Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation” while discussing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s comments describing half of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” driven by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic” beliefs, Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan Peggy Noonan said this “was the kind of divisive and embittering language that will be — that will harken back to two other gaffe, one is Mitt Romney’s 47 percent, the other is Barack Obama’s bitter clingers.”
Noonan said, “It is — she used memorable language, basket of deplorables. An original and — and perhaps startling phrase, but it was memorable, therefore it will be memorable as a gaffe. It was a mistake. You don’t write off immoral and ethical terms half of the supporters of — of the person you’re running against, meaning one quarter of the voters in the United States, as such nefarious and rather wicked people. She did walk it back. She said she shouldn’t have said half. But I think, at the end of the day, it was the kind of divisive and embittering language that will be — that will harken back to two other gaffe, one is Mitt Romney’s 47 percent, the other is Barack Obama’s bitter clingers.”
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