2016 Postmortem

on the other, it reads like you might be missing some forest through the trees

i would agree that the corruption section of the video is both weak and weakly supported, but this is, in a sense, why it becomes a real problem: it is the "common" view of HRC. this commentator is no Trump fan, and takes a progressive viewpoint on the vast majority of issues. he even notes in the video itself that some of the "common" perception of HRC is rooted in falsehoods, and then, as you observed, goes on to push those additional falsehoods.

part of running a successful political campaign is "managing perceptions", especially of the candidate. the Clinton campaign by-and-large failed to manage perceptions. one could argue that with 30 years of Republican smears on her, managing perceptions is a very difficult job, and, sadly, that is a big part of why we're in this situation, having this discussion in this thread. for whatever reasons, a lot of those GOP lies stuck, and are now what is often referred to as "baggage".

you can explain to people until you run out of air that HRC is clean on all counts and the things said about her and various associated organizations are complete and utter bullshit. however, as noted in the video, people tend to assume that where there's smoke there's fire, which complicates the process of getting someone to reflect upon and change their commonly held opinion about HRC's actual degree of corruption (especially relative to her opponent). having Trump daily referring to her in stump speeches as "crooked Hillary" with no coherent and consistently-repeated rebuttal from the Clinton campaign actually reinforced that idea. her campaign allowed her to be branded as corrupt without tagging Trump as such, when he is actually the source of the very kind of corruption the people who voted for him would claim to deplore.

a lot of the negative campaigning i saw from the Trump campaign was closely tied to acceptance of the premise that HRC is a corrupt establishment insider (aka branding). that such a concept could be applied as a premise rather than a conclusion is indicative of her weakness as a candidate. there were many other factors, but like it or not, that narrative played a role.