As a policy wonk and intellectual she is streets ahead of most. As a poltician, she is… bad.
Lost to a minority half term Senator in '08
Struggled to beat a near octogenarian former Commie
Lost to Donald Trump. Donald fucking Trump.
Is her political career basically the result of the political neutron star that is Bill Clinton? He was able to get her parachuted into NY Senate seat and Presidential contention but she could not get across the line.
Frank Reynolds, of IASIP, said it best (about 10 years ago too).
There is a tide in the times of men…
It would have been irrational not to work to the data. But it turns out the data were wrong.
It’s not that she’s a bad politician, it’s that she lacks charisma. Bill Clinton and Obama have it. Al Gore, John Kerry, and Mike Dukakis didn’t.
It’s that simple. It’s why the Democrats should put effort into fielding one or two truly charismatic candidates in 2020.
This presidential election reminds me most of the 2008 special election to fill the Senate seat of Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy. In that election the republicans ran a little-known guy by the name of Scott Brown and the democrats ran the Mass. attorney general Martha Coakley. Someone whose biggest flaw was a complete inability to appeal to the emotions of the voters. She was all qualifications and no charisma.
In a stunning and devastating upset, Brown won, depriving the democrats their 60 seat supermajority in the senate and sowing the seeds of the Obamacare story for the next 8 years. Without a supermajority, the democrats couldn’t fix the obvious flaws in the bill and passed it in lame-duck hoping to fix it later. We know how that turned out.
Enough background.
To answer the OP, the democrats picked a candidate who is a bad politician. To be a good politician one has to have a thorough grasp of the real issues, an ability to make the right decisions, AND the ability to appeal to the casual voter. Of these three traits, the last is by far the most important. Both the democrats and the republicans have demonstrated over and over the ability to appeal to the casual voter is the deciding factor. Hillary failed that test in spades.
BTW, a casual voter is not an ignorant person, nor an uninvolved one. He/she is one who makes a decision based on a few factors, not a long list. In the extreme-a single issue voter.
Don’t forget that the best that could be said about Clinton’s political experience was strictly small town unelected shit. Then she was handed the Senatorship of New York without having to work her way up (mayor, state assembly, US House, etc.) then given Sec’y of State.
So before 2016, when has she ever had to campaign for anything?
She got as far as she did on Bill’s political coattails.
She did her best, but that wasn’t enough. CNN’s early analysis suggests she didn’t do as well as Obama among women, Latinos or the young, and this at a time when the economy was generally improving and there was a popular President of her own party in the White House and her opponent was you-know-who.
Ugh ugh ugh.
Yup Hillary had exactly the same problems. I don’t know how many times Democrats used the “most qualified candidate” for Hillary as if running for President was filling the right checkboxes on a job application. A successful Presidential campaign especially for the first term has a to build a story and a message that voters can relate to on an emotional level. Obama did it. Bill did it. Reagan did. Even Trump in his own fashion did it.
There was never ever any reason to believe that Hillary would be able to do it and the Democrats were stuck with talking about her “qualifications” and attacking Trump, and the latter incompetently because they never zeroed in on what white working class voters found appealing about him.
The fault really lies with the Democratic establishment which very early on decided on Hillary despite her limitations being abundantly clear.
She got elected to the Senate, maybe she’ll have another go at that. Or Speaker/Minority Leader of the House.
It seems to me that an effective presidential candidate needs some combination of charisma, ideology, and accomplishments. HRC had consistent difficulty articulating the first two, and her accomplishments came across more as personal rather than policy achievements.
Trump, by contrast, had charisma, and his burn-it-down message effectively played the role of an ideology. Certainly, I don’t think he won on the basis of accomplishments.
She is uniquely bad because they’ve had a uniquely long time to throw shit at her. That she isn’t particularly good at deflecting the shit, and has a tendency to sometime smear some of it on herself for no apparent reason doesn’t help.
I think basically she would ne nothing if not for her husband. Everything seems to have been given to her, and her Senate run and everything were just stepping stones to what she ultimately wanted, the presidency. She felt she was owed the presidency, I wonder if Biden had run if the results would have been different, part of me thinks even if you had a better candidate the results would have been the same. Trump had charisma and electrified the voters on his side, I think the Democrats just thought they had it in the bag, but a lot of voters just didn’t get out there and vote. Maybe only Bernie had enough charisma to equal Trump’s during this campaign but I’m not sure if he would have had a broad enough appeal across the board to more moderate Democrats.
That’s still volumes more than Trump, and she was re-elected to her Senate seat in 2006.
My guess is she lacks *enough * charisma to overcome the sexist barriers in her path. The pearl-clutching reflex many felt at her keeping her maiden name back in the late seventies is still around, and reinforced by decades of determined smears.
I’m starting to think that had she stayed in Washington (and retaken and passed its bar exam) instead of heading to Arkansas with Bill, he likely would never have been president but she might have by now.
What makes you think that? Bill is smart, but also has charisma, and seems genuine when he says he cares about people, his “I feel your pain” moments, but Hillary would still not have any charisma if she wasn’t with Bill, maybe even less, during the debates, she seemed to mimic a lot of Bill’s behaviors from his debate appearances, walking up close to the people asking questions, saying their names, looking directly at them, I think Bill taught her everything he knows, but she just doesn’t have that innate charisma of Bill or Donald and people see through her futile efforts to manufacture it.
It’s an amusing fantasy I have where smart people prevail. It’s been dealt quite a blow in recent hours, I admit.
The impression I have, and I’ll cheerfully admit by own biases, is that while Bill is indeed very smart and very charming, I’m not sure he’d have gotten beyond Arkansas without Hillary. Possibly if he’d had a more demure wife (i.e. one who was in utter denial about his affairs instead of forgiving him for them - oddly, many people seem to think it was unforgivable for Hillary to forgive Bill), he could have served more terms as governor.
Utter speculation, I cheerfully admit. I just think Hillary has talents that for some reason Americans don’t appreciate, or not as much as their current craving for hucksterism.
I think Fiveyearlurker nailed it to an extent that can’t be appreciated unless you have some inkling of the conservative media, especially as it existed pre-Fox News.
I used to be a Republican. GWB cured me. I used to subscribe to a magazine called The American Spectator. I listened to Rush Limbaugh. During the Clinton administration, those who chose to have the Spectator and Limbaugh (and worse) be their sole source of political “information” were fed endless fantasies as facts regarding the Clintons. They murdered Vince Foster and others. They ran drugs through an airport in Arkansas. They somehow got rich via the Whitehouse travel office. They got rich from the Whitewater development deal.
This deluge of bullshit never ended or even waned. Fox News has distributed it even further. A major portion of our populace has been fed a 30 year diet of Clinton = EVIL. Every accusation or innuendo about her is received by these folks as fact.
[QUOTE=pool]
I think basically she would ne nothing if not for her husband. Everything seems to have been given to her, and her Senate run and everything were just stepping stones to what she ultimately wanted, the presidency. She felt she was owed the presidency, I wonder if Biden had run if the results would have been different, part of me thinks even if you had a better candidate the results would have been the same. Trump had charisma and electrified the voters on his side, I think the Democrats just thought they had it in the bag, but a lot of voters just didn’t get out there and vote. Maybe only Bernie had enough charisma to equal Trump’s during this campaign but I’m not sure if he would have had a broad enough appeal across the board to more moderate Democrats.
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I agree that the political career she has had would have been impossible if she had not been married to Bill Clinton. But, lots of politicians have gotten their start based on their family name.
She is undoubtedly very capable. Her sidelining as SecState (as Vali Nasr recalls) is perhaps understandable, she was not trusted by the Obama inner circle, who saw her as a defeated opponent, and Joe Biden’s experience overshadowed her, but her work as Senator seems to have been limited; only guess is that she decided to keep her powder dry for her run and avlided making waves.
[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
The impression I have, and I’ll cheerfully admit by own biases, is that while Bill is indeed very smart and very charming, I’m not sure he’d have gotten beyond Arkansas without Hillary. Possibly if he’d had a more demure wife (i.e. one who was in utter denial about his affairs instead of forgiving him for them - oddly, many people seem to think it was unforgivable for Hillary to forgive Bill), he could have served more terms as governor.
Utter speculation, I cheerfully admit. I just think Hillary has talents that for some reason Americans don’t appreciate, or not as much as their current craving for hucksterism.
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Guy who was State AG at 28, Governor at 30, President at 46, that Bill Clinton? If anything, having her as his wife hurt him in Arkansas. He would have been President whomever he married. She herself stated that one of the reasons she turned him down initially was her worry at the path he had taken in life.
She cannot relate to people. She tries to manipulate people simply with words but there’s no feeling behind it. She can’t admit she’s wrong or ever apologize, even in the weasel-y way of politicians. She can’t tell which way the wind blows. She’s too self-centered, not exactly narcissistic as we expect in other politicians although she has plenty of that, but she cares more about her principle of the day than what the people believe in.
She is an awful politician in public. She skillfully manipulated the Democrat Party to become their candidate and then clumsily sent it all down the drain. She is lucky that she had such a clumsy opponent and managed not to get beaten in a landslide.