David Craig, on January 26th, 2018(Friday blog)
I came across this story and believe it may well be true. It mirrors what happened in Britain with Corbyn.
In the US, the Clinton campaign wanted to help Trump as they believed he would be easier for Clinton to beat than the more mainstream Republican candidates. Similarly the Tories were overjoyed when thousands of young people paid £3 to join Labour and vote for the supposedly unelectable Corbyn to become party leader. Some Tories even paid the £3 to join Labour to vote for Corbyn.
In both cases, the strategy to help their ‘easy to beat’ opponent backfired spectacularly. Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Clinton helps Trump?
What was not often acknowledged in Trump’s heated race against Democrat Hillary Clinton was how her campaign fueled his rise to power.
An email recently released by the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks shows how the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party bear direct responsibility for propelling Trump to the White House.
In its self-described “pied piper” strategy, the Clinton campaign proposed intentionally cultivating extreme right-wing presidential candidates, hoping to turn them into the new “mainstream of the Republican Party” in order to try to increase Clinton’s chances of winning.
The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee called for using far-right candidates “as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right.” Clinton’s camp insisted that Trump and other extremists should be “elevated” to “leaders of the pack” and media outlets should be told to “take them seriously.”
The strategy backfired — royally.
On April 23, 2015, two weeks after Hillary Clinton officially declared her presidential campaign, her staff sent out a group message with information for a “strategy call.” The email included as an attachment a “memo for the DNC discussion.”
The memo, which was addressed to the Democratic National Committee, outlined “the strategy and goals a potential Hillary Clinton presidential campaign would have regarding the 2016 Republican presidential field.”
The document stated, “Clearly most of what is contained in this memo is work the DNC is already doing. This exercise is intended to put those ideas to paper.”
The memo articulated a three-point strategy. Point 1 called for forcing “all Republican candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions that will hurt them in a general election.”
At the time, there were more than a dozen Republican presidential candidates. The “variety of candidates is a positive here,” the Clinton campaign said.
“Many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right,” the memo noted.
As examples of these “pied piper” candidates, the memo named Donald Trump — as well as Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson).
“We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously,” the Clinton campaign concluded.
This document was part of the tens of thousands of emails to and from John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which were released by WikiLeaks.
Other messages published by the whistleblowing organization show how, while the Clinton camp was facilitating the rise of Trump, it was systematically undermining the campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s left-wing opponent.
Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, repeatedly warned in the primary that he would have a greater chance of defeating Trump. Poll after poll showed that he would have beaten Trump in the general election by wide margins. Instead, his candidacy was repressed — and then the ghastly Clinton lost to Trump.
Hoisted by one’s own petard, Hillary?
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