President Obama’s best intelligence chiefs and many media people are now suggesting they have no doubt that the Kremlin was able to change enough voter’s minds to give the 2016 election to Donald Trump. If true, election campaigns will be changed forever. Perhaps as few as twelve foreigners with some help and a relatively small budget won a presidential election using some pretty sophisticated, but readily available, tools. Campaign financing in the future could be of minimal importance. The amounts spent by the Clinton and Trump campaigns was reported to be in the billions, with Clinton having outspent Trump by a substantial margin. The Russians bought Twitter ads for less than $300,00 and, according to a Wired article, may have spent “tens of millions of dollars … over several years to build a broad, sophisticated system that can influence American opinion”. That’s a lot of money over several years, but only a small fraction of what the candidates spent on just one election. Why hire an expert like John Podesta and spend a fortune on TV and staff?
With that record of success by the Russians it would be expected that campaign managers around the world are already studying the Russian technique for clues how it can be lawfully applied. Our intel professionals purport to know exactly how it was done and future campaigns will, no doubt, be the beneficiaries of that knowledge. The Russian formula however, doesn’t seem very complicated. As laid out in the Wired article “the content pumped out by the Russians was not paid or promoted ads; it was so-called native content—including video, visual, memetic, and text elements designed to push narrative themes, conspiracies, and character attacks.” Doesn’t seem like rocket science. In fact, most of what the 12 Russians did seems to be standard for campaigns these days — dirty but commonplace. Not sure why Hillary didn’t think of it.
According to a report by the Director of National Intelligence in January 2017, our intelligence community has known for some time about Russian meddling. In fact, they seem to have known that the Russians have been interfering in one way or another for decades. One has to wonder why the intel folks with such in-depth knowledge of what the Russians did for so many years, didn’t have a clue how to either prevent it or at least counteract it. Many Democrats in the House and Senate assure us that the intel community knows exactly how and by whom we were duped even though that community showed no concerns until Trump won. Are the Russians so good that our best intel minds are powerless to stop them even when we know what they are up to? I wouldn’t presume to question our intel community, especially when it comes to Russia since some have said that is tantamount to treason. But the broader question about Russian meddling since the Cold War, is how did the Russians suddenly become so proficient so as to be the determining factor in our 2016 election? Certainly our intel community has been watching the Russians for a long time and never thought the Russians had any impact in our previous elections (or at least they never made public any information about the subject). Did the Russians become so good because of 50 years of practice? Or is it possible that the Russians did have the same impact in prior elections as they had in 2016, but the intel chiefs were ok with the election results? Nah. That’s a silly conspiracy theory. Perhaps there was no impact in the 2016 election at all, and the difference in the rhetoric and the hysteria is simply because of the person who won.
On the Right Side 