit
the rich and corporate America at their
expense.
Tone deaf hardly describes
the severe political impairment of those who
insist that denouncing Russia will be key to
the Democratic Party’s political fortunes in
2018 and 2020. But the top-down pressure for
conformity among elected Democrats is
enormous and effective.
One of the most
promising progressives to arrive in Congress
this year, Rep. Jamie Raskin from the
Maryland suburbs of D.C., promptly drank
what might be called the “Klinton Kremlin
Kool-Aid.” His official website features an article about
a town-hall meeting that quotes him
describing Trump as a “hoax perpetrated by
the Russians on the United States of
America.”
Like hundreds of other
Democrats on Capitol Hill, Raskin is on
message with talking points from the party
leadership. That came across in an email
that he recently sent to supporters for a
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
fundraiser. It said: “We pull the curtain
back further each day on the Russian
Connection, forcing National Security
Adviser Michael Flynn to resign, Attorney
General Sessions to recuse, and America to
reflect on who's calling the shots in
Washington.”
You might think that Wall
Street, big banks, hugely funded lobbyists,
fat-check campaign contributors, the fossil
fuel industry, insurance companies, military
contractors and the like are calling the
shots in Washington. Maybe you didn’t get
the memo.
Norman Solomon is the
coordinator of the online activist group
RootsAction.org and the executive director
of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is
the author of a dozen books including “War
Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep
Spinning Us to Death.”
