On Monday’s Breitbart News Daily, political analyst Pat Caddell told SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon that he didn’t think Hillary Clinton’s polling lead over Donald Trump was “totally manufactured,” but he did think her media coverage was “highly orchestrated.”
“She got a bump out of the convention, just like Trump did. That’s not unusual,” Caddell said. “And then, let’s face it, Donald Trump had a very, very bad week, or ten days. But what we’re watching here are swings that aren’t consistent. All of the tracking polls are much closer, showing less movement — movement, but much less movement — than these one-off polls. Some of them are registered voters, some of them are all people. If it’s in the battlegrounds, well, some of those polls I have questions about.”
“But let’s assume for a moment that that’s real,” he continued. “This is very early in the process. We’re in the longest general election we’ve had since 1960, conventions being that early. Usually what we’re seeing right now would be what happens at the end of August, the beginning of September.”
He recalled that in 1976 with Carter, and in 1980 with Reagan, “two people that went on to win the presidency,” switching from primaries to the general election campaign was difficult, especially since they were challengers, giving both of them “very rough starts.”
“This is a very volatile political year,” Caddell declared. “A lot of the polling and stuff being done is very superficial. It’s hard not to get those kinds of quick numbers. I think that the structure of the race hasn’t changed, and we’re in an election where the question is her, and her problems, versus Trump and his problems.”
“But on the question of change, when the question is, do people feel that the country is not just on the right track, but in decline – do they feel that the political class is basically rigging the system, and the economic system, against them? – we’re talking about vast majorities of Americans,” he said.
Bannon asked how it was possible that Hillary Clinton, the ultimate candidate of the status quo, could be leading by eight to ten points in many polls, given the popular insurrection against a rigged system Cadell envisioned.
Caddell said it was because so much coverage of the campaign was focused on “the other person,” Donald Trump.
“This race has not defined itself yet,” he said, predicting that if the public concludes Trump is “a safe enough risk to make the kind of changes” people want, his poll numbers will turn around. At the moment, Caddell criticized Trump for not keeping that message of change “front and center” in the campaign.
“Remember the political class, and the elites, only have one way to view the election. They have a mindset about what politics is. They’ve been wrong all year long,” he said. “And yet, they never question their premises. These polls you talked about are also based on those premises.”
He said it was “very instructive” to see Clinton giving a speech to reporters, in which they openly applauded her, as a supportive audience of constituents applauding their chosen candidate. However, this was the same speech in which Clinton tried to explain her false statements about her email server by claiming she had “short-circuited,” and Caddell noted front-page coverage on Monday morning of “the execution of the Iranian spy,” Shahram Amiri, which prompted speculation that Clinton’s exposed emails might have played a role in his death sentence.
Bannon noted there has also been renewed speculation about Clinton’s health, to which Caddell replied, “She has not been a very good candidate, and she’s just very, very contained.”
“I don’t know. I saw it again last night, all the questions being raised, and other things, but who knows? She is the most bubbled, in the biggest, most secure bubble I have ever seen — and God knows, when she strays out of it, it’s not good,” Caddell opined, predicting that there would be few unscripted Clinton appearances or Q&A sessions for the remainder of the campaign.
“This is the most united effort by the press, certainly in the 45 years that I’ve been on the national political presidential stage of analysis, that I’ve ever seen them united with this kind of fierceness — against one person who they are trying to destroy, where there are no rules, which is Donald Trump,” he said, describing the crucial advantage that might help Clinton overcome her poor campaign performance. “I don’t think there’s anything comparable since ‘64 with Barry Goldwater. You go back — and I was very young, but I do remember some of that — where you had everybody questioning his sanity, and whatever, in the press.”
“The press is in the business of protecting the political class,” Caddell explained. “The fierceness of their response, as it is in the political class, is not just a little bit inspired by fear that someone who is representing the disruptive majority of America is a threat to their position and power. Donald Trump has got to understand he is, in this campaign, in a different kind of campaign. The country has to understand, we aren’t talking about a press that’s reporting the news.”
“All you have to do is look at the lack of coverage — I mean, yesterday, there were two networks in which there was even no discussion of the ransom payment,” he said, adding incredulously that “you don’t just get in an unmarked airplane with pallets of money on it, and send it someplace, and have the hostages sitting on the ground, ready to go, waiting for that plane to land, and not call it what it is.”
Caddell stressed that this problem of media bias was not merely an “institutional crisis,” but a “systemic democracy crisis.”
He said the First Amendment protected the press because “there is an implicit bargain that they would protect people from power,” but “they have now become the outriders of power, and that is a crisis.”
“The lines of battle here are being redrawn. This is a new paradigm, and you have to deal with it that way,” Caddell urged, citing two recent manufactured Trump controversies — a baby supposedly being thrown out of his speech because it was crying, and a military veteran who gave Trump a copy of his Purple Heart — as instances of the press not even bothering to interview the actual people involved, because it would have destroyed their preferred narrative.
“All of this stuff designed, as they get their cues — they might as well be operating out of Brooklyn headquarters,” Caddell complained, referring to Hillary Clinton’s campaign HQ.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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