Scaife's  summer house on Nantucket has always  had a rug outside the back door  with a picture of Hillary's face and the words "A vast right wing conspiracy".

Yes Clinton was unfairly targeted for decades and yes Trump is almost certain to be a worse President than Clinton was.  But the insistence by Clinton supporters (and Clinton herself) over the past two years, in both corporate and social media, that all Clinton criticism is unfair and comes only from right-wingers, racists, misogynists, "deplorables", et al., most likely played a significant role in Trump's win.  It couldn't have been just money that elected Trump.  After all, Clinton raised and spent far more than Trump did.

By rejecting outright legitimate criticism and going so far as to deny the facts underlying such criticism, Clinton's loyalists lost all credibility.  They also made clear that they would not hold President Clinton accountable if, as many of us anticipated, she embraced her "moderate" and "center" self on trade, foreign policy, financial oversight.

PP - I agree wholeheartedly with your focus on money in politics as the root of (almost) all evil.  Do you have any proposals for getting a lot of it out?  It seems as though we're facing a Sisyphean task does it not?  The winners in this corrupt system have little or no incentive to change it and they are the only ones who can.

One conclusion that we can draw from this election is that money isn't everything, particularly at the national level. Jeb Bush substantially outspent Trump. Hillary Clinton substantially outspent Trump. Opponents of Trump ran numerous attack ads against him (accurate but still negative). To what effect?

Dragging up the late Richard Mellon Scaife's 20-year-old smear campaign is weirdly anachronistic, as if his dead hand were still hanging onto Hillary's ankle. In light of her more recent troubles, I think we can reach a different conclusion. Scaife wasn't able to savage Hillary's reputation in the 90s because his money was so effective. He was able to do it because she was such an easy target. In other words, he went after the low-hanging fruit, and it plopped right off the tree.

I'm not suggesting that the smears were valid, far from it. But it's clear that there is something about Hillary Clinton (part congenital, part self-inflicted, part misogynistic) that makes people see the worst in her. Scaife and other smearers just provided the narratives that people wanted to believe.

If  someone has a better idea, be my guest. Otherwise  this seems like a good way to go out

" I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire 

Of a low dishonest decade.

W. H.Auden  

" September 1, 1939"

When it actually  was worse,

100% correct on all counts, IMO.

We people talk about money in politics, they are usually referring to money expended on elections, but you show that that's just the tip of an iceberg of communications infrastructure the goes much deeper and wider below the surface. It's this infrastructure that creates the, how to put it? the group state of mind that drives many elections. Focusing on elections is focusing too late. By the time the election comes along, the battle is half over because the mental ground has long ago been prepared.

Take Hillary. By the time she gets to 2008 and certainly by 2016 she is walking around like Pig Pen with a 35-year-old stink of corruption that was well documented in The Hunting of the President. And this is an odor that reaches liberals and progressives as well as independents. So anything new that gets added to this mix finds fertile ground. IOW, there is a presumption of guilt about her that new events simply confirm. Emails harken back to lost billing records. The Clinton Foundation harkens back to the ill-gotten $100,000 she made on commodities in Arkansas or the sweetheart deal the Clintons got from the McDougals. And much, much else.

She gets no benefit of the doubt because, in people's minds, she's already gotten away with murder (literally) over the past 35 years, and anything new, like the emails, is simply fit into this narrative.

Last year, or the year before, I realized I might have to vote for Hillary. I say "have to" because I knew that, rightly or wrongly, her running would bring on a huge shit show I didn't want to go through. So, in preparation, I did a lot of reading about all the Clinton scandals, which I never really understood at the time they were happening. Whitewater, in particular, was opaque. The Hunting of the President was the best book by far. Even though WW turns out to be fairly simple in essence--a losing land deal--there is a cast of characters worthy of any Russian novel. The book is a masterful piece of reporting. As PP notes, there really was a "vast right-wing conspiracy" arrayed against Bill and by extension against Hillary.

Bottom line, there was no there there with the scandals of the 1990s,** but it took a huge amount of money to create this "negative brand" and pin it on the Clintons over the past 35 years or so.

This is what the Republicans do so well and Democrats at least seem to do poorly. They till the soil. They add fertilizer. They plant complementary crops together. They don't just stick some gorgeous plants into the ground, water them, and hope for the best. After the loss, I stepped back to think about it, and the most amazing thing to me was how much we Democrats focused on the presidential race...as if nothing else mattered. But when you look at Congress and then the states, it's clear that the Republicans essentially "own" this country politically.

And this would still have been true, largely, even if Hillary had won. Losing the presidency threw into stark relief that the Democrats had nothing else. It was as if we'd gone to the roulette table and put all of our money on R11. And when we lost, we had nothing left. Even worse, we had no one in the pipeline. No up and comers to grab the fallen flag and continue to charge. Had Hillary won, we'd have been so happy or relieved, but we'd still only have gained a small, albeit important, beach head in a much bigger battle that we've been losing for a while now. All of which takes a lot of money to wage. And not just money, but persistence over many years. But it was almost as if we were so focused on this one battle, we didn't recognize that we had lost almost everywhere else.

Here's something I heard that I haven't verified. At this point, the GOP is only one state away from being able to pass an amendment to the Constitution, basically on their own (assuming they could all agree). That's shocking.

So yes, spending lots of money on any given race is essential. Essential and necessary, but not always sufficient to win. Sometimes, the low spender wins on any given Sunday. Ironically, spending money on specific elections probably plays a more decisive role at the state level (including Senate and House races) than at the national level, even though you need many shekels to succeed at the national level. But the real spending goes into softening up public opinion, not on the race per se. If people think that global warming is a hoax, this position in the minds of millions of people, this negative brand, if you will, becomes a broad sword that's powerful in a LOT of races, not just the one one candidate may be running.

If you tallied up all the "free advertising" Trump got from a supine and witless press, it might reach the billion-dollar mark. And all of that air time was much more effective at changing people's minds than an equivalent amount of time spent on spots would've been. People tune out spots because they know they're advertising and thus slanted. They pay a lot more attention to the candidate standing there "naked" in front of the cameras and blabbing off the cuff. It's reality T.V. They're watching the actual guy say what he thinks at that moment. So Trump got a helluva lot more air time and more effective air time, IMO, than Hillary with all her advertising spend. My 2¢.

And this doesn't count the many millions of dollars that had already been spent against the Clintons during the preceding 35 years. I'd call all of this spending tilling the ground, keeping it fertile, never letting it go to seed.

** The only caveat I'd add is that the Clintons do have a talent for drawing enemies and for getting themselves tangled up in these non-scandal scandals. That's curious, because no one else seems to have this much talent for creating controversy and not being able to kill off the attacks. They survive, but the smell lingers and lingers.

I don't know what this talent is. Some people say, the Clintons are so convinced they are doing good, they don't bother to cross all the tees. Politics is so thoroughly their life and "business," the two get entwined, as seems to have happened with the Foundation (maybe). In reading The Hunting, my theory was that they do X. X looks bad, or someone says that X looks bad and bears investigating. Instead of just saying this is what happened, they try to keep up appearances with various cover stories to smooth it over. When the stories don't pan out, it then looks like they are trying to cover up a crime. This, then, encourages further investigations, lots of news, etc.

So with WW, the McDougals were hiding how much money the project was losing from the Clintons and feeding money into the maw of this failing project to try to save it. When it came out that the McDougals were putting in far more money than the Clintons even though they were equal partners (I believe, though it was a corporation, not a partnership), the suspicion arose that this money was pay back for favors granted the McDougals by the state government. In this case, one of the "favors" was supposedly granting McDougal's failing S&L the right to raise money by issuing and selling shares.

So when it came out--and the Clintons learned for the first time--that the Ms were putting in tons of dough, it didn't "look good." It looked like there had been pay for play. So the Clintons lied about how much money they had in fact put in just for appearances' sake. (I think I have this right.) They had done nothing wrong. They hadn't known that WW was failing because they were, in essence, silent partners. They hadn't known that the Ms were throwing lots of money at the project. But once this all came out, it LOOKED like Clinton might have taken a bribe in exchange for getting the government to do the Ms various favors.

Same thing with Travelgate. They had the right to replace the travel office staff and put in their own people. Especially if they believed, as they did (wrongly, as it turned out) there was corruption in the office. Hillary WAS involved in this decision, but the press made it seem as if there were something wrong with her being involved. (She wasn't the person the people had elected, after all.) So they lied and said she'd had nothing to do with it, again to keep up appearances. Of course, they handled the firing and re-instating of the staff very badly in lots of other ways, but there was nothing illegal or even unethical with what they did, as I recall. It didn't rise to the level of scandal, but it was turned into a scandal.

*** PP, I think you mean a repentant Brock, not a recalcitrant Brock.

***Peter, indeed I do. Mental thesaurus failed me... PP

Just to be clear - Hillary was obviously the better option.

This comment by Obey made my heart sink. If "Hillary was obviously the better option," why did so many on the left, broadly defined, continue to trash her even after she won the nomination?

Why did I hear countless numbers of progressives talk about ways they could avoid voting for her while not giving Trump a boost?

One woman, an economist who lives in CA and is something of a star intellectual, said that she was going to vote her conscience in CA and campaign in swing states against Trump?

I don't even know what that means.

They couldn't come right out and support Trump or say they didn't care whether he got elected, but they did everything they could to evince their disgust at the prospect of voting for Hillary.

It was like she was a leper. Trump was worse than leper, whatever that might be, maybe someone in the final throes of Ebola. So they were going to do everything they could not to vote for her, tell everyone within earshot how horrible she was, and yet still rest easy with--what?--the knowledge or hope that Trump was somehow not going to get to the WH.

This was not the way to keep Trump out of the WH. Voting for Jill Stein or Johnson or whomever and was NOT a way to help keep Trump out. All you're doing is depriving Hillary of your vote and spreading slag and HELPING Trump get to the WH.

People became so precious about their vote. They were "holding their nose" and voting for Hillary. Well, when you get into the booth you can hold your nose, pick your nose, or blow your nose, and your vote counts the same. Your vote doesn't come with a place for a "signing statement" that says, "I know this is a vote for Hillary, but just know that I don't support her and don't even like her." Or "By voting for Stein, I'm sending a message to the Democratic Party that I don't want Trump to win, but my conscience keeps me from voting for Hillary"...who was the ONLY candidate in the race capable of keeping Donald Trump out of the WH.

But people got so tangled up in what their vote meant and what message it was sending, when the political calculation was--at least to me--pretty clear: You vote for the candidate who is, as Obey notes, "the obviously better option." [my emphasis] How hard is that? Do you want the worse option to win? No? Then vote for the better option. That's it. That's all you have to do. And if you're going to constantly slag the "obviously better option," then you are, in fact, helping the worse option to win. Period.

So I have one FB friend, a progressive, who keeps saying that he's working to destroy the Democratic Party because it's rotten to the core, etc. That way, a truly progressive Democratic Party can rise from the ashes. But he also keeps complaining that the Democrats aren't going to fight to protect the little guy from Trump et al. And, he preferred Trump over Hillary, but was keen to make clear that he didn't vote for the guy. Who cares? The guy, my friend, in his own little way, helped bring on our current situation that he now demands the Democrats save us from. Seems to me this fine fellow is shadow boxing with himself.

Once you get down to the general election, it's like two lines facing each other in football and the ball is being hiked. You have to be on one side or the other and give it your all if you care about the outcome of the election.