It is among the most venerable election rituals of the smartphone era: down the home stretch, a recording surfaces containing embarrassing audio of a candidate elite-’splaining politics to a room of rich, self-satisfied donors.
In 2008, Barack Obama was caught talking in San Francisco about Rust Belt left-behinds who “cling” to guns and Bibles. Four years later, Mitt Romney never recovered from his “hopeless 47%” comments in Boca Raton. And last Friday splashed the arrival of Hillary Clinton’s very own “basement tape”, recorded at a fundraiser in a tony Virginia suburb. In it, Clinton is heard caricaturing young Sanders supporters as frustrated, fist-pounding baristas — “living in their parents’ basement” — clinging to their Bernie T-shirts and naive fantasies of system change.