Counterpoint: Framing her campaign as "Trump is existential threat & unfit" & downplaying Dem agenda WAS tacking to the center. https://t.co/VPvA7suQW8
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) May 17, 2017
She and Obama thought and said that, but did not act truly consequentially on it… This seems hard for their supporters to confront. https://t.co/ev72ESurSM
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 17, 2017
https://twitter.com/Don_Zeko/status/864936604078657536
For example, refusing to debate him, with clearly stated justifications.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 17, 2017
https://twitter.com/DucksForDuckGod/status/864939370771513345
well that contradicts what I just tweeted, referencing her.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 17, 2017
Or maybe what you're saying is that she confronted him on his unacceptability in the debates, specifically – but that's the whole problem…
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 17, 2017
…legitimizing him implicitly in order to deliver an inherently contradictory message of his illegitimacy…
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 17, 2017
…the one thing Trump & his voters had right was the political class – as continually re-confirmed in their pusillanimous responses to him.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 17, 2017
In the same way the Comey letter mattered mainly because it re-confirmed that with HRC it would be "more of same" for four years…
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 17, 2017
More paralysis, more apathy, more triviality, more pointless conflict. In that way the foreseeable inevitable implosion of Trump…
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 17, 2017
..may yet turn his election into the long run correct if unpalatably risky decision – compelling the "anti-Trump" truly to awaken.
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 17, 2017
–so endeth the theodicy of Trump–
— CK MacLeod (@CK_MacLeod) May 17, 2017
Only the retrospective knowledge that Trump, against every establishment anticipation, won the election lends the idea that Hillary Clinton ought to have refused to participate in the debates in a (to my mind, Quixotic) attempt to “de-legitimize” Trump even the remotest plausibility. For one thing, a refusal to debate Trump would have been portrayed by the Trump campaign as an instance of the very pusillanimity of the establishment cum political class that you say (assuming that I understand you correctly–the compressed nature of a “tweet” may be an obstacle to my understanding) is “the one thing Trump & his voters had right”.
In any case, the key reason why the Clinton campaign assumed it would not be in their self-interest to attempt to “de-legitimize” Trump was their conviction–universally shared by the establishment punditocracy–that Trump was unelectable (where “electable” is somehow supposed to correlate with “approximation to left-liberalism” or, perhaps better, to “liberalism simpliciter”), and thus Hillary Clinton, however moribund her candidacy, was assured of victory.
It is proverbial that the failure to cognize one’s position as vulnerable or defeasible sets one up for disappointment or even astonishment–and the astonishment of left-liberals and of others whose political perspectives are approximations or echoes, however remote, of left-liberalism or liberalism simpliciter, is inscribed in their political deeds to this very day, some six-odd months after the election.
The left-liberalism that is concretized in the Democratic Party has quite obviously become a species of fanaticism–and, while I’d be the last person on earth to deny the virtue (and maybe even the sheer necessity at all times) of fanaticism–it seems to me that this particular iteration of the fanatic spirit isn’t born of an underlying vitality but rather of a decay of vitality.