Hillary Clinton made a comment during Monday night’s debate with Donald Trump that may have seemed innocuous when she said it, but has the potential to utterly destroy her campaign if one were to actually think about the context in which it was said.
During a discussion about law enforcement and policing, moderator Lester Holt—who had just taken a beating from Trump for arguing about a “stop and frisk” policy adopted by the New York City Police Department—asked Clinton to weigh in. He asked, “Do you believe that police are implicitly biased against black people?”
In other words, are police inherently racist?
Given the beating she took earlier in the month for her “basket of deplorables” comment, which she suggested applied to one quarter of the American population, many expected her to sidestep the question. And in a way, that may have been what she was trying to do.
Her answer: “Lester, I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other, and therefore, I think we need all of us to be asking hard questions about ‘Why am I feeling this way?'”
In other words, everyone’s racist.
Unfortunately for Trump, he never pounced on what she said, perhaps because he was still regrouping from his previous exchange with Holt—which violated the rules of the debate established by the Committee on Presidential Debates. Some media outlets did pick up on the comment in their post-debate analysis, though.
As The Daily Caller noted, it remains to be seen if the comments get the attention of the electorate, which has already found the “deplorables” comment off-putting.
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