That she was seeking the approval of Democrats? Should she have made bragging references to the size of her dick? That would have been awkward. Perhaps sneering references to Uncle Bernie Bedhair? No, because they both were sensitive to the prospect of unity after the primaries. Perhaps the rhetorical conflict was more heated than normal for Dem contests, but compared to Trump, it was sipping tea with pinkies akimbo, murmuring polite compliments.
What was to be done, be more Trump than Trump?
She didn’t think that democrats were as gullible as republicans.
If the bernie bros had turned out, if the stein voters had voted for clinton, if lots of things…
The general was just as unprecedented as the primaries.
All apologies for any confusion; I’m talking about what she should’ve done differently after winning the primaries. I’m merely noting that, even before she accepted the nomination, she could already see that Trump had done well with his approach.
This wasn’t the narrative during the campaign at all, BTW. I remember how people on this board would get crucified for suggesting that Hillary Clinton was anything but a shining example of honesty, and how people would post links to sites ‘proving’ that she was more honest than other politicians. It’s funny that even her ardent supporters seem to be dropping the Honest Hillary narrative, but it’s way too late.
She ran an awful campaign, all of the apologists trying to blame Trump Magic or Republican Specialness or Russia or anything but Hillary are simply wrong. Her attitude was very much “It’s her turn” (that was even floated as a campaign slogan), and she didn’t feel the need to lower herself to putting out a coherent message beyond “I’m Hillary Clinton, what are you going to do, vote for Trump?” while her supporters treated any dissent with “Anyone who doesn’t like Hillary just hates her for being a woman”. The whole “she’s so honest!” meme didn’t help either. She campaigned heavily in places like NY and CA where there was no chance of her losing, but almost completely ignored swing states (first major party candidate since 1972 to skip Wisconsin, first Democrat to lose it since 1984). There was a TON wrong with her campaign, pretending that it was well run just doesn’t match reality - and it failed the most test of any electoral campaign, ‘was it capable of beating even an awful candidate?’.
She actually didn’t do what the best and brightest in the field were advocating, if anyone advocated ‘don’t come up with a clear message’, ‘imply that people who don’t vote for you are sexist’, and ‘ignore everything but big states there’s no chance you’ll lose anyway’, they clearly aren’t very good at winning presidential elections. She explicitly ignored the advice of her husband, the Democratic President with the most impressive electoral achievements with the ‘skip the flyover rubes’ strategy.
And you need something better than a poorly-run conventional campaign when you’re starting with a weak candidate like Clinton and trying to win the biggest election in the country. She was widely thought of as being very much an dishonest, establishment politician, has little in the way of personal accomplishments, little experience in winning elections, awful charisma, and what policy positions she did put out were either divisive (‘ban all handguns’) or obvious ploys (‘I’m opposed to the TPP after supporting it. Also my supporters will condemn Trump for blocking the TPP like I said I would, with the explanation that they knew I was lying’). She’s good at playing games within the party, but not good at actually leading or at winning contested elections.
Because all the polls and all the talking heads were saying that her conventional campaign was going to work - she was going to sweep to the White House in an electoral landslide.
“Never argue with an idiot - he’ll drag you down to his level and beat you on experience.” She never realized that this might apply to Presidential elections too.
Regards,
Shodan
But here’s the thing. Virtually no one ran against her. And I think a lot of that had to do with them buying into the whole “inevitable” mind-set. Yes, she ran a shitty campaign. But where was the competition? Where were the Democratic challengers? Obama defied the odds in 2008, but no one stepped up the plate besides Bernie in 2016, and he wasn’t even an actual Democrat.
Sounds like Democrats could have benefited from having a few “outsiders” in the DNC rather than “insiders.” Wasn’t that Bernie’s appeal? It wasn’t lost on many liberal voters that the Democratic party was run by Clinton insiders to the detriment of liberal politics.
People assumed that this could apply to Republican voters, many of whom were “deplorables” and prone to supporting people like Trump, and especially against a crowded field. But independents and previous Democrat voters wouldn’t buy his act, and especially against one alternative he had no chance.
I’m sure there were some such people. But many Sanders supporters (including on this board) thought she was somewhat corrupt from the start. Though that attitude has undoubtedly hardened since the election. (I’ve suggested that this results from bitterness and disappointment.)
All this is hindsight.
I was following the campaign closely enough to know that this was not the consensus of experienced campaign experts at the time.
I don’t think I agree with this. There were several other serious candidates. People don’t remember them because they never got traction, but that’s not the same thing as no one running. The fact that she (& Sanders) trounced those candidates speaks to Clinton and Sanders not being such weak candidates as people are portraying them, not to Clinton doing well only due to the absence of competition.
So at many levels, the Democratic Party works much more on your-turnism and seniority that do the Republicans (tempted to cite the Union influence here but not to derail - just say that’s the general culture). I’m involved at the local level and you can see that in spades. This has its plusses when things are running smoothly (you can better block a tea-party or trump-like insurgency) but it works terribly in a “change” election because it’s very hard to pivot. And of course, Clinton no matter how hard she tried to re-label was the ultimate in “democratic establishment” whether or not her actual positions moved leftwards.
You can quibble tactics that would have pushed Clinton over the edge (e.g. not visiting the Rust Belt) but this was just a huge organizational disadvantage in a change election, out of the gate.
So now we see the whole organization trying to spin to “not-that-way” but there’s going to be huge inertia - seeing it at the statewide level where I am now. Note this doesn’t have anything to do with the “progressive” versus “moderate” but just how to welcome new voices and blood regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. The finger-pointing is not so much a matter of “corrupt” versus “not corrupt” but looking more deeply at organizational culture that is biased in all kinds of ways against people who haven’t “put their time in”.
How does this “rigging” differ from the wheeling and dealing, glad handing, fund raising, building relationships over decades, and horse trading, that is the bread and butter of politics.
The Berine fans complaining the Hillary rigged the Democratic Party sounds like a student complaining that their classmate cheated on the test because he spent the night before studying.
Exactly. It’s all political. She won (within the party)
And they voted against her. But as it turned out, more Democratic primary voters wanted to vote for a Democrat. Should they have been ignored, because there was a vocal minority who wanted an outsider?
You mention the local level, and that’s where the democratic party is floundering the most.
I am a rare beast, a liberal who owns a business. I go to chamber alliance meetings, and am absolutely surrounded by republicans. I am not sure there is another liberal there (and I have long hair, so any other liberals could make that assumption, and seek me out.). Now, owning a business means two things. One, you are good at networking, and two, your business gives you a whole new platform for networking. You make friends and alliances in your community by being a business owner. As business owners tend to be republican, and business owners tend to have a leg up on getting into local politics, they also have a leg up for state and national races as they reach those levels.
Without local community business leaders turning into local political leaders, the democratic party is cut off at the ankles.
I don’t really see any exciting prospects coming up from the democratic bench, and I think that the lack of support and growth at the local level for democratic leaders is a main cause.
How to encourage more democrats to open businesses, or how to encourage business owners to vote democratically is a problem I don’t know where to start in solving.
I don’t agree with this. Business owners have a leg up for political races as compared to employees of those businesses. But lawyers and activists have a leg up over business owners - and have vastly more interest in entering politics to begin with - and those groups are dominated by liberals/Democrats.
It’s not just an issue with business leaders (though I agree with you - more would be very nice!). The results of the 2016 election brought in a wide range of interested mid-career professionals who suddenly saw the importance of politics, only to be turned off by “party stalwarts” who, while I appreciate their direct political experience, had been in a bubble for a long time, had limited professional experience, and were very small-c conservative about their organization.
This was enough of a turn-off in my local districts that many of the professional progressives found a better-fit with special interest groups (e.g. “school funding” or “minimum wage” interest groups and so forth) - this is getting money in the system, all well and good, but it sure ain’t supporting a breadth of quality candidates (yet) and promotes more infighting.
Did you read about the 32 million?
Lawyers often own their own firms, and if they are getting involved in politics, are usually going to be on the letterhead. I don’t know a national breakdown of lawyer’s politics, but locally, pretty much all the lawyers are pretty conservative. Activists don’t really get all that much community support outside of their cause. All the local trustees all have their own businesses, and run on that.
But yeah, business owners have a leg up for political races as compared to employees of those businesses, as well as employees of other businesses in the community.
I understand that. The local democratic party is fledgling and underfunded. They haven’t controlled an office around here in forever. Yet, they “know what they are doing”, which is basically funneling the fundraising efforts by the few local democrats into the coffers for other races.
I’m kinda being vetted for some pretty insignificant offices these days, and it would be easier to run and work my way up as a republican than as a democrat, both due to better demographics, and because of a more substantial party support.
Gotta admit, “Blue Collar Billionaire” is a touch of malignant genius.
Right…there was absolutely no way HRC could have anticipated being asked about the water contamination crisis in Flint, MI…no way at all. Whatever one may think of her, I doubt very much that she would have been incapable of appropriately responding to the question whether she had known about it beforehand or not.
I’m not saying it isn’t troubling, but it does seem to have been blown all out of proportion.
Regarding the notion that Bernie Sanders had the nomination stolen from him, I disagree. Given where the political center of gravity is these days, I doubt that a candidate who is so far to the left that he can’t consider himself a Democrat, would have been able to win the general election.
American elections are won and lost at the margins. DJT is President today because Jill Stein took away a few score thousands of votes in battleground states that almost certainly would have gone to HRC otherwise. Before bending over backwards to fracture the left, one should consider the current state of play and ask whether we want the country to be run by billionaires, fiscal and religious conservatives, and free market anarchists for the foreseeable future. A fractured Left cannot prevail against the Republicans, even as split as the latter now seem to be.
It’s not about the DNC keeping Bernie from winning. He probably would have lost the primaries without the heavy handed DNC interference. It’s about the Democratic Party and how it’s being run and what it represents. It’s a return to old time machine politics at the organizational level, and an abandonment of its principles for the same kind of double dealing that the GOP does. Hillary is representative of those problems. They need to change in many more ways than this kerfuffle illuminates to succeed.
Frankly, I think they’ve been dead in the water for decades. They’ve only succeeded in electing charismatic presidents since Kennedy (with the exception of Carter who needed a GOP meltdown to succeed). They lost control of congress because they lost touch with the American people and have only gained a modicum of control again following Republican disasters. All Hillary did was continue on down the road to nowhere.