Here are some things that happened yesterday that in any other election year would have been major developments in themselves. But yesterday, October 7, the Day of the Tape, most didn’t even make news programs:
1. Russia trying to tamper with the election. That is what the U.S. government has come out and claimed, for instance via a WaPo story with the headline, “U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections.” Sample:
“The U.S. intelligence community is confident that the Russian government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” said a joint statement from the two agencies. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process.”...
“Today was just the first step,” said Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), a member of the homeland security committee. ... “Moscow orchestrated these hacks because [Russian President Vladimir]Putin believes Soviet-style aggression is worth it. The United States must upend Putin’s calculus with a strong diplomatic, political, cyber and economic response.”
The possible Russian interference would range from something that’s already happened (the hacks of DNC and other email accounts, with releases timed for political damage); to something that might be happening now (interference with registration rolls); to something really alarming (directly tampering with election-night results); to something even worse. That worst-of-all prospect is seeding long-term doubt about the legitimacy of the election itself. Of course this is ground that Trump himself has shamelessly prepared with his “It’s all rigged!” talk from early on (for instance, see installment #68).
Other countries have always had interests in the outcome of U.S. elections. For decades historians have suspected (and recently may have confirmed) that Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign secretly worked with the South Vietnamese government to torpedo peace talks to end the Vietnam war, in hopes of further damaging Hubert Humphrey’s campaign. The Manchurian Candidate, as a novel in the late 1950s and a movie in the early 1960s, was about Soviet/Chinese rigging of a U.S. election.
But nothing like this level of attempted interference has been suggested before. This is new.