It’s not that she “lost by some horrible amount”; it is that she won the popular vote by such a small margin against an opponent who ran an openly racist, misogynistic, and most absurdly, anti-factual campaign that by any reasonable expectation a decent candidate should have been able to completely shut down by such a wide margin that there wouldn’t even be a story. Ignoring that it was Hillary Clinton that lost this election, rather than “a Democrat” or “a woman” fundamentally misses the problem, and a failure to recognize this will fail to inform a future selection of good candidate.
I would say the four qualities needed for an ideal Democratic candidate are charisma, political intelligence, biography and honesty.
Bill had three of them and his biography and charm was off-the-charts effective for the white working class voters who were even more important in the 90’s.
Obama had all four though his biography was both an asset and a liability.
Hillary arguably had none of them. She is widely considered an intellectual giant but the evidence I see is of someone who is articulate and knowledgeable but has a remarkable capacity to miss the big picture which leads to repeated fiascos like Hillarycare, 2008 and 2016.
Booker has the charisma and Duckworth has the biography but it remains to be seen whether they have the other qualities. In particular do they and their team have the intelligence to understand the political landscape and where the opportunities and threats really lie? This quality is hard to judge as evidenced by the general overestimation of Hillary.
The Democrats should not make the mistake of thinking they could get away with nominating someone like Trump. Their coalition is fundamentally more unwieldy and less disciplined. The white part of their coalition is at least as complex as the entire GOP coalition and you have blacks and Hispanics on top of that. Bringing them all out is like solving a really complex puzzle. Maybe we should check how many hours of Civilization/Europa Universalis the candidates have.
If the right promises not to let the Bush twins ever run, can you offer up a woman who is neither the wife nor daughter of a former president too? Surely there are other women who can make the first female presidency on her own merits rather than her attachment to a former president.
Fact is, this is not 2019. It is not the time to be picking the successor. The political landscape of the next election will be very different, just as the landscape of 2012 was quite different from 2015. Most likely, some kind of leader will phoenix-rise to prominence, and we will all say, well, of course. Or we might get another Kerry.
That’s two of us now. We need one or 2 more and we’ll have a movement.
Seriously though, it seems people respond to braggadocio more than calm, reasoned facts. I think we might be approaching the point where he would be a viable candidate, and holy shit, that happened a lot faster than I ever dreamed.
I think someone will emerge who has not yet been thought of. Someone of high intelligence, dynamic, charismatic, and a true leader. He/she will enter the primaries and emerge as the nominee and be able to put Trump in his casket, so to speak.
Especially for Democrats though, I think executive experience is a must. If you read any books about Bill Clinton, talking about the nonbiased kind here, strictly chronicling history, he and Hillary had long shared a belief that in order to have activist government, it has to be work well. Republicans by then had made huge gains by attacking big government as too expensive, too wasteful, and not even working all that well. So Clinton made that a priority. It’s not sexy and it doesn’t make headlines, but one of the untold stories of those eight years is how much confidence in government improved under Clinton. Well, not entirely untold. When he said “the era of big government is over” he wasn’t so much talking about its size so much as its effectiveness. No longer were programs growing just because they had grown last year. No longer were people collecting welfare indefinitely. Al Gore had taken an ax to unnecessary regulations and duplicative federal programs. And programs that worked, Clinton proposed ideas to make them work better. Knowing how to do all that takes executive experience.
So add executive experience, otherwise you risk eroding confidence in government.
Stewart would first have to get rid of his security blanket of saying, “I’m just a comic!” whenever he says something outrageously wrong. That wouldn’t fly on the campaign trail.
I’m sick of stunt-casting presidential candidates. I don’t want another tv star, or a presidential spouse or presidential offspring. I want a career politician with a distinguished record.
I don’t think it’s that simple. What Trump proved is that if the other party also nominates someone who probably wouldn’t be electable under normal circumstances, AND you’re drawing voters who normally don’t vote, then Vermin Supreme could indeed win.
But that career politician should also be someone who has done more than just climb the ladder. It should be someone who has been willing to oppose their own party on principle and has actually come up with new ideas. It’s the difference between a Bill Clinton and a Hubert Humphery. HHH was accomplished, but his accomplishment seemed to be pretty much just being a good Democrat for a long time. Clinton shook things up, founding a party within a party(the DLC) and advocating for changes, as well as implementing some innovating policy solutions in Arkansas. Martin O’Malley fits that bill nicely. Plus unlike Clinton, he’s a little to the left of his party on most issues, so it’s not like the liberal activist base has to swallow their pride like they did in 1992.
Chaffee and Webb are pretty experienced and competent as well though. I understand why they weren’t favored by Democrats, but their resumes were impeccable.
…yeah, I’m on the Jon Stewart train. I make the case for him in another thread.
If not Stewart, then someone similar who can go toe to toe with Trump. I just watched about 20 seconds of that video that Salvor posted of Cory Booker and just shook my head. I’m sure he is an exceptionally nice guy who is doing fantastic things and one day might be presidential material. But he would get eaten alive by the Trump Empire. They would chew him up and spit him out.
Maybe they should have sent their resumes to the primary debates, because they came across as being **way **out of their depth.
I’m gonna pass on Jon Stewart. He’s a very smart man and was excellent at what he did, but he’s clearly a man who suffers from a lot of self-doubt. That’s the sort of quality a skilled comedian can channel into producing sharp material (and you may recall there was a lot of self-deprecation in his TDS work, which was one of his more endearing traits), but in a President would result in a nervous breakdown in very short order.
