Policy has little to nothing to do with perceptions of personality. Joe didn’t get a free pass on this subject, he didn’t need one because he didn’t run for president.
I have talked to plenty of women in many industries who have had to fight tooth and nail against sexism. But I don’t understand your point. Hillary was a terrible candidate for reasons that had nothing to do with sexism and despite that she still won a majority of the popular vote. Had she been a better politician she would be president now. Sexism does exist but there’s no free pass being given to Joe Biden because of sexism.
I remember that too. It was an early demonstration on the national level that she was a terrible politician. Do you recall the details (bolding mine):
All you have to do is pretend that Joe Biden is the same charismatic person he is now, except he’s inhabiting an almost 75 year-old woman’s body. Does anyone seriously think “Joanne Biden” would be heralded as the surest bet against someone like Trump? I respect Biden as much as the next person, but come the fuck on. At best, female Biden would be regarded like a scampy little grandma type, like Estelle Getty in Golden Girls. And she would’ve never been picked to be Obama’s running mate because it would’ve been political suicide for him.
This is absolutely true. Just like the level of hatred directed at Obama is racism, pure and simple. The visceral venom directed at these two individuals goes waaaay beyond disagreeing with their policies or judgments about their ability to govern. Bill and Hillary had marital problems that spilled over into their public life, but Hillary is hated and judged for them much more than Bill ever was. And Obama never had one breath of personal, financial, professional scandal associated with with him, but he is passionately hated as only black people have been hated in this country.
Speaking of popular, you know that thing that keeps Trump up at night? That thing about his opponent receiving millions more votes than he did. The voter fraud commission, or whatever it’s called, was not, totally not formed to ease Trump’s so called mind. In fact, Kris Kobach, the man leading the commission claims that our election results are so uncertain that by golly, you just won’t ever be able to tell for sure if Clinton won the popular vote. We’ll never really know, guldurnit.
Republican. Douchebag. Redundant.
I guess I’m imagining this thread. Because here I thought we were discussing how - eight months after the election - somebody was still paying for polls to ask people how much they disliked Hillary Clinton. Why? Do you think Obama was polling people after the election to ask them how much they liked Romney? Do you think Bush cared after the election what people thought about Kerry? No, because they realized it didn’t matter. The elections were over and they won.
But somebody is still out there knocking Hillary Clinton down. And I offered a rational reason why they might be doing that. I’ll concede I might be wrong. Perhaps their motivations are irrational.
Obama got 46% of white women voters in 2008. There is more at play here than just sexism, which everyone knew would be a factor. If it was simply a matter of qualifications, a different woman with Hillary’s resume could have won in a landslide.
Ann Richards (D) was pretty much a female Joe Biden, and she got elected governor of Texas. Charisma.
The candidate Clinton reminds me of is Dukakis. Hard-working, experienced, competent and the voters just couldn’t relate to the guy. It’s stupid, but we’re stuck with it.
No one has claimed that no woman has ever been elected to office in the USA at all.
So, yes: if we are discussing the question of whether Clinton’s gender made a difference to some voters in the presidential election, it’s more reasonable to cite examples in which some other woman was elected President (or VP).
Since there are no such examples, those arguing that Clinton’s gender made no difference to voters are reduced to talking about women who’ve been elected in particular states to Governorships or to Senate seats—those things are of interest but they don’t really touch on the question of whether sexism might effect presidential races.
Trump’s diseased ego just won’t let him accept the fact that he didn’t fool us, most of us saw him for the worthless piece of shit he is, and we didn’t want him. He may have gotten the electoral votes, based on the rules of the game, but he LOST the popular vote and it’s driving him crazy. He’s a fucking LOSER.
And now he’s “running” the country JUST like he runs his so called businesses - “let it fail I won’t own it”.
We already KNOW who won the popular vote, and no amount of damned lies will change that.
That is true. The thing about that linked video that made me do the sideways dog head confused thing was hearing a politician on the national stage just simply unable to say that Clinton got more votes than Trump did. As though it were uncertain.
Just to mention a couple of things, first, In 2008 Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden ran for president and Hillary did much better than Joe. Second, if Hillary had been a better politician she would be the POTUS right now, she even won more of the popular vote than Trump, despite all her shortcomings.
That’s how a lot of people will prefer to view it looking through the lens of the present. In reality, the destruction of Hillary Clinton, the public servant, took place over the better part of 25 years. Clinton’s original sin was trying to reform the American healthcare system while being the First Lady of the United States. Her second sin was having the gall to be ambitious enough to want political office for herself after she and Bill left the Oval Office. The reality is that people are more forgiving of Bill Clinton for his extra-marital escapades than they are of Hillary Clinton for reconciling with her adulterous husband and trying to establish her own identity as an individual. In 2017 she’s the “cold, cunning, calculating bitch”, but before that she was “the un-elected healthcare and policy wonk who didn’t know her place.” There’s a connection between the present and history.
There’s no question that Hillary and her campaign bear a lot of responsibility for her own failures as a candidate. Hillary’s judgment has indeed been questionable – I don’t argue against that. What I would submit, though, is that she pays double for the same sins that her male counterparts make. And I think that awareness in some cases probably made her come across as cautious, defensive, evasive…less “charismatic” in her interviews and public appearances.
The Margin of Error for the entire sample (after clicking through to the Bloomberg article Slate used) was ±3.1%. The two point difference is statistically insignificant. Clinton is as unpopular as Trump not less popular in any kind of meaningful way.
Journalists in general screw up when it comes to demonstrating even basic understanding of statistics with respect to polls. Slate stands out for a little extra mention in this case. They doubled down by failing to even mention the margin of error in a story about poll data. :smack:
The last election had two wildly unpopular candidates. Without digging ISTR references at times to both candidates having historically low favorability ratings for candidates in the time frames considered. This isn’t even the low poll number for Clinton. From the Bloomberg story and their poll report, she was an insignificant 1 point lower in September 2015 early in her primary campaign. April of 2015, when she announced, was the last time in Bloomberg’s polls where she was above water - 48 favorable against 44 unfavorable. Clinton had an issue with favorability. If it weren’t for Trump having an even bigger issue that would normally have been a big story.
So we started with two candidates with crappy favorabiltity. Since the election Clinton has lost favorability among Clinton voters faster than Trump has among his voters. That leaves them neck and neck on a race for the bottom.
Oh so it’s now about how Hillary was unable to bullshit and con the public into voting for her. We’re moving the goalposts from “Hillary was a neoliberal whore who had terrible policies” to “Bro, you know what? She should have been better at gaslighting the public”. So the problem then isn’t that Hillary was a dissembler, but rather that she wasn’t a cult of personality leader who could make people question the notion of truth. That’s the political equivalent of blaming the rape victim for being raped: she just wasn’t strong enough to resist male power. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
I’ve got nothing against Joe Biden, but he’s relevant to the extent that most people agree that he would have been the “better” candidate than Hillary Clinton. But when you ask why, nobody can really give a good answer other than he’s just a more “charismatic” person. He’s more “likeable”. He’s more comfortable in his own skin. Well of course he is because Hillary Clinton, like Barack Obama, knows that if he does even a fraction of the shit that a white male does, it’s over. A white male can have affairs. A white male can be aggressive and use profanity in front of the cameras. A white male can be apparently really, really “unpresidential” and in fact behave in ways that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. But the moment a black man or a white woman dares to push those boundaries…it’s over. Everyone knows it. Conservatives tried to make Barack Obama into a jive-ass black man from the ghetto, and fortunately they failed. But they were successful in taking Hillary Clinton and making her into a cunning, gold-digging witch, which practically every divorced male in America, regardless of race, can identify as a bogeywoman.
I will believe it when I see it. Actually, the closest thing I’ve seen to a female political phenom in this country is…Sarah Palin. It’s not surprising because she is a conservative free spirit who said a bunch of outrageous things that fired up her conservative base. Palin had a lot of soulmates.
I’m really talking about people who identify themselves as “progressives” here, or people with “progressive” leanings. There is no way that they would support someone like Sarah Palin for obvious reasons, but to be honest, I wonder how much they’d support Elizabeth Warren. And even if they did, it wouldn’t matter because Warren has no chance to go beyond her Massachusetts base. What I’m saying is, progressives have been talking about someone like Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders running, but I don’t see them really rallying around female democratic figures.
I guess what I wanted to point out earlier is that what a lot of people don’t seem to realize is that there are different shades and levels of ‘isms’. There are different degrees of racism and sexism. I’ve said before that I think a lot of the people who voted for Trump aren’t necessarily people who think of themselves as Archie Bunker racists and they understandably tend to be indignant at such charges. Of course some are racist, but many are not consciously so. But what I’ve maintained all along is that a very, very high percentage of Trump voters were what I would label as having racial or cultural anxiety – a subconscious (or conscious) fear that their country is being taken over by people who aren’t like them and that they’re getting displaced.
On that note, here is where I pivot to progressives. I focus on progressives because they typically represent the side of the racist/sexist/whateverist spectrum that tends to be much less racist and much less sexist, or whatever. And yet, if you probe deeply enough, you will find that there are subconscious biases that lurk within that even they are not aware of. The stereotypical white hipster progressive will understand fully well that things like use of the n-word is wrong, discrimination is wrong, sexism is wrong, sexual harassment is wrong, and so on. But then comes a situation in which they are asked to judge two people who have essentially the same political track record, one male and the other female, and they end up revealing obvious biases that can only be described as sexist. Naturally, being aware that sexism goes against their value system, they aggressively push back and adamantly deny those allegations against them. And yet they are unable to reconcile their opinions and attitudes in a satisfactory manner. There was an excellent article somewhere recently that discussed this phenomenon at length in an article about Seattle schools, albeit it tackles the issue of racism and not sexism.