The usual Berniebot claptrap about how more Democrats favoring Hillary was unfair to Bernie. HOW DARE THEY LIKE HILLARY BETTER?!
Because of course adherents to a particular political party are going to prefer the outsider who jumped on the bandwagon yesterday to the person who’s been serving the party for over 30 years.
^^ This is my point. I don’t hate Hillary. But I feel very much let down by her, which is why I lump her in with Mondale and Dukakis and such. Hillary ran a horrible campaign. She combined in a sense all of the worst traits that made McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis losers. She lacked charisma. She lacked “the common touch” - bad especially in a year where populism was in. She gave the impression of not having very many ideas when it came to economic issues, or at most, the “same old same old” which people didn’t want to hear, and on social issues, she ran to the left which I believe alienated some more conservative Democrats and Independents.
She took the White Working Class base vote for granted, and at the same time, pissed off the Progressive faction of the party. Rather than picking a progressive running mate to appease that already upset wing, she picked a milquetoast guy most of the country had never heard of, who had even less charisma than her. A guy who offered no real strategic value to the ticket (think for example how Kennedy selected Johnson because Johnson was able to give him the South, or how Reagan picked Bush to get moderates to his side).
She had numerous gaffes (‘basket of deplorables’ - even if her intentions were good, she failed to realize what a soundbite culture we live in). Some of her debate answers were horrible. For example, she was asked in the second debate whether or not a President should have both a public and private stance. Rather than be honest about it and take charge of the question, she instead went into a rambling talk about Abraham Lincoln and how Wikileaks and Russia were lying about her words. She made no attempt to just “be real”…She came off haughty.
I voted for Obama in 2012 with pleasure. I would say that it’s a toss up between TR and LBJ as to who my favorite President of all time. But I had to hold my nose when pulling the lever for Hillary.
I place her among the worst losers in our electoral history because unlike McGovern, she wasn’t up against a Nixon. Nixon, for all his flaws, was at least intellectual, well-read, and could come off eloquent when he tried. Unlike Mondale, she wasn’t running against Reagan, who had good looks, literal star power, and charisma up the wazoo. Both of these guys were also running against incumbents who naturally have an advantage; Hillary wasn’t. Dukakis ran a bad campaign and was facing the Vice President of a very popular President at the tail end of a robust economy.
Hillary should have won in a landslide. She failed to capitalize on the gains made under the Obama years or really campaign on his legacy; she wasn’t running against some great, grand speaker or a popular incumbent. She was running against Donald Trump, probably the most banal candidate in our history, a vile parody of a man, a borderline illiterate narcissist and open sexual predator, and lost. It doesn’t matter that she won the popular vote; she lost the election, and that’s all that matters.
Again, while George McGovern and Barry Goldwater got skunked in their elections, and definitely “lost the battle,” both men won the war. Each man transformed his party.
Thus, there’s a bright side to McGovern’s loss that I can’t see in Mondale’s or Hillary’s.
Again, it seems like you should be apples-to-apples comparing her to Gore.
So why talk about McGovern and Mondale when you could talk about Gore?
One point to keep in mind is that, in 2016, any Democrat was going to have a ton of baggage, because the Republicans would have manufactured that baggage no matter who was running, just like they manufactured it for Clinton.
As for there being some sort of perception that Clinton won the primary because it was “her turn”, remember that that’s what people were saying back in 2008, too. Except that it turned out that when someone ran against her anyway, it wasn’t her turn after all. There are a lot of Democrats who could have run in 2016 if they had chosen to, and who probably would have beaten Clinton if they had, but who for reasons of their own chose not to. Yes, I know that some of my fellow Sanders supporters complain about the DNC not being impartial, but they’re not supposed to be. Of course they’re going to favor one candidate over the other: That’s their job. Maybe we would have been better off if they’d favored Sanders instead (or maybe not; maybe he would have lost to Trump too), but there’s no point in complaining that they favored someone, and it’s hardly surprising that the establishment favored the establishment candidate.
Manufactured baggage? Succeeding a President who spent most of his time underwater in approval wasn’t baggage enough? Historically, even candidates succeeding very popular Presidents tend to have a tough go of it.
You can blame Clinton’s loss on Clinton, but the other 1000 Democrats who lost their jobs were Obama’s fault.
I don’t blame Obama for the fact some people didn’t appreciate him, I blame those people who didn’t appreciate him. What would you have him do, become less competent and less intelligent to appeal to the Trump voters? That’s crazy talk.
What’s to appreciate? Was there a pent up desire for an ordinary Democratic President that I didn’t know about?
Let’s see, pussy grabber? No
Knows the cause of the Civil War? Yes
Refrains from stupid tweets? Check
Turned around major recession through sound and steady policies? Yep.
Yes, an ordinary Democratic President sounds damn good.
Sure, then let’s look at the last four elections where the incumbent wasn’t running:
1968: Nixon won by 511,944 votes.
1988: Bush Sr. won by 7,077,023 votes.
2000: Bush Jr. won by -543,895 votes.
2008: Obama won by 9,550,193 votes.
So Hilary, winning 2,868,691 votes more than Trump is right in the middle of the pack: behind Obama and Bush Sr., but ahead of Nixon and Bush Jr.
And, with respect to the fact that Trump did not have public or military office, it appears that the people who voted for him took that as an advantage, not a drawback, at least in this electoral cycle.
You didn’t know?
Or are you just being coy?
It as one of those Russian hack wikileaks that revealed that Hillary’s campaign was being fed some of the debate questions before the debate.
Another one of those Russian hacks revealed that the DNC was strategizing how to help Hillary to win their primary. In fact there is a lawsuit by Bernie supporters in court over that right now. And the DNC defense is that they can decide to ignore the results of the primaries and just decide amongst themselves who the nominee can be so its perfectly OK if they were conspiring against to help one nominee over another.
These are both widely viewed as cheating.
It always comes down to one of these things:
Trump is actually a political genius all evidence before the elections, during the elections and after the elections to the contrary. Trump is practically a candidate of destiny.
Anyone criticizing Hillary is just trying to make excuses for voting for Trump (I don’t think more than a small handful of people on this board voted for Trump).
It was the Russians fault for exposing bad things that Hillary or her supporters did.
It was Comey’s fault for investigating bad things that Hillary or her associates did.
Its never because Hillary is really a bad candidate who di all the wrong things at all the wrong times to get the wrong result.
Cite?
I don’t recall seeing emails between RNC members scheming about how to knock Trump out of the race.
Sometimes people blame the top of the ticket if there is widespread underperformance on the rest of the ticket. I guess blaming Obama’s never gonna go out of style.
There’s lack of positives and then there’s giant negatives.
I guess Mondale was a decent sort, but not so popular in himself. McGovern was sort of the same way, I guess.
Hillary-and-Bill (and they are a set) by contrast, had a mountain of negatives weighing down their positives; they had too much baggage to come back. She might have pulled it off in 2008, when the Republicans could not win. But running Hillary for President in a year where she had to succeed a Democrat instead of replacing a disliked Republican was a huge mistake.
Superficially, that statement is fair, and yet it lends itself to mockery like this:
The Clintons can’t fail democracy, democracy can only fail the Clintons? If only this were a constitutional Clintonocracy, then the Clinton Party would always win!
C’mon.
The truth is, any Democrat and any Republican was going to have a hard time against someone who could unite Perot voters and the pro-life GOP base, as Trump managed to do. Trump can probably sail to re-election in 2020, *especially *if he gets us into a foreign war, & maybe even if we’re in a civil war; because enough voters are just the right kind of stupid to vote that way.
So, yeah, we were let down by the swing voters. And we may be let down by them again in 42 months.
That said, the Democratic Party is as weak as it is because Bill Clinton was a bad leader, and attacked other Democrats who would get in the way of his family getting back in the White House. We might have survived Trump with a Democratic Party holding Congress. Not to diminish the skill of Reagan, Norquist, Gingrich, and Ailes in turning the GOP into a permanent majority, but I fear the Clintons’ familial ambitions have cut the Democratic Party down to something that will be a weak regionally based minority.
I don’t recall Russia hacking the RNC’s emails nor Wikileaks publishing them.
I don’t think Trump motivated the Republicans’ pro-life base. I think he was able to motivate the base because they’re not pro-life.
This indicates either the RNC was a lot more competent at server safety, say at the level of online shopping sites as opposed to the DNC’s level of a 20 years unmaintained Yahoo GeoCities local library website; or they had nothing worth pinching.
WikiLeaks hates Trump and the GOP, even if Assange hates Hillary more — then again Trumpo never threatened him with a droning.
Wow. If Democrats keep this attitude, the party is done.
Did Hillary really “serve the party”? No, I don’t think so. But enlighten me if I am wrong. People voted for a familiar name who was supposed to be electable, they voted for feminism and small-c conservative approach; and it didn’t work out for a variety of reasons. But I don’t think Hillary served the party; I think she tried to get the party to serve her.
We weren’t backing Bernie because we’d been brainwashed. We were backing Bernie to save the left-center coalition from several more years of being abused & run into the ground by the Clintons.