I don’t think its possible to separate out how Hillary really was from how we perceived her after 20 years of a smear campaign. That stuff gets in your head.
I think so, too.
I would add that those feelings of dislike were amplified with great success by Russian troll bots all over social media, most notably Facebook. This factor is rarely considered in these discussions – which is, in my view, a mistake.
According to Silver on 528, Clinton lost due to three factors-
The Comey Memo
Poor campaign strategy
Unending hate meme and posts, even from her own party.
Perhaps that last was party due to her gender, but being a woman was not a major factor in her loss,
Part of reason #3.
I don’t recall saying, any woman any criticism equals misogyny. What I actually said is that she does not “cackle.” I also said that I felt that particular criticism was one of the more misogynistic ones.
After all, how she laughs has little to nothing to do with her skill or her intelligence, but it always comes up when discussing her. This in spite of her not cackling. I was gonna’ post some clips, but I’m having big technical issues.
I am sure she would have been an excellent president. Just an awful candidate. They are different skill sets.
Harris is not making her mistakes. Above all else Harris is trying to decrease Trump’s margin with rural and non-college educated white voters, recognizing that they actually do have major issues that should be recognized and addressed. If all HRC had done differently was disrespect that cohort a wee bit less she’d have won. We’d be in a much better world … because she’d have been a great president.
ETA she had fine laugh.
Not awful. The EC vote was very close and Hillary won the popular vote. She just wasnt as good as she should have been.
I agree with you, but the unfortunate reality is that superficial factors play a major role in how politicians are perceived. As the humourist Dave Barry once sarcastically put it, the most important quality in a politician is their hair. Whether Hillary “cackles” or not is a subjective and irrelevant discussion we could have forever, but the salient point is that a lot of voters perceived her that way, and that was part of her undoing.
In any case, the good news here is that Kamala Harris ticks all the boxes both on issues of substance and on the superficial ones, too, making her a terrific candidate, and frankly a better and more charismatic one than I had originally imagined. Apparently Biden knew what he was doing when he picked her for his VP, and his legacy lives on.
I am a big Festivus! Fan, and what the Democratic Party needs is a good American-made aluminum pole and an Airing of Grievances.
The last time we had one was 2008. That was supposed to be the year Hillary Clinton was given the imprimatur as the first woman to be nominated for President. But that year – 12 years after having won an election – the party allowed a free Airing of Grievances and lots of people ran against Hillary.
Barak had the powerful message. Hillary, the Democratic stalwart, had to hang, there on the bench.
So, in 2016, the Clinton’s still had a lot of pull in the party. Barak told Joe – who should have been the natural successor as VP – that he had to mourn his dead son. Elizabeth Warren was told by the party – led by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz – that the party was behind Hillary and there wasn’t room for two women; Elizabeth Warren gave up her run early. The party then tattooed Bernie Sanders “Socialist,” just as Donald Trump and all Republicans tattoo all Democrats “Communist.” This is regardless of the fact that only 0.01 % of the U.S. population, knows the difference between a communist and a socialist; they’re the same thing to the American People.
In 2016, the Republican Party had a proper Airing of Grievances to determine what it wanted to be. It decided to be a party of White Man’s Grievance. It’s been that ever since and it has only one standard bearer, Donald Trump. And other than what Donald John Trump says, it has no platform.
Hillary Clinton was the most qualified person ever to run for President. She lost because people who wanted her to win didn’t go out to vote.
I suspect that one of the reasons Kamala Harris (and Tim Walz) will win is that Donald Trump supporters just don’t care enough to go out and vote for him on election day this year. In 2016 there was a whole lot of enthusiasm for Trump on Election Day. But in 2024, the people know he’s a liar; they know he can’t magically improve everything for whitey; and Donald Trump doesn’t care about people.
I suspect that enthusiasm will be there for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on November 8. They have a ticket that will fight for America and Americans.
To get back to Festivus! We have not had a proper Airing of the Grievances since 2008 and with Kamala Harris having taken over the nomination from Joe Biden, we haven’t had one this year. Should she win, we may not have one in 2028. That’s too long.
I think Kamala Harris will govern as a middle-left Democrat. She and the party should welcome and engage challengers in the Democratic party from the centrist and Progressive wings come 2028. We need to have a discussion about our party. The party cannot be run as a gerontocracy when the enthusiasm comes from the young.
Yeah, but people make superficial judgements of politicians all the time, male and female. Nixon sweated during his debates with Kennedy, George W. Bush mispronounced ‘nuclear’, Joe Biden stutters, and Donald Trump has bad hair and ill-fitting suits.
The point is to put women in an unwinnable bind. If they show emotion they are “shrill” or “cackle” or are “harpies” or are “hysterical”. If they don’t show emotions they are “cold bitches”. Hillary got hit with both sides of that as she shifted her presentation in response to criticism.
Like most Democrats I think her biggest mistake was in trying to placate people like that in the first place. She should have written such people off politically decades ago, recognized that they’d never feel anything but insane hatred for her (and most other people), and tried appealing to the people who actually might vote for her. And not worried about offending the Right.
It went back to her offering up chocolate chip cookie recipes. Trying to (unconvincingly) change yourself to please others is a poor means to come off as authentic.
Literally so. (Think “hysterectomy”).
That’s why I thought she would win — Bill Clinton’s good economy.
Maybe she lost because of Monica Lewinsky. After that it was hard to see them as a fully coordinated team.
As far as Hillary Clinton only getting where she did because of family, not to the extent of Indira Gandhi or Isabel Perón. And most national leaders at least started out on second base (in Harris’s case, her mother was a Berkeley PhD researcher, her father a Stanford professor, and she went to a famed Canadian high school and at least semi-elite university). Just the way it usually works.
Did she do that?
What I remember is her being eviscerated by the Right for making a statement along the lines of not being the sort of woman to “stay in the kitchen and bake chocolate chip cookies.” I don’t recall Hillary ever offering up chocolate chip recipes.
No you’re right. My brain misremembering. That was her being true to who she was. The problem was instead that her true self expressed some disdain for those who did choose to do that. But not repackaging herself!
Yeah, that’s what I recall. The Right went insane, just like with her ‘deplorables’ comment. Their response was what made her become much more guarded in what she said publicly.
At the time, Clinton commented that the Right was dedicated to demonizing her and I thought the comment was a bit over the top. But as is almost always the case with Clinton, she was right and I was wrong. I learned to listen to what she says.
Exactly this. And then the complaints that are typically articulated against Hillary follow the patterns often used by sexist bigots. (Not talking about posters here, but posters here are not very representative of people I meet in real life.) Unconscious bias is a real thing.
I’m very much hoping that the first woman to be president bestows the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Hillary Clinton. Even though she lost the election, she made it unremarkable for other women to run.
Especially since trump says that’s the very best medal, I think giving it to the person who lost the election to trump, rather than to trump himself, the winner of that election would be a perfectly aimed slap in his face with a 2x4. With nails in it.
Hilary Clinton was sour and entitled. Everyone knew in 2008 that the nomination was hers for the taking, and then along came some man* and took it from her. So 2016 was her year, dammit, and no-one was going to stand in her way. And no-one did, except she herself. Her personality is what lost her the election, all things being equal. She was perceived as being buttoned-up emotionally, and not genuine. Her agenda was that being President was going to be her personal victory over everything that ever went against her. The best thing she did in that election was to be graceful in losing. I am still impressed by that.
What’s different this year? First, everyone now knows exactly what Trump is, even if they don’t admit it (or love it rather than deny it). The continuing mental deterioration is driving away support. Harris doesn’t have any of the emotional or historic baggage that Hilary carried, and is free to be the breath of fresh air that everyone is saying she is. She wasn’t much of a campaigner in 2020, I hope she’s learned a lot since then, and I also hope that she doesn’t get over-confident from her initial bump after Biden stepped out of the race. She’s still a pretty unknown quantity to most people, and she needs to be serious along with the other, more fun stuff. It helps a lot that she isn’t running as “the woman candidate.” She’s just a candidate who happens to be a woman, That’s a lot easier for a lot of people to deal with.
*some man who had some of the same personality traits that Harris is now exhibiting.
I just looked up how Harris is doing against Trump, compared to how “sour and entitled” “cackling” Clinton was doing at this point. Trump is polling better against Harris than he was against Clinton at this point of that election:
Exactly eight years ago on August 18, 2016, polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight, which became part of ABC News in 2018, showed Clinton with a substantial national polling lead over Trump. The polling average showed the Democratic candidate with 43.6 percent support compared to Trump’s 36.8 percent—a lead of 6.8 points for Clinton.
Comparatively, Harris is only 2.6 points ahead of Trump nationally in FiveThirtyEight’s current average as of Sunday afternoon.