“Words have consequences,” Hillary Clinton likes to caution while campaigning against the loose-lipped, insult-hurling Donald Trump. “Words can be misinterpreted.”

But it was the Democratic nominee, generally so careful with her language, whose own inelegant prose seemed to level invective at some 20 percent of the American electorate Friday night, when she plopped them all into a big “basket of deplorables” while addressing supporters at an LGBT fundraiser in New York City.


“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables, right?” Clinton told the friendly audience fired up to see Barbra Streisand perform at the cavernous Cipriani on Wall Street. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it.”

It was a safe, familiar setting and crowd for Clinton, one of the factors that could have made her feel looser preaching to the choir. It also happened to be the first fundraiser of the entire election that Clinton’s campaign opened to the press, immediately transforming her comment into a political maelstrom with shades of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe in 2012, or even of Barack Obama’s “cling to guns or religion” mistake in 2008.

Neither one of those incidents ultimately mattered to the outcome of those elections, and most likely the impact of this weekend’s flap will prove just as fleeting -- though Clinton’s partial backpedal on Saturday amid the Trump campaign’s howls of outrage suggests she wants to hedge her bets.

“I was surprised,” one close Clinton ally in the audience told POLITICO, describing his reaction when he heard the remark. “But I think that she was being honest -- and that's refreshing, even if not politic -- as to where Trump is getting much, but not all, of his support.”

Perhaps the greatest effect of “deplorables” will be on the psychology of Clinton’s campaign. Coming days after NBC’s Matt Lauer seemed to give Trump a fact-check-free pass during a live presidential forum -- after grilling Clinton aggressively on her email use -- it uncorked a huge amount of pent-up frustration at the Democratic nominee’s Brooklyn headquarters. There, many Clinton operatives saw the Republican outrage and media attention devoted to Clinton's words as the latest example of an absurd double standard at work.

“Trump has insulted and degraded everybody he has talked about during this campaign -- from our generals in the military to a gold star family to a judge who has devoted years to serving the public, for his heritage,” senior campaign strategist Joel Benenson said in an interview. “Nothing compares to that. We will not stop talking about the bigoted remarks he’s made, or the white supremacists he retweets. He doesn’t deserve a pass on any of those comments.”

"[T]his is a fight we're eager to have,” Clinton campaign chair John Podesta said in a statement that reinforced her own. "We will never stop calling out Trump’s bigotry and racist rhetoric, because we know our country is better than this."

But Clinton’s inartful honesty briefly handed the moral high ground of the campaign to an opponent whose character and judgment the former secretary of state has been methodically trying to impeach. And it allowed Republicans, for a day at least, to rally behind a nominee that many of them find deeply distasteful.

“While Hillary said horrible things about my supporters, and while many of her supporters will never vote for me, I still respect them all!” Trump tweeted Saturday morning. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus accused Clinton of “showing her outright contempt for ordinary people.” And even House Speaker Paul Ryan, no fan of Trump, tweeted that Clinton should be “ashamed” of her comments.

Friday night wasn’t the first time Clinton used her basket metaphor to describe Trump’s “alt-right” base -- which also made her remark seem more like a bungled strategy than a gaffe. In an interview last week with an Israeli television station, Clinton said, “Take Trump supporters and put them in two big baskets. There are what I call the deplorables -- the racists and the haters and the people who are drawn because they think somehow he’s going to restore an America that no longer exists.” The other basket, she said, was made up of Americans who simply feel the government has let them down and are searching for an alternative.

But Clinton’s self-inflicted problem was in her specific phrasing at the fundraiser, Democrats said. “You assign a number, as Mitt Romney learned, and you end up defending the number,” said Mo Elleithee, director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and a veteran of Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

Four years ago, Romney told donors at a private fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans are “people who pay no income tax” and would never support his campaign because they see themselves as “victims ... entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Romney also later apologized, acknowledging the comment “was not elegantly stated.” But like Clinton, he stood by the substance of his remarks, noting that he had made similar statements, perhaps more elegantly, in public.

But Romney’s comment was potentially more damaging because it made assumptions about Americans based on their economic status, rather than on their personal views. And it fed into a pre-existing narrative about the wealthy, out-of-touch patrician with a $55,000 car elevator.

Some of her highest-profile supporters seem to think she had nothing to apologize for.

“Not everyone is going to feel it’s wrong to call people who chant ‘lock her up’ at rallies ‘deplorable,’” billionaire Mark Cuban said in an email. “How would an objective observer describe as a group the hundreds of thousands who have chanted ‘lock her up’ at a Trump rally, or the millions who have called her a criminal, if not deplorable?”

Clinton’s spokesman Nick Merrill took to Twitter Friday night to explain that “obviously not everyone supporting Trump is part of the alt-right, but alt-right leaders are with Trump. And their supporters appear to make up half his crowd when you observe the tone of his events.”

By Saturday afternoon, Clinton’s campaign had changed its strategy from defense to cleanup. “Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that's never a good idea,” Clinton said in a statement. “I regret saying ‘half’ -- that was wrong.”

The “half,” after all, was what turned Clinton’s regular discussion of the racist and bigoted elements of Trump’s campaign into an insult hurled at millions of Americans. But she quickly signaled she has no intention of backing off her larger narrative about how Trump is empowering the fringe right: “It's deplorable that Trump has built his campaign largely on prejudice and paranoia and given a national platform to hateful views and voices, including by retweeting fringe bigots with a few dozen followers and spreading their message to 11 million people,” she said.

It’s a message she broke into her August hibernation to deliver in one of her most searing and brutal speeches of the election season, and one aides say she’ll continue to hammer home regardless of how much Trump complains. And most of all, arguing about what precise percentage of Trump supporters go in the “basket” beats another go-round on the emails and the Foundation.

Clinton campaign officials also said they believed they could make a virtue in the coming days out of their swift cleanup on Aisle Six -- a leader can express regret, they pointed out, whereas Trump has never apologized for any of the insults he has hurled at a war veteran, a disabled reporter, a gold star family, and more. (Trump, in fact, urged Romney in 2012 not to apologize for his “47 percent” comments.)

“Donald Trump does not want to engage in a conversation about how much racism is fueling his campaign,” Elleithee said. “The fact that she recognized that it’s the number that is tripping her up is the right direction of the conversation.”

Added longtime Clinton ally Paul Begala: “It is simply true that Donald Trump has electrified the racist fringe in America, and that is really critical for her to raise.”

That discussion, Begala said, helps energize the two groups that Clinton needs to win the election: college-educated white voters, who Democrats have never won; and the millennials that overwhelmingly rejected Clinton for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.

“I don’t think it’s a gaffe,” Begala added, “I think it’s a really important strategy. This fires up her voters."