September 13, 2016--The "Deplorables"

Candidates for the presidency should stay away from private fundraisers.

Or if they do attend (and they all seem to feel the need to) they should not make comments but just go around the room and say thank you a lot.

First of all, these bundler-sessions are not private. Anyone running for the highest office in the land who doesn't know that with smart phones nothing is private is not qualified to be commander in chief where at least a few things should be secure from Russian hackers.

Second, when hobnobbing in 15,000-square-foot houses with fellow one-percenters, they are prone to utter what they really think. And telling this kind of truth can be fatal to one's aspirations.

Hillary stepped in it last week at a Manhattan big-bucks fundraiser just as Mitt Romney did in 2012 in Boca Raton and Barack Obama did before him in 2008 in Beverly Hills where among like-minded folks he thought his remarks about average people "clinging" to their guns and religion were off the record.

Romney did him one better when he opined about the "47 percent" of Obama's supporters who were "takers," "dependent" on the government for their sustenance, while the well-oiled Floridians and of course Mitt himself were the "makers."

And now Hillary will forever be associated with her comments that "half" of Trump's supporters fit into "a basket of deplorables"--a presumably unwashed species of the "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic--you name it."

Those who shelled out $10,000 a pop to see her, the New York Times reported, applauded and laughed.

A few things to take away from this--

When will we hear equivalent outrage from the same progressives who justifiably condemned Romney for his 47-percent calumnies?

I think of my colleague progressives as fact-based thinkers who also strive to be openminded and fair. If I have that right, after they get over how to think about Hillary Clinton's alleged pneumonia and why she didn't tell the truth about it for 48 hours (when she was contagious, by the way), what will they have to say about her castigating "deplorables"? I suspect, alas, not very much.

Also, will they have anything to say about what the "clinging," "47-percent," and "deplorables" comments have in common? About how when members of the elite condescend and look down their noses at the underclass it makes those pt-upon people crazier and motivates them to embrace Donald Trump even  more fervently.

Then, as a matter of political strategy, candidates should be careful not to too lightly turn adjectives into nouns--

I suppose unsavories and amorals and obtuses work in some clever circumstances, but transmuting deplorable into deplorables can lose one the election.