The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election

Politics & Elections
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…after previously violating standing policy by suggesting that on the basis of the FBI investigation, the AG did not have grounds to charge Clinton with a crime. It was his job to present evidence, not tell prosecutors what to do.

All in all, Comey’s actions during the entire affair might have slightly benefited Clinton, or been a wash. Polling after the late revelation of a reopening of the investigation did not show a substantial shift in Trump’s favor by Election Day.

The overwhelming cause of her losing the election was that she was heavily disliked by a substantial proportion of voters and ran a bad campaign. If Democrats go along with the pretense that she only lost because of Malign Outside Forces, they’re setting themselves up for defeat again in 2020.

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Cite, please? And a definition of what you mean by “substantial” would be helpful as well. Mr. Nate Silver, who does this stuff, says it likely did, but you have excellent reasons to brush that aside. Now might be a good time to share them.

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The reason Hillary lost can be boiled down to one single factor: She was the worst campaigner since…I dunno…Bob Dole? Walter Mondale? Actually I think she’s worse than either of them. They at least seemed to be trying, in their own incompetent way.

Rightly or wrongly, she’d been perceived as a person who’d lie even when the truth would serve her better since at least 2008 (remember her infamous claim that she landed under sniper fire in Bosnia and had to run to her vehicle while under a hail of bullets, only to have video show up of her skipping happily across the tarmac with a little girl who read poems to her and gave her hugs?). That was the sort of thing she should have been on guard about this time round, since it was one of the big nails in the coffin that made her lose to Obama (another is that Obama is likable and perceived to be honest).

Every possible problem this election, Hillary lied which made things worse. If she’d said “Yeah, I had a private e-mail server, and so does person A, B, and C. It’s just the way things are done.” it would have been over or spread thinner as the investigation spread to Republicans she could have mentioned who also had private servers. Instead, first she didn’t have one. Then she might have had one. Then no, she didn’t have one–until it was found. Then she wiped it. Then she claimed that she didn’t know what wiping a server was (“What? Like with Windex?”) etc. She took a story that had a normal lifespan of maybe a week and managed to make it last for like 5 months by constantly lying. Her lies became the story, rather than the initial accusation.

Ditto with her illness. People report that she looks sick/tired/ill and catch her on film staggering, tripping etc. She likes and says she’s fine. Rinse and repeat for weeks. Then she kinda faints on cam and she had…what? a drug reaction? Again, the truth “I have the flu (or whatever), but I’ll be fine and it won’t hold me back” would have done better than the constant string of lies.

There were bunches more micro-scandals that Hillary made worse by lying or being condescending and dismissive about.

The reason that things were tight enough for Comey’s letter to be able to affect anything at all (if it did) was that Hillary was such a terrible candidate that she let things get that bad in the first place. If she’d campaigned as well as Bernie (who’s a solid, middle-of-the-pack campaigner, but nothing special*) she would have been 8-10 points ahead of Trump, easily, by the time Comey’s letter hit.

*Best three campaigners I can think of are Obama, Bill Clinton (who’s the only one who seemed to genuinely enjoy campaigning…the others are merely good at it. Bill loved it) and Reagan.

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If you watch Hillary and Obama on Between Two Ferns, the difference is stark. Obama comes off very likeable and clever, with good timing on his replies and quips that just seem to fly out. He seems to enjoy doing a silly interview even outside of promoting the ACA website. Meanwhile Hillary comes off very stiff and awkward, it seems like she’s gotten handed replies and still can’t deliver the jokes well. She comes off like a dowdy older relative trying to be hip, Obama comes off cool and clever.

Charisma is very important to being elected president, and not only did she lack it, but she tried and failed at faking it so often it’s painful.

I think it also didn’t help that her supporters tried to paint her as honest in spite of the pattern of lying. The ‘Honest Hillary’ idea that was floating around was just unbelievable, and she’s one of the few people with enough ‘talent’ to manage to look dishonest when compared to Donald Trump.

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Come now, let’s not deceive ourselves that adherence to truth was in any way a criteria for voters last year.

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Isn’t that basically the same thing in the end ?

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This clearly is not so.

For instance anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the court.

Segregation was struck down by the court.

Did the courts affect social change? Were those improper over reaches by the court in your view?

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While I agree Clinton had an honesty problem it is interesting that you two blame this for her failure while not mentioning that in comparison to Trump she was a beacon of honesty. Trump’s lies weren’t even half-truths or buried but just bald-faced, outright lies much of the time yet he did fine.

The unrepentant hypocrisy of his supporters never fails to amaze me (I am not saying either of you are Trump supporters).

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Didn’t Silver and 538 predict that she was going to win the election back in November, by more than 42%? 2016 Election Forecast | FiveThirtyEight

Not sure I’d consider his analysis on the topic with much credibility.

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That’s a rather innumerate conclusion, isn’t it? A perfect model predicting a 75% chance of election should be “wrong” once every four times.

Silver did a lot better than almost everyone else. At the time, he was derided for being so bearish on Hillary. If anything, the result should raise your estimation of his modeling skills. YMMV, but I think concluding that he can’t model numbers or that the numbers themselves are meaningless is nihilism not math.

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Since any particular election is a one-off, “predicting” that Clinton has a 75% chance of winning is utterly meaningless. It is unfalsifiable. She wins, you’re right. She loses, you’re right. What exactly is the point of the “prediction”?

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You’re actually asking two questions:

(1) How can you falsify a probabilistic model?

(2) Why should we care about probabilistic modeling before it has operated long enough to be falsified?

Which question did you want answered?

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You could start with “probabilistic”. Is that like launching a bowling ball with a trebuchet and calculating the chances it will land on Donald Trumps fat fucking head?

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I’d argue that you are shifting the goalposts since your statement (“The SCOTUS is not there to override the will of The People,”) did not come with any kind of qualifiers, but it doesn’t really matter because social (and technological) change does and should factor into Supreme Court decisions. In the 1780s, surgical termination of pregnancy (abortion) was not even safely feasible. By the early 1800s it was possible but still unsafe, and socially unacceptable. By the 1900s the practice was so common that alll states had anti-abortion statutes prohibiting abortion often even if it was a medical necessity to save the mother’s life. By the 1930s it was medically possible to perform abortions as a routine practice without undue hazard to the woman, and by the 1950s it was becoming more socially acceptable to do if not to speak of. By the 1960s it was widely performed and debated, with a large public shift toward allowing legal abortion in all cases of medical necessity, and in 1973 the Supreme Court made the judgments in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton that were aligned with changes in public sentiment and good medical practice largely based on an evolution of interpretation of the Due Process clause (14th Amendment). The Supreme Court has frequently changed views and interpretations on a number of subjects such as slavery, equal protections under the law, access to education and voting rights, et cetera that we have come to regard as being more favorable to the basic principles of justice and freedom. The entire function of the Supreme Court is to be above the fray of ordinary politics, and make judgments which represent both the intent of the Constituion and the balance of justice regardless of what the majority of voters or their elected representatives want.

The notion that the federal government of the United States obtains its authority (what you term the “legitimacy to govern”) strictly from the simple majority of voters is so utterly, completely wrong that I’m not sure where to even go from there. It doesn’t matter how many people voted for Trump, or even if every American did; he still doesn’t get to issue executive orders arbitrarily banning a group of people from legal entry into the United States in contravention to due process and previous commitments. And quite frankly, if the Supreme Court had been more “activist” we wouldn’t have a concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay filled with “enemy combatants” we can neither prosecute nor release so for conservatives to piss and moan about “judicial activism” every time the Supreme Court strikes down a law or order they like is just sour grapes. The sum of Supreme Court decisions can only be viewed as “activist” if your idea of justice is a return to the halcyon days of Dred Scott v. Sanford.

In fact, in estimating a 25% chance for Trump to win, FiveThirtyEight was giving very good odds of that occurence. In most presidential elections the vote is so lopsided that even with uncertainty the probabilistic model should skew very heavily toward the eventual winner, and the model that FiveThirtyEight uses has actually been tested with polling data into elections going back to 1980 and accurately indicating the winner in every election except for 2000 (which, for obvious reasons, is an oddball case). It is apparently poorly understood by the general public that probabilistic MCMC methods do not give absolute results; they show the propensity of a system toward a result give a large number of variable parameters. If Silver was showing that Trump had less than a 5% chance leading up to the election then we’d have to consider that there was some serious defect in the model or assumptions (e.g. bad polling data, bias in the decision linkages, et cetera). When it gives a ~25% chance, you’re basically two flips of coin away from that result. That’s a greater chance than playing Russian roulette. That’s a better bet than any hardways roll. The fact that it was showing that high, despite the conceit that Clinton was “due a win”, should have been a wake up call to everyone. It was the reason I got up and stood in line at the polling station fifteen minutes before it open (even though it didn’t make any practical different) and held my nose to vote for a candidate I thought to be one of the worst in decades, because she was still the best of a terrible lot.

Stranger

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I don’t agree at all, and I think the fact that a lot of people don’t is why the Honest Hillary idea failed so badly. While they have different styles of lying, I would say that overall Trump is more likely to do what he says he’ll do than Hillary is. For example, on the TPP both campaigned against it, Trump did quash it, and Hillary supporters insisted she was lying when she campaigned about it. Both of them made promises about cleaning up corruption in Washington, and neither of them were going to actually do it - and no, it doesn’t matter to me that Hillary’s promises were more vague and limited, I still wouldn’t expect her to do anything about ‘the swamp’. Trump did make grandiose promises for things like The Wall, cracking down on immigrants, and Trumpcare, and has attempted to follow through on them - the fact that he had no idea how difficult those things are to do (and so hasn’t been able to do them) doesn’t change that he did try to follow through on his promises. Meanwhile, I am confident that a lot of Hillary’s promises would have been forgotten the minute she was sworn in, like most politicians promises, which I would regard as less honest than being an idiot who thinks the President is a dictator.

So no, Hillary wasn’t a beacon of honesty. She was a standard, establishment, corrupt, lying politician like most of her ilk. The fact that Trump’s style of lying was different and more grandiose doesn’t magically turn her into a beacon of honesty, she still lied routinely on a wide variety of topics and even her supporters don’t actually think she tells the truth.

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In September 2007, Clinton suggested that every newborn baby receive $5,000 upon reaching their 18th birthday. Clinton said that with this money, “they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that downpayment on their first home”. In October 2007, Clinton withdrew this proposal and according to USA Today stated that “it was just an idea and not a policy proposal”.
Wikipedia

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Three points:

  1. The answer to the question “Is Hillary a liar” is not “Donald Trump is a bigger one” (although, yes he is a bigger liar, or he’s got some mental condition like senility that make him unable to remember what the hell he’s said before. And the latter is scarier than the former) :slight_smile:

  2. Trump didn’t campaign on “I’m so very honest! I’m Honest Donald”. Hillary did. Donald the Cheeto’s campaign boiled down to “RAGE! AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!”. Hillary’s campaign was trying to portray her as being above the fray, while she lied on every single tiny issue and her utterly stupid lies kept turning 5 day stories into 6 month stories.

  3. The CheezePuff with a Toupee’s lies…I’m having trouble figuring out how to say this…but his lies were just blatant and outrageous. Sort of like a buddy of yours telling you that he’s had sex with over one THOUSAND women. You know he’s full of shit, he knows you know and it’s kind of joke between you. Hillary’s were constantly condescending. It wasn’t a buddy-lie with a wink and a nod, her lies carried a tone of “You’re too dumb to discover my lies, however blatant or stupid they are and you won’t notice if I change my lie every few days when the old one doesn’t work”. And that (IMO) is why the “Basket of Deplorables” comment along with the ham-fisted way she phrased the “We’re going to put a lot of coal-miners out of work! YAY US! (by the way, we’ll find them jobs or retrain them” thing all added to the perception of contempt.

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Filled, presumably, with coloring books, Mein Kampf, and a lot of unsold copies of The Art of the Deal.

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I think this is really a key difference. For example, trump loved riling up his supporters with ‘Lock her up!’ during the campaign, but then once he won he ditched it entirely and admitted it was just bullshit that worked to help him get elected, there’s been no move to ‘lock her up’. Lying, then admitting that you just lied to win the election is radical honesty compared to standard politicians.

Compare that with Hillary’s vote for war on Iraq - she voted to go to war with Iraq, and voted against the amendment to the bill that would have required additional authorization for Bush to actually commit ground troops. But she also gave some speeches saying that it was troubling at the time. Once it because clear that the war was a disaster, she started claiming that she was opposed to the war all along, with an attitude of ‘well you just don’t understand the nuances behind my vote for the war’, and put up a wall of complicated lawyer-speak to avoid saying she supported the war.

If she was really as honest as Trump, she’d admit that either she voted for the war because she figured it was going to happen and her vote didn’t actually make a difference, or that she was in favor of the war at the time but that Bush screwed up the execution, and that’s why she’s opposed to it after. But instead if you bring up the topic you get this big confusing, condescending swirl of words ‘explaining’ how she was really opposed to the war even though she voted for it. The problem with this strategy is that even if she technically didn’t lie about her position, most people consider that kind of language game dishonest outside of a court room, so even if she didn’t technically lie, she practically lied.

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Um yeah so donald has a dick so when he lies it’s cool. He gives it some “english” and it’s great. We know we’re being lied to but we’re liking it. It’s like watching a chuck norris movie or something.

Hillary don’t have a dick? How dare someone? Let’s list each one of her “lies” no matter how technical. Now we’re on to something.

Signed Vladbot 3000