Discussing this election is a challenge even for people whose lifeblood is elections, because so many of its participants and observers react to the introduction of clarity as if it were foreign tissue.

Speaking in Reno, Nevada, on Thursday, Hillary Clinton laid out in painstaking detail all the ways Donald Trump is mainstreaming racial hatred in the country, and facilitating the white-nationalist right’s efforts to supplant the leadership of Republican Party.

“This is what I want to make clear today,” she said. “A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military.”

Clinton’s comments hit pretty close to the mark, but the subject matter made them extraordinary, and thus alien—unconformed to the conventions of partisan campaigning.



Consider these blinkered responses from across the political system.