I completely disagree with all this. Clinton had a lot of baggage, but her campaign was well run.
It’s unfair to just look at the results. Clinton ran the standard campaign that any professional political expert would have advised her to run. Huge fundraising advantage, emphasis on GOTV, play it safe on outrageous statements etc. There are always going to be decisions that you can quibble with, but no one felt she was completely going about it backwards. That was Trump, who violated every bit of conventional wisdom and who every expert (plus a lot of non-experts, like me) felt was sabotaging his own campaign. You can’t fault someone for running a campaign that every expert would think was the way to go about it, just because an unprecedented event took place.
yes it is a valid observation, but it highlights the reality that a machinery in the modern politics can not overcome the lack of the public charisma, that the Person of the candidate does matter actually.
I don’t think it was lack of charisma that killed Hillary – it was the scandals (whether valid or not) and associated baggage. Too many people just absolutely hated her, whether for good reasons or for bad ones, and we (and she) didn’t/couldn’t see it.
But who the hell knows for sure. Turnout was high, I’m pretty sure, all around – even for blacks and Hispanics. But lower income white turnout swamped them, and lower income whites voted (in an unprecedented fashion) like minorities – utterly overwhelmingly for Trump. Maybe they would have done so even against Bernie or Biden. Maybe Trump had the magic touch with them that no one else could have had. Or maybe it was just a shitty candidate.
In the end, I think it always comes down to charisma. It’s different in multi-party systems, but in the typical American two horse head-to-head race, the most charismatic candidate always wins. Policy doesn’t matter. History doesn’t matter. Accomplishments don’t matter. It’s all about charisma. And when I say it’s all about charisma, I really do mean that charisma is quite literally the only thing which really counts. Since the advent of televised debates in the 1960 election, I can’t think of a single instance in which the less charismatic Presidential candidate has emerged victorious. Can you?
Hillary had the money, the backing, the experience, the history, the knowledge, the passion, the connections, and the means to bring about real change for the very people who ended up voting Republican…but on the stump, she had about as much charisma as an Excel spreadsheet. Trump was nothing more than a blustering, clown-shoes clusterfuck who embarrassed himself on a daily basis…but, although he’s hardly charismatic himself, he’s like Tony Robbins compared to Hillary, so he carried the day.
Because I agree with you - her campaign was well run. That’s what is so unsettling about all this - she should have won.
Maybe it is unfair. Heck, not even “maybe” - it is unfair to just look at the results. But the results are that we have Donald Fucking Trump as President.
Most of us have had the experience of being on a major project that goes down in flames, and then there is a post-mortem to figure it out. A good project manager tries to find out what happened and fix it. A bad one just wants to assign blame.
I’m a bad manager. Because I don’t have a fricking clue what went wrong. So all I can do is point fingers and blow off steam.
Off the top of my head, IMHO candidates the DNC could have run vs Trump and won: [ul]
[li]Mark Warner;[/li][li]Jim Webb; [/li][li]Martin O’Malley…[/ul][/li]Definite Maybes:
[ul]
[li]Elizabeth Warren—though that one could have gotten a little bumpy;[/li][li]Bernie Sanders —Bernie voters could, and I think we’ll see they did, get pissed at how he got screwed by the DNC, and go vote for someone like Stein, Johnson, or just not even show up. I don’t think Hillary voters would’ve been as likely to defect as Bernie’s people turned out to have done;[/li][li]Cory Booker;[/li][li]Julian Castro;[/li][/ul]
Get off the ledge people: your candidate lost because three Rust Belt states (PA, WI & MI) decided to go for Trump by a combined total of currently about 110,000 votes out of around 13 million. Hell, a recount may shrink even that. Plus Florida being lost by 130k or so out of 9 million plus votes cast. Do you have any idea how incredibly thin that margin is? And that it took one of the most unlikeable candidates in US political history, the most corrupt candidate since LBJ, plus the perceived jettisoning by the Dems of one of their signature constituencies—white union tradespeople—to lose by that razor thin margin? I don’t think people were voting so much For Trump, as they were voting Against Hillary.
Chill out. This isn’t a 'Reagan in ‘84’ repudiation of everything you stand for; it’s a black swan culmination of several factors that probably won’t happen again. I also don’t think that the Rust Belt workers that Trump has now are going to stay with him very long when he’s not able to bring those factories and jobs back to the US. The odds are very good that the comps for Trump’s Administration won’t something like Huey Long writ large, but rather those of two other outsiders storming into executive positions: Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think that, like those two guys, Trump’s going to enter with big plans, butt heads with the bureaucracy and end up not getting a lot done. He’s never had to really work with the Feds before, and the Federal empire is a whole lot bigger than, say, when Reagan canned the ATC workers that went on strike. If Trump does manage to drastically cut federal regulations, as promised, this might change, but I don’t think he’ll be able to. He’s also going to have to deal with the long-promised, and I think finally-delivered after the 1st of the year, Fed Reserve rate hike.
Remember, the Democrats hate Trump, and the mainstream GOP doesn’t like him all that much either. This doesn’t look to me like a united GOP like the Contract with America Congress. Does “NeverTrump” or the threatened revolt at the GOP Convention ring any bells? I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how little Trump is able to get done. Merrick Garland’s probably off the table for the time being, though.
How is unfair? You don’t get to declare a moral victory when you are upset by a massive underdog just because you did your best. Clinton failed.
Now, somewhat ironically, I am suddenly somewhat hopeful about the future. Shodan is rightly terrified about what four years of President Trump and control of both houses (and likely SCOTUS) means for the future of the country, because it virtually guarantees a Democratic blowout in 2020.
But Shodan and I agree - perhaps shockingly - that Clinton failed both of us. She failed him by not being the least worst option to the electorate, and she failed me for much the same reason. Yes, the GOP has spent 30 years throwing mud at her in preparation for this moment, but they also undid all the damage by giving her the most ridiculous opponent in history.
They likely won’t have to. Trump doesn’t seem like a man to let go of a grudge, and he and Ryan have been at loggerheads as much as he and Clinton. I think it will be more a case of Ryan deciding whether to oppose Trump’s agenda.
For all his rhetoric, I see Trump as primarily focused on business-related issues once in power so in that regard he and Ryan might get along. Neither seems to give two shits about social issues except when it benefits their election chances.
Trouble is, I think her lack of charisma is one of the main reasons why those scandals stuck to her in the first place. It’s just easier to believe the worst of people who have no charisma. From JFK to Trump, charismatic candidates have always been referred to as ‘teflon’, because the scandals just slide off them. Their charisma makes people want to disbelieve the allegations. Sadly, this is something that could never be said about Hillary Clinton.
So, John McCain got 59,948,323 votes. Mitt Romney got 60,933,504 votes. Fucking John Kerry got 59,028,444 votes. And, as of this moment–I guess there are still a handful of votes remaining to be counted–Donald Trump got 59,131,310 votes–fewer votes than McCain, fewer than Mitt Romney, and barely more than John Kerry. And, it appears Clinton will wind up with more votes than him. So, how the fuck did Trump win? Well, Barack Obama got 69,498,516 votes in 2008, and he still got 65,915,795 votes in 2012. As of right now, Hillary Clinton has 59,293,071 votes.
I’m sure she would have made a perfectly serviceable President, but she was a lousy candidate. She got beat by someone who was also a lousy candidate, because in the face of an absolute disaster of an opponent, she couldn’t generate enough enthusiasm to get within 6 million votes of Obama’s totals in 2012–when the new had worn off and we weren’t electing America’s First Black President in a Historic First and there was plenty of time for disappointment and frustration to set in. I certainly blame the idiots who voted for Trump, and the idiots who voted for Obama but couldn’t be bothered to turn up and vote for Clinton (or even just vote against Trump).
But she was a lousy fucking candidate. And she got the nomination in no small part because she was supposedly “electable”.
Democratic politicians and voters didn’t just go out and pick someone with the most baggage possible and make her their candidate. Clinton had a lot of baggage but also had a lot going for her. First female nominee, association with the popular Bill Clinton presidency, resume as a successful and competent Senator and SoS. Another candidate with less baggage might have not had her positive qualities, and it’s hard to say what would have happened with another candidate.
Especially when you consider how much baggage Trump himself carries, which far far exceeds Clinton’s, it’s hard to see Clinton as a flawed candidate based on that alone.
How could I have forgotten Biden on my list above?
Try this thought experiment. Swap out Clinton for Biden. Is there any doubt that he’d have won with vote totals similar to the ones MEBuckner cited above?
indeed how can some one think that the “baggage” was the problem when it is clear the opponent had very much baggage even sometimes worse.
but he clearly has the media charisma that Mrs Clinton never had and the idea that having the mechanical campaign as like doing some of the excel sheet planning overcomes the personal flaw of no real public charisma… it is extraordinary in the face of the comparison.
Ryan is toast. He’ll be gone as Speaker within 24 hours of the new Congress getting sworn in, if not sooner. There are too many Republicans with too many agendas for them to deadlock with Trump on anything. He’ll give them support for anything they want passed, and they’ll roll over and play dead for him.
it is clear he has a certain mediatic charisma that has a real appeal or at least in comparison to Mrs Clinton who I think all agree has no real media charisma.
