In this day and age, you never get another shot at running as the nominee if you lose. That’s probably for the best.
Holy shit, I actually forgot about Kaine. Yes, he was also short on charisma but at least he wasn’t from a solid blue state. Still, had she picked Bernie Sanders it would have been a blowout.
You’ll be even more confused to find out that the Washington Post has taken note of the possibility of a Clinton revival. And Politico had its own take previously.
I suspect the right-wing sources speculating about a Hillary rerun are doing so with a mixture of glee and dread. It’s sort of like having nailed shut the coffin lid on a vampire, only to have it break free and sit up with a dreadful leer on its face.
Somehow I doubt all of Clinton’s public appearances, fund-raising efforts and quotable quotes are aimed only at cementing her place in history.
*"And perhaps most relevant of all: She’s Hillary Clinton. Does anyone doubt she goes to bed every night with the phrase “Madame President” haunting her dreams? As Goodwin notes: “Doubters should recall the line about pols who get the presidential itch: There are only two cures — election or death.”
On top of the NYPost’s data points, there’s the fact that Hillary just won’t stop talking. She’s on TV almost as much as she was during the campaign, and she’s generating headlines at least once a week. She’s scheduled to speak at the American Federation of Teachers’ national gathering in Pittsburgh this Friday.
Who was the first national union to endorse Hillary in the 2016 Democratic primary? The AFT."*
Face it, fellow Democrats. If the right set of circumstances occurs (including a crowded and divided field of candidates with no clear front-runner), then “spontaneous” calls to draft Hillary back into the race will be heard. And if she isn’t dead or moribund, she’ll jump at the chance.
This, again, is exactly right. Trump pretty much believed it himself. Nobody could possibly lose to Trump, unless some significant portion of the American electorate was stupider than one could ever imagine, and an even more significant portion was too complacent to even bother voting. It was the perfect storm. Everyone shelter in place until further notice.
I think the Clintons should go quietly into the sunset. I also think Biden and Sanders are too old. I would like to see Gov. Dayton run.
I’ve been living in Maryland (where O’Malley was 2-term governor) for nearly 2 decades now, and have spent 30 years of my life in Virginia (which Kaine represents) and whose politics I’m still pretty familiar with.
And I can barely tell you a thing about either one, they’re both so generic.
The piece says nothing to suggest that Clinton might actually be considering another run. It’s just one of those “let’s show our sophistication by writing something totally counterintuitive” sorts of pieces. Should be in Slate, because it’s the perfect #slatepitch.
Guy’s full of it too, because he brings in unsuccessful primary campaigns as instances of defeats followed by successful comebacks. We’re talking about defeat in the general election. The last Dem who lost in the general, and later won the Dem nomination, was Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, a lifetime ago. The last time it happened for a Republican was Nixon in 1960/1968.
IOW, it could happen again sometime, but it’s been one hell of a long time since it happened, and the political world worked differently back then: just a handful of primaries, and party bosses deciding how most of the delegates voted.
Jackmannii expresses the reason why I don’t put her running again at 0%, like I would with most other former candidates. And I think it would have to be a situation where Trump didn’t run in 2020. If it’s Trump again, I think someone form the DNC will arrive at Hillary’s door and handcuff her to the stair rail until November of that year.
I like that rule. Even more so if it applies to Republican primaries!
After 3 years of Trump and one year of Pence, the voters might be ready for a generic Democrat who simply does his or her job without a lot of drama.
I’m a lifelong Democrat. I liked Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
Hillary Clinton ran one of the weakest, most incompetently run campaigns in recent history. It was Tom Dewey in 1948; it was Ed Muskie in 1972. She never really gave anyone any reason to really vote for her. She never really articulated her vision for the country.
And when I went to her campaign website to express my concerns, >>> there was no link to email the campaign <<<. That campaign didn’t give a shit about what I thought.
To compare: in 2000, I looked at Al Gore’s campaign website. I noticed that Al “Earth In The Balance” Gore’s Presidential campaign website >>> didn’t have an energy policy <<<! But it at least it had an “email the campaign” link, so I did, pointing this out. I never heard back from the campaign, but when I checked back about three days later, there was a “New! Al’s Energy Policy” link on the website. Now, it was pretty surprising nobody on Gore’s campaign thought about an energy policy, but at least they had a link to contact the campaign; they had somebody reading those emails; and they reacted when something was pointed out to them. Sixteen years later, nobody on Hillary’s campaign could do the same thinking. This was one of many unforced errors on her part.
Oh, and by the way, Al, if you’re reading this - you’re welcome.
She very much embodied a “It’s my turn” attitude. She was due. The presidency was hers and doubly so with a weak candidate like Trump. She was marking time to her coronation.
She did not articulate a vision for the country because she also very much embodied “More of the same” politics. She completely missed that people were fed up with the government as it is. Trump tapped into that “throw the bums out” feeling in a big way.
She was a status quo candidate through-and-through.
Hillary 2020? No, definitely not. I think the same left wing apathy would be the result, and even if she won I think it would be a crippled presidency so there is no upside (well, save we wouldn’t have Trump as president…so, yeah, that’s a big upside, even if we are talking a crippled presidency). No, I think that this time the Progressives need to get their candidate. They need to get someone like Bernie but not so old…someone young and progressive and radical. And that person, whoever it is needs to win. It’s really the only way the country can move forward. We’ve had Trump, and when he loses we will hopefully have collectively gotten that out of our system (I like the imagery of the collective US rump over the toilet with Trump sort of oozing out into the plumbing)…hopefully we won’t have to do THAT again. So, now we need to have a radical progressive at the helm, so we can collectively see how that works out in our system. After that, perhaps we can get back to moderate politics and compromise that actually will work in our system with our varied population.
Regardless, I think just about anyone would be better than Trump. Even Bernie. Hillary would be orders of magnitude better, but she has so much baggage with both the left and right (hell, probably the middle too) that she would be a very bad choice. I will honestly vote for any Democratic candidate they throw up, so, serious business…go for a progressive and a young one. I don’t care what race, color or creed, what sex (or sexual orientation), or really what policies they are touting…if they aren’t Trump I’m voting for them, full stop. And I seriously doubt I’m the only one in the country who will do so, either. So go wild, Dems!
…and isn’t fantastic she didn’t get elected! Who needs more status quo? I can’t tell you how pleasant it is to wake up every morning to check my twitter feed to see “what has the moron done this morning”? It does wonders for my anxiety!
This was the message from two years ago.
Loud and clear. A vote for Trump was a vote for the puppet. Lets not rewrite history. Lets not pretend that Clinton didn't expressly tell the American people exactly what they were voting for. If you didn't get the message that isn't her fault, that's yours.If you actually believe this then I can only guess that you didn’t watch any of the debates. Really.
Yeah. What’s happening now is no fucking surprise. Not to anyone that was paying attention, anyway.
A bit of rambling follows, admittedly not all on point:
Firstly, I totally reject the OP’s premise; for me, Hillary’s chances of running again are effectively zero.
Meanwhile, I think there are quite a large number of people who have managed to talk themselves into feeling that whatever Trump may be doing, that they are somehow insulated from any negative consequences, that he has rolled back a bunch of societal and economic changes that they feel vaguely uncomfortable with, and look, he’s just so entertaining and unpredictable while doing it. A significant proportion of the electorate, as many before me have stated, seem to think they are watching a reality TV show and are just dying to see what outrageous hijinks our President gets up to next. That he is repeatedly sticking it to a bunch of people that they have been carefully taught to hate by right-wing media is just a bonus.
A generic Democrat ain’t gonna cut it for this crowd. Probably no Democrat of any kind will ever cut it for this crowd, but I don’t see how this hypothetical generic Dem will ever bring out enough notional fence-sitters to swamp the reality-TV fans. A Democrat even older and crankier than Trump seems unlikely to cut it either.
Doesn’t matter right now, though. In the current atmosphere, we won’t even have a real insight into who’s running until a lot closer to primary time, but that person will, at minimum, need to be to be a king-hell orater to cut through the din of the Trumpoid noise machine. You know, kind of like Obama was.
:dubious:
You know, it’s possible for someone to believe both that Clinton was a bad and uninspiring candidate AND that Trump was obviously far worse.
Given Whack-a-Mole’s sig line, I’m guessing he didn’t vote for Trump, as you seem to be assuming he did.
I think this Mark Schmitt essay from 2004, mostly about the Kerry campaign, is even more apropos with respect to Hillary. (No, I didn’t remember it across all these years. I’m not sure I even read it back then. Matt Yglesias mentioned it, and someone I follow retweeted it this morning.)
His thesis: It’s not what you say about the issues, it’s what the issues say about you.
That last sentence was even more true for Hillary than for John Kerry. If there was a story about Hillary Clinton that her campaign was trying to tell, I missed it entirely - and it’s not like I wasn’t paying attention.
And I think that’s why the Comey stuff was able to bring her down at the end. There was no core story about her that voters had bought into that would have enabled them to place a low value on the suddenly renewed onslaught of news about the emails.
Of course it is. No one think Hillary will run again. The whole point of articles like that is to get people stirred up, bring up past bad memories, remember fake news from the kremlin and so forth.
I think the whole point behind the article is to further divide the Democratic party.
There weren’t many candidates the Democrats could have trotted out that would have lost to Trump in 2016. There may have only been one, actually. For Hillary to run again would be a comically egregious blunder.
In 2020, the Democrats don’t need to find the most progressive candidate. In fact, I think an overly progressive candidate will embolden Trump’s supporters and may prove to be too bitter a pill for moderates and “Main Street Republicans” to swallow. I’d love it if 2020 didn’t involve mud slinging in both directions. We know how Trump will operate, but I hope to see a Democratic candidate who can run on their own platform.