What “personal guilt”? I showed up 15 minutes before the polls opened to vote for Clinton even though I had to hold my nose to do so, and I fully blame her for running an entitled, self-serving, obtuse campaign that not only ignored the concerns of people in economically disadvantaged areas but often actually inflated their concerns, allowing Trump to feed upon their fears.
It may be true tha the playing field was unlevel and that she has been the target of unjustified attacks by the neoconservative far right for decades, but she was aware of that going in and instead of assuaging the concerns about her actions she actively fed the fire by delaying deliverying e-mails from her server and speaking dismissively about real concerns about the transparency of her communications in an official capacity in addition to ethically dubious relationship with investment banking interests. Comey’s public reveal of reopening the investigation (which I believe was more about covering his own ass and the reputation of the FBI than a deliberate attack on Clinton) may have slightly hurt the public perception of Clinton, but only because that perception was already shaky to begin with.
Clinton was a flawed candidate to start with, promoted by the DNC because of party loyalty over good judgment, and she lost to the worst Republican contender since Alf Landon. A better politician would accept the errors as their own and provide a better model to others, but Clinton is too absorbed in her belief that she is entitled to the presidency to make an unqualified admission of fault. This doesn’t reflect well on her or on the Democratic party which needs to move on from “What if…?” to “What next?”
Absolutely. I’m not absolving Hillary of any fault. I’m pointing out that many people are blaming her in order to deflect fault from themselves. It doesn’t matter how lousy her campaign might’ve been or what her personal failures might be, each person who did not vote for Hillary when they had the opportunity must bear responsibility for Trump’s election. And many people are trying to deflect that fault in their own actions.
When you include left leaning independents and right leaning independents, you end up with a slight Republican leaning majority.
Anything divided by zero is infinity.
She had infinity times more experience than Trump.
Not if you grade it on a curve. The expectations for Trump were exceedingly low.
The thing is, she’s not Tiger Woods. She’s Tiger’s Wood’s wife who happens to know a shitload about the history and physics of golf but has never actually won a competitive golf game in her life.
So a qualified and experienced candidate should have recused herself from the race purely because her husband had previously been president, even though her political experience had begun long before he even became governor? How does saying she shouldn’t run purely because she’s a Clinton make any more sense than say she should run purely because she’s a Clinton? How is the fact that two Bushes had previously been president her fault? It sounds like the tags on that baggage have your name on them, not hers.
Uh-huh. And if she’d divorced him she’d have been accused by Republicans of failing to try to make the marriage work and hating family values. Hell, she got criticized for daring to suggest she didn’t stay home and bake cookies all the time. Bill certainly deserves scorn for his philandering but blasting her for “tolerating” his behaviour (bearing in mind we have no idea what was said behind closed doors) is ludicrous.
I am aware of the accusations that she “tried to destroy the credibility” of Bill’s accusers. I’m also aware that many of them were brought forward to destroy the credibility of Bill with the help of a lot of GOP money behind them. Were some of them genuine? Quite possibly but who knows? And we can’t know, not because Hillary destroyed their credibility but because the Republicans did.
Meanwhile we’ve ended up with a president - not a spouse but the actual president - who spent a great deal of effort to discredit a number of sexual assault accusers that puts Bill’s list to shame. So, y’know, good going there.
On that point it isn’t as if you had a choice in this election.
On the topic of Hillary being held accountable for Bill Clinton’s bad actions and history as president, it is certainly unfair in the sense that Hillary is her own person who would run her administration (and I have to believe she’d be giving Bill the “Shshh! You had your shot!” every time he offered unsolicitied advice), but the political reality is that reputation and perception weigh as heavily in public opinion as objective merit, and Hillary knowingly came into the race carrying that baggage. That she had a substantial history of being a credible if not outstanding career as a US senator and a somewhat checkered tenure as the Secretary of State does not offset the fact that she acted as an apologist (and perhaps even facilitator) of Bill Clinton’s infidelities, and frankly if a male candidate had done the same for his wife he’d be viewed as weak, likely even moreso than a female candidate. She made the political decision at the time to publically stand by Bill, which was a sound decision as a kingmaker but she had to know that would come out against her in her own candiditorial efforts, and she did little enough to assuage public concern that the Clinton’s were not some kind of cut-rate, inept versions of House of Cards’ Frank and Claire Underwood.
That Donald Trump can get away with all of this and worse and remain essentially untarnished to his bevy of supporters speaks to his crass appeal and political acumen of his handlers (who have had their own challenges in protecting the public image of Trump) but to give the devil his due, he knew who he needed to pander to and how to do it, which makes him a better politician than Hillary Clinton, even if he is an objectively terrible President in every essential way including the most superficial capacities of being graceful and well-spoken. The lesson to be learned here is that you should run the candidate who has good appeal and understands the voting public rather than the micromanaging policy wonk who gives the appearance of disdaining the electorate. The lesson of Trump, on the other hand, is when you win the election with a vacuous figurehead you need to make sure he understands that he needs to populate his advisors with smart and experienced people and listen to their counsel. Oh, and hire someone other than the world’s angriest Toastmasters washout to be the press secretary for your administration.
I still don’t understand how you can console yourself with a 3 million popular vote advantage when 110 million eligible voters didn’t bother voting at all and her entire popular vote advantage can be accounted for in California where she won by a larger margin than any other candidate in history.
If she hadn’t married bill, I suspect she would have eventually become a well respected partner at a law firm pulling in millions of dollars a year to help corporations do what corporations do. Bill was lucky to have her and she was lucky to have Bill. but between the two, Bill was the one with political talent.
People wouldn’t have cared any more than they cared about Trump’s foibles. I know a lot of Trump voters who would have picked Bernie over Trump. I know zero Hillary voters that would have switched to Trump if Bernie was the candidate.
I like Uncle Joe but he wasn’t a strong campaigner in 2008 and had a mild case of foot-in-mouth disease. He was certainly personally more likable than Clinton but I’m not convinced he would have won either.
I wouldn’t have voted for either Trump or Sanders, who in my opinion are equally unqualified. (Clinton, for all her foibles, at least has some credibility and experience, and wasn’t campaigning to just burn everything down for the sake of doing “something”.)
If it had been the choice between those two, I would have voted for Joe Exotic; even if he is “broke as shit” and won’t cut his hair, he still presents a better image than the two of those Batman villains combined.
Yup. Guy who was AG at 30, Governor at 32 and President at 46 would have gone far regardless who he married.
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
On the topic of Hillary being held accountable for Bill Clinton’s bad actions and history as president, it is certainly unfair in the sense that Hillary is her own person who would run her administration (and I have to believe she’d be giving Bill the “Shshh! You had your shot!” every time he offered unsolicitied advice), but the political reality is that reputation and perception weigh as heavily in public opinion as objective merit, and Hillary knowingly came into the race carrying that baggage
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:dubious:
Is it also unfair that she was married to one of the greatest politicians of all time, whose influence gifted her a Senate seat and jumped her up the line of Presidential hopefuls?
And she would be very stupid not to listen to the advice of Bill Clinton, hell she wrote in her first memoirs, that Bill valued the advice of former Presidents when he was in office, Nixon gave him a lot of information on Russia before he died, which Clinton found to be first rate.
As it is, you are right, she did shshh Bill, his advice to concentrate on working class voters was brushed aside.
Like I keep pointing out in these threads, if you’re going to talk about her ‘qualifications’ and ‘experience’, you inevitably bring up the fact that she strongly supported a lot of things she opposes now, like the Iraq War and the SuperPredators crime bill. And she was openly opposed to gay marriage until the courts decided the issue, another big flip-flop. She was in favor of the TPP, then opposed it for the election, but her supporters assure me that she would have favored it after being elects. A lot of her campaign promises seem to be “I’ll oppose the stuff that I supported, and support the stuff I opposed” when you start looking at her record. That’s a lot of bad stuff to dredge up, especially in an election where discontent with party insiders was such a strong force.
And what’s all that impressive about her experience? She won a senate election when the prime candidate for the spot had to drop out of the race for unrelated reasons, and didn’t do all that much as a senator. She made some blatantly false claims about her experience, like the claim that most of the bills she introduced had a Republican co-sponsor, which further detracts from it’s value. Other than that, she was Bill Clinton’s wife during his presidency, and then got appointed to some positions for being a party insider, and did nothing especially interesting with them.
I really don’t see how harping on her ‘qualifications’ and ‘experience’ was supposed to help her election chances, and I see a lot of ways that it hurt. She just didn’t have a good record to fall back on, ‘competent insider’ is the best read from her history (there’s not even ‘competent campaigner’ in there). Sure she was better than Trump, but you’re not going to win an election by pointing out that the sky is blue.
I don’t remember people on this board thinking Comey was all hat bad a few months earlier when he said that no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges against Hillary.
Is it possible that Comey, a bureaucrat with about the highest reputations for integrity in Washington DC, was doing his job the way he was supposed to do his job?