I feel like this article is also missing the point. How about the unbearable self-flagellation of the press? I voted for Hillary, but goddamn was she an uninspi

I feel like this article is also missing the point. How about the unbearable self-flagellation of the press? I voted for Hillary, but goddamn was she an uninspiring candidate! She played not to lose, and that turned out to be a bad strategy. Donald Trump didn't get some surprisingly high number of votes, Hillary just managed to be even less inspiring than we thought. And now the tone has inevitably flipped to "what did we do wrong? Maybe it was our tone of voice?" Absurd and self-absorbed! Be as smug as you like, just don't be just smug! It's not wrong to reduce Trump's appeal to racism because it's smug, it's wrong because it's wrong. It's lazy thinking. There was a lot of positive and maybe even unfair disdain for trump. But that's not why he won the election. There was also a lot of positive and maybe even unfair hatred for hillary, but that's not why she lost. One candidate was able to harness anger (the way Bernie also did) and one candidate couldn't harness any positively motivating emotions. In fact, hillary was, if anything, the fear candidate. Fear of terrorists (guised as foreign policy experience) and fear of trump himself, fear of his racism and his misogyny. And the press fed those fears, and did little else. Be an smug, who cares. Just be smug for something.