The conservative columnist William Safire once described the “psychopolitical challenge” that voters face: “how to deal with cognitive dissonance.”37 He began with a story of his own such challenge. During Bill Clinton’s administration, Safire recounted, he had criticized Hillary Clinton for trying to conceal the identity of the members of her health-care task force. He wrote a column castigating her efforts at secrecy, which he said were toxic to democracy. No dissonance there; those bad Democrats are always doing bad things. Six years later, however, he found that he was “afflicted” by
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