Again on the Hillary Clinton/Tulsi Gabbard controversy

Since I mentioned the current Hillary Clinton/Tulsi Gabbart flap in a long previous post, I'm going to follow up with a couple of links and some comments.

The Clinton statements in question came in an October 17 interview with David Plouffe on his podcast, Campaign HQ. The interview is around 45 minutes, and an interesting and informative one. Hillary is smart and has an incredible amount of experience in politics and law.

The Tulsi Gabbart moment comes in the second half. PolitiFact has provided a partial transcript that includes the Gabbart part. (Miriam Valverde, In Context: Hillary Clinton on Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump campaign and Russia 10/22/2019) This is from the transcript, talking about the 2020 general election and assuming that Trump will be the Republican candidate:

Clinton: "Well, I think there's going to be two parts and I think it's going to be the same as 2016: ‘Don't vote for the other guy. You don't like me? Don't vote for the other guy because the other guy is going to do X, Y and Z or the other guy did such terrible things and I'm going to show you in these, you know, flashing videos that appear and then disappear and they're on the dark web, and nobody can find them, but you're going to see them and you're going to see that person doing these horrible things.’"

"They're also going to do third party again. And I'm not making any predictions but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up. Which she might not, 'cause she's also a Russian asset."

Plouffe: (Inaudible)

Clinton: "Yeah, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally.

"And so, they know they can't win without a third party candidate and, so, I don't know who it's going to be it but I will guarantee you they'll have a vigorous third party challenge in the key states that they most need it."

The part that PolitiFact quotes begins in the podcast at around 33:00 minutes.

After listening to the whole podcast, my judgment is still that Clinton was strongly implying that Tulsi Gabbard is being groomed by Russia to be a spoiler third party candidate. She doesn't use Gabbard's name, but I've yet to see anyone suggest she was talking about Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, or Amy Klobuchar. Even in the quote included above, it also sounds like she's implying that Gabbard is a "Russian asset" like she specifically accuses Jill Stein of being.

Anyone can misspeak. But Hillary Clinton is not exactly new to giving media interviews. And as the rest of the interview shows, she's able to deliver her points articulately and convincingly. Earlier in the interview at around 22:00, she talks about Trump's campaign and Russian interference and how she expects it to happen again in 2020. After the interview is over, Plouffe also assumed that she was talking about Tulsi Gabbard in that section quoted above.

So that's my reading of what she was saying about Tulsi Gabbard without naming her explicitly. And I won't recap here what I said about why that's problematic in my earlier post.

But I would also encourage people to listen to the postcast. For one thing, it's an illustration of how impressive Hillary Clinton comes across in this format, as opposed to her stump speech style. And she's providing some well-informed political analysis here. She comes across very strongly on her criticism of voter suppression.

But I will add that, unlike what she presents in this podcast, I haven't seen the evidence from the post-election voting and polling analyses that the third party voting in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was decisive to the 2016 Electoral College outcome.