Thread by @mcjulie

My take: it's a little bit of all of them.

First, the right wing has been sliming Hillary LITERALLY since her husband was president, and they've basically never stopped -- that's a lot of backstory, a lot of TIME for the name "Clinton" to be a boogeyman to the right.

https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1317533696115683333

One of the ways propaganda works -- smear campaigns especially -- is to set you up so that a single word, like "Clinton" or whatever, can call up this big bucket of associated ideas and feelings.

Hillary had this whole character that was created for her -- she was shady! Had people murdered! Partied with Epstein! Partied with Trump!

I mean -- seriously -- I saw people use her past associations with TRUMP to discredit HER.

But that's partly where the misogyny comes in. Women get blamed for things that men get a pass on. Hillary is somehow more "corrupt" for having been at a party with Trump than Trump is for BEING Trump, it doesn't have to make sense.

BILL Clinton's infidelities are held against his wife more than against him. You don't hate her because she's a woman. It's some other reason. You can't explain it. There's just something about her that bothers you.

But, Biden also has unique strengths. He's got that "third Obama term" thing going on, which maybe wouldn't have 100% sold it in in 2016, but it looks pretty good NOW, doesn't it?

But this relates back to the final question: is the right wing slime machine losing its touch?

I would put it like this: they've got a couple of moves & when they work they look like geniuses, but if they don't work, they don't have a depth of alternate strategies.

One of their strategies is: make the Democrat look just as corrupt as the Republican. They're clearly trying that with Biden, but it's not sticking.

The other strategy they have is to make the Democrat (if male) look insufficiently macho. They're also trying that with Biden -- remember Trump giving him grief for wearing a mask? But that is ALSO not sticking.