Your memory is faulty. Clinton’s lead was already thinning.
He certainly wasn’t as good a candidate as McGovern and Mondale’s opponents, who were, I hasten to point out, sitting Presidents.
If forced to choose I’d still pick McGovern, though, as the worst of the three. But that’s one helluva low bar.
Mr. Comey is now gunning for Mr. Assange, possibly with GOP blessing, threatening him with prosecution — although Mr. Assange has no relation to America — lending credence to the latter’s basic fears that were he not in the Embassy he would be rendered to the USA.
*During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Comey attempted to distinguish WikiLeaks from outlets like the New York Times or the Washington Post. He acknowledged the First Amendment rights journalists have in the U.S. while arguing WikiLeaks does not engage in journalism.
Republican Senator Ben Sasse asked Comey why Assange has not been charged with a crime. Comey did not want to confirm whether there were charges pending but came pretty close by saying Assange “hasn’t been apprehended because he’s inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London.”*
…
*But whether the government has any clear evidence of a “cutout” with ties to Russian intelligence is called into question by officials like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who testified, “The WikiLeaks connection, evidence there is not as strong , and we don’t have good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may have been provided.”
Assange claims, “We have said clearly that our source is not a member of the Russian state. And even the U.S. government is not suggesting that our source is a member of the Russian state.”*
Nicest of all is the [ untrue ] allegation:
This is also the government’s argument for criminalizing WikiLeaks. It is amplified by the contention that WikiLeaks does not contact U.S. agencies first like the Times or the Post to see if any of the material will put American lives in danger if documents are published.
ShadowProof
Meanwhile…
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Hillary Clinton on Wednesday to blame herself for losing the 2016 presidential election.
**You can’t blame WikiLeaks when what we leaked was your words and positions. Blame yourself. http://snpy.tv/2p5EWtj
— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) May 3, 2017**
The Hill
It is grossly unfair to accuse Mrs Clinton of having positions.
BTW, Walter Mondale looked to be sitting pretty in 1982.
Seriously, EVERYBODY wanted to run against Reagan in 1984, because he looked like a one term President early on. In 1982, we were in a deep recession and the Democrats were more united than I’ve ever seen them. Mondale seemed perfectly poised to run as a reasonable, mature adult ready to fix the economic mess Reagan led us into.
Until… the economy rebounded strong. Leaving Mondale with the argument, “Things LOOK good but they aren’t.” A tough message for any candidate to sell. Bob Dole was in the same boat in 1996.
Don’t forget the role Tom DeLay and Karl Rove played in this. In fact, they probably succeeded far too well since the biggest threat to the GOP is in the party itself (i.e., the reactionary Tea Party/Freedom Caucus contingent).
As the three Democratic candidates mentioned in the OP, I think McGovern easily was the weakest. Granted, his campaign was continually snake-bit (and rat-fucked) after he secured the nomination but his own mistakes, political tone-deafness, and amazing ability to make Nixon seem charismatic is mainly what sealed his fate.
I loved McGovern and he was one of the first POTUS candidates I really worked and pulled for so my opinion may be a little shaded but ------- I have to give the title to Walter. I don’t think anyone could have beaten Reagan in 84 but he should have been able to do somewhat better. Yeah - McGovern did really poor but how often have we failed to reelect a sitting POTUS during war-time?
Yes, Hillary should have won in a landslide. That she didn’t is a failure of the American electorate. The only possible reasons for anyone to cast a vote for Donald Trump were active hatred for America, and what we claim to stand for; or abysmal blind, pig-headed, criminally willful stupidity.
Why in the world should we care? Most Americans disliked her before the election season even started, therefore it was idiotic to nominate her. The fact that much of that dislike was based on building is beside the point, unless you think that winning elections is less important than treating Hillary Clinton fairly.
+1
We’ve been over this. The DNC bylaws clearly state that it’s members are required to remain neutral in primary elections.
Damn autocorrect. “Bullshit”, not “building”.
I don’t personally remember the McGovern campaign, but his basic problem was that there was a political realignment in process. The civil rights movement had emerged, and Northern liberals were no longer willing to collaborate with Southern racists, so the Democratic coalition that had existed for the previous few generations was no longer tenable. It might have been possible to nominate some Humphrey figure to hold the party together for another election cycle or two, but the split was coming, and it was going to leave the Democrats as a minority party for a few cycles. And Humphrey couldn’t beat Nixon when Nixon wasn’t an incumbent, so I doubt that stratstrategy would have worked even in the short term.
So I can’t comment on McGovern’s personal political skills, but I think his loss can be attributed to structural factors beyond his control, and I don’t think the Democrats had a potentially electable candidate available to them, so I won’t call McGovern a poor choice.
I think Clinton was the worst choice, in that she blew a very winnable election. I’ve argued at length that Sanders would have beaten Trump like a drum, but I also think that O’malley or pretty much any generic Den would have done so.
Hard to say about Mondale…Reagan was very popular going into the election, so he had an uphill battle. Again, like 1972 and unlike 2016, it’s not clear to me that the Dems had a clearly superior alternative available.
Can you expand on this? How was Bill a poor leader, and how did he destroy/harm the Democrats at the non-White House level? Can you explain how their familial ambitions harmed the Democratic Party to this extent?
Yeah, I can try.
The Democratic Party is a coalition of different interests and tendencies. Unions, civil rights campaigners, moderates, progressives, environmentalists to a degree, and so on. Sort of a center+left grand coalition. The Clinton paradigm was to run way to the center, assuming that the left would show up and vote for center over right. That was overly one-dimensional, and could not keep the left mobilized to vote in any country without mandatory voting. Eventually leftish and especially poor voters just stopped voting at all.
The rot in the party was happening well before 1992. Instead of a more bottom-up system, the Democrats became a loosely defined brand of individual actors, seeking funding from wealthy patrons. It became in the interest of young, upwardly mobile politicians to seek greater concentration of wealth in the hands of those patrons, never mind the party’s populist base and rhetoric. Contrast Labor parties in countries like Australia, where the unions actually are part of the party structure and try (not always with success) to direct it to some degree.
And Bill didn’t seem to care about major elements of the Democratic Party’s appeal.
A union member? Bill Clinton didn’t believe in the “American System” and protectionism. He was a free-trader. That lost a lot of votes. Also, the decisions were being made by a moneyed cabal, not by people from union politics.
Related to this, Bill was tied to Bob Rubin’s Citibank. Hillary and Obama would later get in bed with Goldman Sachs. This has the stench of corruption in some nostrils, but even if not, it made the Democratic “leadership” more aligned to private banks than to local parties.
If you wanted prison reform? 1990s Democrats actually expanded mass incarceration, working with Gingrich’s Republicans. This fit the Clintons’ desire to appeal to white moderates like themselves, but undercut the any ability of Democrats to differentiate from Republicans on that issue.
A Great Society liberal? Bill bragged about ending welfare. Again, trying to get small government conservative votes, but demonstrating amply to poor voters that he was not on their side.
Anti-death penalty, like the NAACP? Bill was determined to prove that he was not on your side. In fact, Bill and Hillary tried in general to act like they thought the progressives were wackos and nerds, not enlightened conservatives like them. So they weren’t building up the progressives of various kinds who made up the party. How do you lead a party you sneer at?
Bill and Hillary were progressive on gay rights (for the time); and they weren’t hostile to environmentalists in the way the movement conservatives were becoming (to damn with faint praise); they were better at budgets than Reagan, but easily as bad at management and government oversight. They proposed health insurance reform, but twisted the concept into a subsidy for private companies.
They conceded to a lot of right-wing economic rhetoric instead of defending a system to protect the American worker, and they lost votes for that.
As a Democrat, Bill was a pretty good Republican. As a Republican, he was kind of a mess. As a leader of either party, he wasn’t any help except to his opposition in the end.
I really think it was because he wanted to build his career in the middle, and he left the party to his left without any effective ideological leadership.
And no one has fixed this, that I see.
Al Gore at least had the environmentalism. Kerry and Obama also were sort of in the middle. Pelosi & Schumer are corporate, and got into leadership not by listening to the party and the unions but by raising money from billionaires. The national party doesn’t listen to the local parties. It stands for little except getting a few token rich politicians elected, which is a reversion to something like the Democratic Party before 1932. A hot mess, and a futility.
Jesus Christ would not have won the Presidency against Reagan in 1984. Mondale was as much taking one for the team as he was trying to be President.
Dukakis’s failure in 1988 - though the electoral map was just lopsided, rather than being comical - was a much more regrettably defeat than Mondale’s. Bush 1.0 was theoretically beatable. Reagan was not.
McGovern and Clinton are awfully difficult to compare. McGovern was, in a general sense, the Bernie Sanders of the 1972 race. He wasn’t as interesting or as compelling, but like Sanders he was a Senator and effectively a Democratic outsider who the party didn’t want but who appealed to the grassroots and pulled it off that way; the big difference is that he squeaked out a win. Clinton was the precise opposite, the anointed choice of the DNC brass from the get go; unlike Humphrey in 1972, that was enough to get her the nomination.
Their opponents were, of course, also massively different. McGovern was running against a successful incumbent and long time politician; Clinton was running against a reality TV show star and lunatic.
So, again, I’ve gotta break the tie through the Loss Rule, which is “A loss is a loss, whether by 1 point or 10.” It is perhaps more embarrassing to lose by a score of 520-17 than it is 304-227, but either way one person gets 1 term as President and the other one gets zero. So I gotta say Clinton was the worse candidate, because she lost an election she could have won had she ran a better campaign, whereas McGovern lost an election he was probably not going to win though any action he could have taken.
Clinton came within 70 thousand votes of all the “experts” writing about her brilliant campaign in their post-election analyses. She got caught between two cult-of-personality campaigns in Sanders and Trump. Remove Sanders from the equation and she wins.
Wow, Sanders did not run as a third candidate. That is quite the claim to make. I can just as easily claim that if HRC added Sanders to the ticket instead of a nobody from nowhere that she would have won those rust belt states she lost.
Can I prove it? No, but I think my statement has more “truthiness” than yours.
Of course Sanders didn’t run third party, that wasn’t my point. Sanders attracted a fanatical following, like Trump. It was a damaging primary for Clinton, and when the election came around, democrats just didn’t come out in the expected numbers. There was a lot of resentment and disillusionment. Had Sanders not run, Clinton would have had a much better chance, imo.
Or if Hillary didn’t run the Dems probably would have won behind Sanders or Biden. Or as I said, had she just added Sanders as the VP to the ticket. Seriously, she was the bigger problem.
LOL, I’m kind of with you on that.
McGovern made a huge mistake picking Thomas Eagleton for vice president. Very poor vetting. And then Sargent Shriver was a miserable second choice, but by that time the rest of Democrats were staying well away from that campaign. McGovern was nominated in the first of two totally open primary systems the Democrats held. The second being 1976. After those lessons, the party tweaked the system to add superdelegates to the mix.
Mondale and Hillary Clinton were far more capable politicians, IMO. Given all her advantages, I’d say Hillary performed more under expectations than the other two.
It is interesting that the Republicans relied on dirty tricks in at least two of those three races.