There have been lots of “Hillary’s evil” and “Obama cured my scrofula” threads (and I’m not pointing fingers since I’ve participated in most and started at least a couple), but this one’s more objective.
Hillary began as almost a lock. Obama was essentially unknown save for “that black guy who gave the really good speech” a couple of years ago. By all logic Hillary should have won, and she certainly got her licks in; even after Super Tuesday she had enough troops in the field to do some serious damage, and as said before their platforms were, while not identical, very similar, and while she has some skeletons not so much in the closet as on display in her china cabinet he had Jeremiah Wright and Rezko and some other detriments?
So while there are many contributing factors to the Obama victory, which one(s) was/were in your opinion the most important? Personality, black voters, message, Bill Clinton’s actions, Obama’s “new” factor or his charisma, or… other(s)? And, whatever the responsible factor(s), how important do you think the same to be in the race against McCain?
While it’s okay and even perhaps necessary to say real or perceived negative things about Hillary, I’ll add this is not another Fork-Hillary thread (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but now that she’s no longer a potential nominee I’m hoping that she can be a very useful asset to the Obama campaign and even find myself feeling strangely sorry for her [though I’m sure glad it turned out the way it did]).
I think Obama was just better organized and had a better game plan by focusing on the smaller states and caucuses. Once Clinton fell behind she didn’t have a contingency plan and he was able to capitalize on that errors on her team. That coupled with the tighter rein he appears to have on his team compared to her team. There was an article awhile back I saw that had the main guy on his team who understood the delegate situation and how to work it, and they implemented that plan and won. Very impressive approach and it is that organizational approach that appeals to me. There is no reason to say anything negative about Clinton (personally I have never understood much of the forking threads)–she ran her campaign with her agenda of experience, but it was the wrong agenda for the time. Change is the key campaign slogan not experience for this time period it would appear.
I think she simply miscalculated; she only planned for the game to last two quarters, and when Obama caught fire in the third quarter, it took too long to react. She did show some recovery late in the campaign, but by then the damage was done, and she was too far behind. She should blame her former campaign manager, Mark Penn.
Because he locked up the caucus states early on and created a delegate lead that H had to catch up to. Also, he’s leveraging web 2.0 tech much better than his competitors and it’s making gigantic dents in fundraising. I remember one poster on the Fork threads saying he only gives a certain amount of money, reoccuring each month and that Obama wouldn’t miss it if he withdrew it. Actually, analysts are saying this is exactly how Obama is getting people to max out, small contributions, a bit at a time.
The best coverage of the election is coming out of Wall Street Journal. If you’re an apopletic Obama supporter, I’d avoid the editorials, though.
Poor organization on Hillary’s part–she didn’t have a clear view of how the various primaries and caucuses worked, and she clearly thought she was destined to win. She didn’t plan for the long haul. Her game-plan was far too focused on the “big states,” as if the nominating process strategy would be identical to how Bush won the Whitehouse in the general election in the past two elections; she failed to account for caucuses (esp. after the first couple) and she failed to account for the Democrat’s propotional system.
Obama’s organization and long-term strategy, on the contrary, were superb.
Hillary’s going negative so early and so long on Obama cost her a lot of votes. Obama did a much better job holding the high ground, morally speaking. She tried way too hard for way too long to prove that she’s tough, which everyone already thought about her. She had nothing to prove in that regard, but for reason she seemed to think she had to prove it over and over. That cost her. She also tried for too many specious attacks on Obama’s character.
Obama’s appeal to independents and liberal Republicans is simply much, much higher. Those people want a visionary, and not old-school divisiveness. Also, Hillary’s reputation among them is not as sterling as among hardcore Democrats.
Obama’s fund raising set a new standard. Hillary’s set a standard for debt accrual and use of loans from personal funds. Her use of the Internet was too little, too late. Again, Obama’s organization did wonders for his campaign, as did his Internet savvy.
It’s a combination of a couple things. Obama’s a very shrewd politician who tapped into people’s desire to change politics as usual, a desire that as, **Knorf ** notes, spans the political spectrum. His background as a community organizer helped him recognize the advantage of mobilizing young voters and the “little guy,” the citizen who won’t ever be attending a $1,000 a plate fundraising dinner, but who can send you a $25 contribution over the Internet. He made those voters feel valued, when they’ve traditionally been ignored.
Clinton compounded that by making some key mistakes in her campaign. A big one, IMO, was her inability to rein in her husband. Plenty oif moderate Democrats love Bill. Plenty more liberal Democrats (not the DNC, but real left-wingers), independents and Republicans thoroughly dislike and distrust the guy. In general, it seemed like Clinton was playing by the old rules–expecting that states like CA and NY would propel her over-the-top, taking the support of African American voters for granted, doing the traditional “just us folks” spiel. I think she underestimated how sick a lot of Americans are of that kind of politics.
The Hillary camp simply underestimated their opponent.
No one though Obama could compete with Hillary’s financial support. Yet Obama found a way to collect money from a large number of small donors. It was done over the internet and relied mostly on small contributions over a period of time (e.g. $25 every month.)
No one thought Obama would appeal to voters because no one knew anything about him. Yet his message for change was strong enough to compete with Hillary’s message of experience.
No one thought Obama would last past Super Tuesday. He did and he won eleven contests right after Super Tuesday while the Hillary camp struggled to raise money and develop a new strategy. After the February contests were over, Obama had built a lead in delegates that was too big to overcome.
One thing rarely, if ever, mentioned about her website, is that it was a moderated forum. I don’t know how it operated once you were approved after your first post because I never bothered to find out. I went to her website, registered, and twice tried to post. Both times I was told that my posts would be reviewed before they would appear, at which point I just left.
To me, it represented one of the clear distinctions between the two candidates; one who made the campaign the “property” of his constituents, making it open to anyone and everyone to participate, and another who wanted to be in control and filter who and who could not participate. It said a great deal to me about how their respective presidencies would be run, as well.
There was and is more of a hunger this year for New! and Fresh! than in most elections, and Clinton could never be either. Too, she could never shake the suspicion that Bill would actually be running the show, and that probably put off more voters than it attracted.
That was between me and Obama, and I’m pretty sure there was never a thread about it.
That being said, I think Hillary took the nomination fro granted. She knew she had the name recognition, and * knew* shew would make the best president. She didn’t take into account that Obama represents a new kind of Washington.He gives hope for change. While she does have some experience, too many of us are tired of Washington insiders and want something different. This is one of the reasons I am so against Hillary as VP , to me it would be a signal that while Obama gives lip service to change, he really is no different than any other politician and is willing to do any thing to win.
I also noticed early on Hillary’s inability to change tactics when those tactics weren’t successful. She never seemed to get–and still doesn’t get–two important things: 1) Obama is well-liked largely because of his image as an uniter not a divider and 2) people are starving for that. So her attempts to bring him down would always backfire because they made her look like a big meanie who only knows how to play the old Washington gotcha ya politics of yesteryear. The plaigiarism accusation, the Rezko scare, and the attempt to brand Obama a flip flopper on Iraq were a series of miscalculations that made her look like a politician stuck on auto-pilot.
Obama never really had to worry about finding new and different ways to attack her because she, in a way, did the work for him. His strategy on offense was to either not play that game or outsource it to people who would do it with not cost to him.
When the people running the country have been incredible fuckups across the board, can you blame people for that hunger?
Given that she supported the people running the country in their super-King-Kamehameha fuckup…Y’know, for years before this campaign actually began, I’d get fundraising mail from Hillary talking about how she was standing up to the big bad Republicans. If she’d been doing that on a regular basis, she’d have been in a position to in fact be the candidate of change. But she was rarely if ever out in front in taking on Bush and the GOP.
I must admit, it’s been many, many moons since I’ve heard this one. The possibility that Bill might be a loose cannon, yeppers. The possibility that he might be the de facto President - hardly.
Oprah’s great and all, but all she can really do for a politician is give him/her the chance to be heard. If nobody’s buying what he’s selling, it’s not going to help in the long run.
I bet Hillary could have gone on Oprah too, if she’d wanted.