Weird thing for you to admit, but you do you.
Obviously, moron. Nobody’s saying otherwise. But:
- Winning the most electoral votes in history (other than Obama) shows that she wasn’t a terrible candidate.
- Not everyone who gets defeated ran a “terrible campaign”.
- You keep overlooking Comey’s last-minute ratfuck.
In conclusion, consider being less of a moron.
So we say she ran a great campaign. How does saying that help us? How do we learn to do better the next time, if we can’t analyze all of the things we may have done wrong? You always say the campaign was bad, and that the next one has to be better. If you don’t analyze your failures, real or imaginary, you never improve.
Sheesh. I don’t get you people.
Hillary lacked the charisma and general appeal that would tip some of the low-info and disengaged voters to her side. That’s the same problem that Gore, Carter, and Dukakis had. Unfortunately, I feel that Biden is also in that same situation this election. No matter how qualified a candidate is on paper, if the candidate does not have wide appeal for likeability, they will lose out on some percentage of votes. Sometimes that’s enough of a deficit to lose the election. That’s the reality of the world we live in. Complaining about that is like complaining that a TV station showing Korean operas should have higher ratings than a channel showing “Real Catfights of the Jersey Shore”. The winner of the election is the person who can appeal to enough voters to win the election, not the person who is the most able to do the job.
- It shows nothing of the sort.
- IMO, she did. My opinion isn’t out of left field here. You have your opinion, and that’s fine. I was part of a half-dozen post-mortems after this disaster in 2016 and 2017, and some degree of “terrible campaign” was the overarching theme from people willing to take an honest look at what we did, and not just cry about things being unfair.
- I’ve done no such thing.
Go take a walk, friend. Take a deep breath. I’ve done nothing to provoke this level of vitriol from you.
Ok, this thread was asking me if I would stay home if Hillary ran against Trump again. I wouldn’t. I would crawl over glass to voter for her. I’ve answered the OP. People are getting really upset over a hypothetical that will never, ever, ever, ever happen. My initial off-the-cuff reply to hajario was misinterpreted by many. But I don’t apologize for it. Imo, she was a terrible candidate. I posted that initially7 because I thought people would stay home and hand Trump the victory if she hypothetically somehow became the candidate in 2024. You all can disagree, but I’m done with this 2016 crap. I lived it once, and I’m not going to go there again. Y’all suckered me in for a minute. I’m not going to get so worked up over this that I start calling people who hold different opinions than me “fucking morons,” so I’m out. Have a good one!
There’s a not insignificant group of people who are dedicated to the notion that the campaign was historically bad, that she was an unbelievably bad candidate, that there were major, foreseeable strategic and tactical errors, etc.
The facts and the numbers don’t really back those up. With the benefit of hindsight, were there things that could have been done better? Absolutely. Could some things been done better at the time? Absolutely.
But there’s not a lot of evidence that this was a uniquely terrible candidate who made major, foreseeable mistakes. And that seems to be the “storyline” that some really want to push.
The campaign was, at a minimum, conducted capably. There are, as always, things that could have been done better, but there’s scant evidence of the total ineptitude that some wish to ascribe.
If the Dems want to do better in the future, it is a bad idea for those folks to cling so tightly to such facile, anti-factual explanations.
Sometimes capable (if admittedly unexciting) candidates lose. It happens. Sometimes it’s helped along by shenanigans along the way. It happens. Denying either of those made/makes a difference is not a great idea.
There are plenty of things to criticize the Clinton campaign for. There’s just no need to make shit up. She didn’t run a terrible campaign and she put proportionally the same effort into various swing states as the Trump campaign.
She ran a good enough campaign to win and we wouldn’t be discussing (and making shit up about) how bad it was if not for the many, many crimes that were committed by her opponent and for her opponent’s benefit. We’d be discussing her impeachment for the 138 deaths of American citizens during the pandemic or some other nonsense.
I’m struggling to think of any other competition where someone lost by the narrowest of margins, and we knew for absolute certain that her opponent cheated, where we would be like, “She played a terrible match.”
Politics is more like a reality TV show than a sports competition. Compare it to the first season of “Survivor”. If you remember, there was one person who was trying to win by being the best at survival skills, while another other person was trying to win by forming alliances and backstabbing people when it suited his goals. In the end the backstabber won over the person who was concerned about providing shelter and food for the tribe. I think the D’s tend to elect candidates who have the capability for the position, but not necessarily the capability to actually win the competition that allows them to get into that position.
What, she didn’t know they would cheat?
Anyone else getting a heavy “Blame the female victim” vibe here?
Yes… “victim”, that’s what she is…
ETA: What I’m getting is the Elon Musk “Apu takes a bullet” meme, with HRC in the place of Elmo.
Do you?
There’s a world of difference between describing every effort that fails as a “bad effort” and identifying places to improve for next time. The latter does not depend on the former. Nor is the former guaranteed to get better results the next time around.
Can you explain what difference this would make? Is cheating somehow not cheating when the other side knows about it?
Like if we were playing chess, and in a moment where you were distracted, I swiped your queen off the board, I’m a cheater and my subsequent win is illegitimate, but if before the game I told you, “If you are ever distracted I will take your queen,” and then I do exactly that, well… I guess you played a terrible game.
The things Happy_Lendervedder mentioned sound kind of damning to me and he had direct experience with helping to run the campaign on the ground in one of the swing states in question. I still think her ‘deplorables’ comment was an unforced error that may not have alienated any voters inclined to her, but may very well have motivated the anti-Hillary-but-lazily-disengaged voters to actually get off their asses and vote out of spite (I haven’t dug into post-mortems on this, just gut sense). She certainly didn’t seem to cover herself with campaigning glory trying to run as the presumed front-runner against Obama in 2008.
I dunno man, if you hate the word terrible maybe some other adjective or phrase with less sting will do. Poorly thought out? Weakly strategized? Sub-optimal?
What I can’t seem to do is categorize her campaigning as brilliant, clever, good or even pretty decent. Comey ratfucked her for sure - I’m convinced she may well have won anyway without that. But I don’t think she covered herself with glory either.
Except Joe does have likeability. That’s not the same as charisma, but it’s still a good thing for a politician. Joe comes off believably folksy and approachable. He has a “good ol’ Joe” persona that works well with voters and also helped him reach bipartisan deals in his Senate days.
What he doesn’t have is the powerful charisma of someone like a Bill Clinton, Barrack Obama, or (
) Donald Trump. (No, I don’t understand the last one either but to a certain class of people it’s enough to literally form a cult around.)
100% agree.
Yes! “Uncle Joe” was an affectionate nickname hung on him years ago. He likes people and people like him (well, sane people). You can especially see it when he glad-hands at rallies and campaigning. The twinkle in his eye, the smile, the talent he has for making people feel comfortable and listened to.
They used to talk about how a huge asset for a candidate was you’d enjoy having a beer with him at a barbecue. That’s Joe, an obviously decent, likable fellow. Just ask Lindsey Graham.
The problem I (and several people I know) had with the email server was less that it existed and more her response to any questioning or criticism. A work email is for work and a personal email is for personal and the two should rarely ever mix. Now, I get that the government was massively behind in IT in 2009 and that the server was a solution to an actual problem. But her “What, like with a cloth?” response to being asked about it being wiped is one of those terrible and clunky responses she always seems to have on camera or in a larger audience.
There have always been plenty of reasons that people don’t like her. She doesn’t connect well. Her time in the Senate was in New York, a state that nobody ever connects her with for any personal reason and so it was easy to blast her for carpetbagging. There were bridges burned back in 2008 with her campaign’s “Obama Boys” attack which was repeated in 2016 with “Bernie Bros”. Frankly, she’s bad at the job interview of being a politician. All the negative feelings parts of the public might not be fair or reasonable, but just like in the private sector, a candidate isn’t going to be hired no matter their qualifications if the people involved in the process don’t want that person as a coworker.
Oh man her disingenuous informational tour when she was “trying to decide” whether or not to run for the NY Senate seat was just embarrassing. “I’ve always been a Yankees fan”, come on. Asking people what they think the biggest issues are and then furiously taking notes when the answer was “crime”. That turned a lot of people off.