Why She Lost: Conventional Wisdom Edition

By A.J. Liebling

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It's the 21st Century equivalent of why the Red Sox lost: was it pitching Lonborg on two days' rest?  was it relieving Jim Willoughby?  was it keeping Buckner in the game with Stapleton on the bench?  These last-century questions are endlessly interesting.   

This century, by contrast, we are going to have to abide an endless torrent of Conventional Wisdom from the usual gasbags and bloviators telling us ignoramuses why Hillary Clinton lost the election – cough, Comey – to a dangerous crooked bigot who now seems to be evidencing signs of Alzheimer's.

Now wisdom dispensers don't get any more conventional than The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, whose evocatively named column, The Fix, has been shoveling it out for years.  Sure enough, Chris knows Why She Lost:

In The Washington Post's terrific oral history of the 2016 presidential campaign, there's a quote from Hillary Clinton media consultant Mandy Grunwald that is remarkably prescient. Responding to a question about how Clinton could lose despite being ahead in every traditional measure of the campaign, Grunwald said:

How it will happen would be that the desire for change was greater than the fear of [Donald Trump], the fear of the risk. . . . That’s something we talked about very early on — how do we make sure that people aren’t comfortable making that leap because they’d like to go for change. . . . The question is what’s the more salient question when they go vote.

That's it. That's the election in a nutshell: change vs. risk.

That's it, says the Bernini of Conventional Wisdom.  Nothing else to see here people; move along. 

Gee, we asked ourselves, could there be any other explanation?  We searched and searched and searched (for about 0.22 seconds on Yahoo!) and came up with one possibility that we'd like to offer up to Chris Cillizza:

Yes, Chris, we got it.