The fault that I’m pointing out is that she, her staff, and her best supporters utterly failed to treat as a giant red flag her almost losing to a ‘not really even a Democrat’ in spite of having the deck stacked in her favor by the party for nomination since 2015. She should have stopped all of the “It’s her turn” nonsense and taken the possibility of losing to Trump seriously when she was barely able to win against a guy who shouldn’t have been a serious contender with the Democratic Party trying to hand her the nomination. Instead she and her staff kept treating the election process like a formality instead of a close-run fight.
The flaws in her campaign (like focusing on her ‘record’ as though it’s a positive thing) were legion, but have been talked about enough in past threads that I’m certainly not going to talk about them here. Trying to blame Sanders for her awful campaign strategy is pretty absurd, though.
As you said earlier, calling out someone running for president as having a big ego is like calling the sky blue. I takes a lot of audacity to think you have a hope of a chance of winning.
I think that sums it up. It was not so much that people voted for Trump, more that a great many people simply refused to vote for Hillary. Bernie Sanders was not the issue, he never made it to becoming the official Dem candidate.
The obvious question: if Bernie Sanders had been put up against Our Donald, could he have won?
I think we agree on that last point. But you’re avoiding the central one - ego can be because of, and necessary to, actual accomplishment and qualifications, or it can be ego for its own sake. They’re not the same and bothsidesism does not apply.
I think it’s a very valid view that media organizations are not operational in small towns. We are currently undergoing a drastic shift in where media jobs are located as newspapers and other companies cut back, lay off, and shut down in smaller areas.
The reason for this is the absolute devastation being wreaked on ad-dependent companies by Google and Facebook over the past decade, but the why doesn’t really matter – it’s the fact that all these small sources of verifiable reporting have vanished and so no longer bubble up to the big time media companies.
This tectonic shift happened so swiftly that many reporters and news organizations failed to realize the full implications of losing all those small- and medium-sized news producers.
That said, I am still amazed that so many American commentators fail to realize that Hillary Clinton was always going to face an uphill battle simply because she’s a woman.
True, but the loss of markets by dead tree outlet to television and the Internet is nationwide, not a rural thing, and has been going on for decades. Electronic media have penetration into low-population markets too,* and always have*. Somebody in Lower Trumpistan has as much ability to watch MSNBC as anyone else, and somebody in Berkeley can watch Fox all day if they want.
The difference in political mindset is exposure to other kinds of people and other views, and to facts as well as propaganda. That comes in large part just from living where those things can be found more easily, and going out and finding them, even if it just requires changing channels once in a while. The dichotomy is, ISTM, being intellectually active instead of passive, and thinking critically instead of tribally.
True, but the loss of markets by dead tree outlet to television and the Internet is nationwide, not a rural thing, and has been going on for decades.
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Yeah, but TV stations don’t cover small markets very well. It requires a higher staff-to-coverage ratio to produce news for TV, and stations generally have fewer staff than newspapers to begin with.
You can produce a small town weekly newspaper with one frantic reporter, one editor/publisher, and a sales person.
Outsider candidates like governors normally do very well in presidential runs. And Trump was even more of an outsider being a non politician. And he was a reality TV star for quite a while too. both of those factors to me were very big for him.
The EC is set up so the more rural, more homogenic, less educated states have outsized power, whichever party names are associated with them. “We” are never going to win the EC while losing the vote of We the People.