Matthews said, female voters viewed attacks on Hillary Clinton’s spouse as “inherently unfair. Ultimately, it came back down to this: Bill Clinton’s not the one who’s running.”
When it came to criticizing Hillary Clinton as an enabler, Matthews said, the reaction was, “yeah, you’re angry. It’s a normal reaction. Any line of messaging on this generates sympathy for her, or voters said it was completely irrelevant.”
The women in the America Rising focus group also identified areas they would consider off-limits in terms of Clinton attacks: “It was her age, her stamina, her health and her looks,” Matthews recalled.
.. With 26 days to go in the race, Donald Trump has said he plans to launch a full-scale attack on the former president. “We’re going to turn Bill [Clinton] into Bill Cosby,” his campaign CEO Steve Bannon told Bloomberg News earlier this week.
.. On Thursday night, Sean Hannity plans to feature three of Bill Clinton’s accusers: Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey. And Trump’s campaign has promised new revelations from previously unknown women.
.. But Democratic allies are thrilled with the politically nonsensical narrative.
.. Brock called it “a giant exercise in projection. If there’s a Bill Cosby here, it will turn out to be Donald Trump, not Bill Clinton.”
.. in Clinton’s 2000 Senate race, her operatives found that suburban women in New York disliked Clinton because of her decision to stay with her husband.
.. the campaign chose not to address the issue head-on, focusing instead on working-class women upstate, who viewed Hillary Clinton as a champion.
.. Democrats close to Clinton speculated that the individuals guiding Trump’s strategy, like Bannon, are most likely focused on what will happen after Nov. 8 — and empowering the Trump base to become a movement of anti-Clinton opposition, whether it’s through a media operation or a grass-roots movement.
.. the biggest problem with the attacks, some Clinton allies said, was the source:
The Bill Clinton Question
Bill Cosby’s sexual exploitations were kinda-sorta in the public record for years and years, but they were a footnote in profiles and biographies until Hannibal Buress starting talking about Cosby-the-rapist in his comedy routines. Then suddenly, it was a story, a cascade of stories, and the whole truth or something close was out.
.. The slippage between a powerful man’s dalliances and straightforward predation is something that could happen just once. But looked at in the light of a credible rape allegation, there are all sorts of Clinton stories — the Willey and Jones cases, the rumors collected by Jones’s lawyers, the old tales of state troopers being used as procurers, the 2002 globetrotting on the jet of a billionaire who’s also a convicted statutory rapist — that could suggest a darker pattern, tending toward the Cosby-esque.