Blaming the victim. (Hillary Group) [View all]

[yallerdawg]

Since we continue to have this ongoing campaign of deflection, distraction and disambiguation regarding what happened, let's get back to what this really means.

Stealing Campaign Data Not a Good Fit for Bernie Sanders’ Brand

Will voters who’ve seen him as the most honest now change their minds?

Source: National Journal, by S.V. Dáte

With a curt “I apo­lo­gize” on na­tion­al tele­vi­sion Sat­urday night, Bernie Sanders tried to put be­hind him his cam­paign’s first real scan­dal of the race, proof that his staff had stud­ied data col­lec­ted by rival Hil­lary Clin­ton.

It may have come too late.

Be­cause un­like many oth­er politi­cians whose state­ments and motives are of­ten viewed with skep­ti­cism by voters, one of Sanders’s key selling points has been his per­son­al brand. At his ral­lies, sup­port­ers nearly al­ways cite his hon­esty and in­cor­rupt­ib­il­ity as one of his strongest at­trib­utes.

While the Sanders cam­paign down­played the level of its snoop­ing, the quer­ies it ran pro­duced lists ex­tremely use­ful to its ef­forts in the early vot­ing states.

With lists of Demo­crats who are strong Clin­ton sup­port­ers, who are not Clin­ton sup­port­ers, and who are most likely to turn out and vote come primary day, the Sanders cam­paign would have been able to save pre­cious time as it sought out its own likely voters, as well as got­ten a strong idea of Clin­ton’s strategy and turnout pro­jec­tions, Clin­ton press sec­ret­ary Bri­an Fal­lon told Na­tion­al Journ­al. In all, the quer­ies pro­duced hun­dreds of thou­sands of names in about a dozen states, in­clud­ing Iowa, New Hamp­shire, South Car­o­lina, and Flor­ida.

“These staffers then saved this in­form­a­tion in their per­son­al folders on the sys­tem, and over the course of the next day, we learned that at least one staffer ap­peared to have gen­er­ated re­ports and ex­por­ted them from the sys­tem,” Dacey wrote. “None of this is in dis­pute. It’s fully doc­u­mented in the sys­tem logs.”

Mean­ing, Fal­lon said, that if Sanders’s staff did not suc­ceed in im­prop­erly grabbing Clin­ton cam­paign data, “it wasn’t for the lack of try­ing.”

http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/126343/stealing-campaign-data-not-good-fit-bernie-sanders-brand?mref=home_top_side_3