I’ll say it.
Nobody.
If anybody other than Clinton had been nominated, we might be looking at a Trump presidency.
Clinton’s a survivor. She was able to get through this wave of shit and succeed. Pretty much anyone else would have collapsed by this point.
And anybody who thinks a different nominee like Sanders or Biden or O’Malley wouldn’t have faced the same wave of shit is being naive. Any of them would have been buried under a bigger mountain of shit than Clinton was.
I completely disagree. Obama’s biggest failure as President is that he tried too hard to be a good bipartisan negotiator. He kept trying to negotiate with the Republicans long after they established they had zero interest in negotiating with him.
Maybe. But he hadnt been heavily examined or vetted. You really think after the Rove hate machine and the wikileaks hit he’d come out unscathed?
In fact, actually Hillary is & was the best candidate just for that reason. The Karl Rove hate and lie machine, a GOP Congress and wikileaks have been hammering at her for decades and they have found little to hang their hats on. Ok, the emails, sure.
No doubt Bernie is pretty damn honest- but he never fully released his tax returns iirc.
Do you really think O’Malley or Sanders would have come out of those three shitstorms clean? It’s a miracle that Clinton came out as clean as she did.
And this will be the pattern folks. The GOP will hold hearings, hack into emails, and use Roves tactics to smear and lie about* any* Dem candidate.
Exactly.
and the voting. Hillary got a LOT more popular votes than the “Man of the People” Sanders.
Joe Biden?
That would be the guy who dropped out of the 1988 race before a vote was even cast, because he had plagiarised speeches on the stump and an article in law school?
The Joe Biden who dropped out of the 2008 campaign after polling less than 1% in Iowa?
That Joe Biden?
If he can’t even get the nomination for himself, why would he have long coat tails?
Yeah, the OP seems to be based on a fallacy that it would ever have been possible to flip the House. My understanding is that the districts are so gerrymandered that you need a D+10 sort of election before that happens. And the country is so polarized that around 40% is about as low as even The Donald can fall. Note, though, that nobody is really polling House elections, so who knows what’s going to happen on Nov. 8.
It’s also the case that while voters unanimously hate Congress, they all mostly approve of their own particular Congresscritter.
Also, according to Cake,you only need a long jacket with a short skirt, and Hillary wears pantsuits.
Name recognition, and a reputation as a gregarious guy you’d like to have a beer with?
I dunno. As has been pointed out elsewhere, Hillary has already been under the microscope for over twenty years, and has withstood it all. That’s a point in her favor (if not in the favor of any coattails we might prefer). But the corollary is that all of the opposition research on her has been done, relieving the Trump team of any onus to break new ground. They just google up “Hillary” + “bad” + “things”, then they collect their paycheck for the day and go home.
What’s the likelihood that Donald would pay to have any new oppo research done on O’Malley or Biden? Or pay a team that would take the initiative to do it without being instructed to?
After the 1988 election, Congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado), who represented me when I lived in Denver, commented:
Bush not only had no coattails, he was wearing a bikini.
But the corollary to the corollary is that it’s all old news. Real mudslinging requires fresh mud and the conservatives told all the good lies about Clinton twenty years ago.
I disagree. I think attacking his opponents is the one part of the political process Trump is enthusiastic about.
Just want to point out that it isn’t all gerrymandering that gives the R’s an advantage. The Democratic voters tend to be very concentrated in cities. Apparently, if you draw reasonably compact districts (like everyone claims to be in favor of having a computer do), the R’s still tend to end up with more seats than the would under strict proportionality. Not as bad as the advantage from partisan drawn districts, but still there.
Wish I could find the article again that put those ideas in my head.
And I completely disagree back at you. Obama’s idea of negotiation is to lecture everyone on why he is right and then sit back and wait for them to come around. Effective presidents spend time with the other side, invite them over for golf or something, get to know them as people and let them get to know him. He hasn’t been interested in doing that, and I think that is a failing.
Yes, he had a lot of built-in opposition, but the way to overcome that is not to lecture those standing against you on how wrong they are. That plays to the public, but it doesn’t actually get anything done.
Obama is graceful, charming, educated, charismatic, a hard worker and a good speaker. He also appears to be of high character and a wonderful family man. We need more people like that in public life. We also need politicians who will persist in working closely with the other side, even when the other side is often hateful.
So if he just took the right tact, “our main goal is to make sure Obama is a one term president” would’ve played ball? “He’s a Kenyan communist Muslim that has come to destroy everything you love!!!” would’ve been put aside if he played a few golf games with them? Come on. He invited them to change Obamacare to their liking, they added something like 120 amendments, and then all voted against it in unison anyway.
Nope. Castro would have encouraged Hispanics to get out and vote Democratic – but Trump has already done that better than any Democrat.
Tim Kaine was chosen to appeal to the group of voters that Hillary needs most – white males.
Or look at the Merrick Garland nomination. Obama nominated the judge that Orrin Hatch asked him to nominate. And then Hatch and the other Republicans still refused to vote on Garland.
Obama has gone far beyond golf invitations in his efforts to work with Republicans. It’s the Republicans who are refusing to negotiate. Hell, the Republicans are refusing to even accept Obama’s surrender.
The polls show that Clinton had a very low favorability rating generally. Of the people who have an opinion 38% are favorable, 52% are unfavorable and 10% have no opinion. This is an improvement over where she was after the DNC convention where it was revealed that the DNC was biased towards Hillary.
In the latest Democratic polls (which are from back in May), only 66% of Democrats had a favorable view of Clinton. 66%!!! Sure its a majority of Democrats but it is an astoundingly low percentage of Democrats that had a favorable view of their presumptive nominee.
Neither of them had the name recognition or political support of someone like Joe Biden or Michael Bloomberg.
What about through most of the primaries, as well as today? I think you’ll find the numbers are (and were) a lot higher for Democrats.
There are 26 seats that Obama won in 2012 that are held by Republicans.
We need to flip 30 Republican seats to take the house.
We aren’t even going to take those 26. Not even close. And we’re running against Trump.