She didn’t run her campaign like it was the General Election. Her plan was to overwhelm her rivals on Super Tuesday, and coast home from there. In the GE, there’s no Super Tuesday - both major candidates are in it until the end, no matter how poorly they’re doing. There’s also the matter of swing states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Colorado that she barely showed up in, and very non-swingy states like California and Texas that she focused heavily on. Very un-GE.
Even if she had, so what? Did sexist chauvinist pigs make Hillary run her primary campaign as if it was a general election campaign? (Damn that Mark Penn!)
Trashed that nonsense here. Feel free to un-trash it.
Yes there was a lot of that going on. I also feel that another part of the problem was that people are simply tired of the Clintons. I for one am tired of the blatant spin. The I know you know I’m lying, but i’m going to say it anyway type thing.
But honestly? She blew it in February. Obama had his group at the caucuses and really racked up the delegates. Take that away from Obama, and she gets a much better chance at getting the superdelegates to win. I think that was her fatal flaw. It takes her from running a flawed, yet ultimately successful campaign to a failed campaign. Once he did that he really made it impossible for Hillary to win. And we all know why she did that.
Her inevitability meme pissed me off too. I think it was a poor way to start off the campaign. It was “I’m Hillary Clinton and you WILL vote for me”-like. If she’d run a campaign that respected the other candidates when she didn’t have to, then she’d be better off too. I saw a clip on the Daily Show of her being asked if she had considered what she’d do if not nominated, and Hillary simply rejected the idea out of hand. That really turned me off. At the time I was trying to get to like her because I felt it was inevitable. I had my heart broken with Dean, so I was trying to prevent it from happening again. Well that little quote really took me out of it.
Hillary’s support of the Iraq War gave a huge opening to an opposition candidate. If she’d been against the war from the beginning, or even done an Edwards and admitted she’d blown it back in 2002, there would have been no oxygen for a major Dem challenger this year.
Obama ran a smart, disciplined campaign. Hillary ran a pretty mediocre one, on average - worse up through Wisconsin, better after that - but once she showed she couldn’t close much of the delegate gap with her wins in Ohio and Texas, it was all over anyway, so the fact that the quality of her campaign had substantially improved just didn’t matter in terms of who got the nomination.
It was of help in convincing the press that she was still in the race, though.
Hillary could have run as the candidate as change. But she chose to run as the candidate with experience. Problem is, the former is easier than the latter, because if you’re gonna tout experience you besta be able to have whole heaps of it. Hillary doesn’t have whole heaps, really. Being First Lady is experience, but there’s only so much mileage you can get out of something like that. By the time the silly 3 am commericals arrived, the experience thing started looking like a joke.
I know that I soured on her campaign when I heard she was focusing her energy only on the big, election-winning states. Her early disregard for certain unimportant voters in unimportant states really makes her “my supporters should be heard and not be invisible!” speech look foolish.
Obama generated a ton of enthusiasm, mostly because of the change thing, and tapped into it with incredible effectiveness. Clinton’s people were expecting to win Iowand blow everyone else out of the water on Super Tuesday. That didn’t happen, and they couldn’t find their footing until the runup to Ohio - and didn’t start regaining any ground until Pennsylvania in mid-April. By then it was too late. In a lot of ways they didn’t get a good read on the electorate for a long time, I think because they thought inevitability was enough," and in the end she was only appealing to specific sections of the electorate, which wasn’t going to carry her over the top.
Her experience claims fell flat for a lot of reasons, but when you have a glut of voters looking for change in Washington, that experience starts to translate into someone who’s stuck in the old ways of running this country. So of course Change is going to win over Experience.
I also got the impression Obama was in control of his campaign, and Hilary’s campaign was in control of her. She had so many voices telling her this is what you should say, this is how it was done, and these are the states that won the nom last time, she didn’t have the capacity to silence all the advice and roll with her gut on some things. Obama had a game plan that he stuck to, but seemed flexible enough to adapt when he needed to. And that speaks volumes with how each of them might run a presidency.
I’m very impressed with the way he ran his campaign and raised money. He understands people today. A thing which experience cannot help you on. He likes change. He’s willing to do what everybody else says he can’t do. And he’s proved himself over and over again.
Yes, certainly you did. :rolleyes:
Q*uote:
Originally Posted by DrDeth
It was a virtual tie. One can count it so either has a small victory. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ep...vote_count.html
Popular Vote Total 17,535,458 48.1% 17,493,836 48.0% Obama +41,622 +0.1%
So, even if MI is not counted at all, Obama won by **1/10th of 1%
**
Yep, that’s a Landslide worthy of Lyndon Johnson. :rolleyes:
Boy oh boy, “trashed” indeed. :rolleyes: 1/10th of 1%.
Clinton didn’t plan on the kind of campaign she had to run and she underestimated Obama. She expected to take the lead in the beginning and then maybe play defense against any come-from-behind rivals. She didn’t have a plan for someone else being the front runner and her being the one who had to come back. And she didn’t create such a plan quick enough because she apparently believed Obama’s lead would collapse on its own.
The key to Obama’s win was his ability to gather resources from outside traditional areas. Obama’s campaign didn’t have the same amount of professional campaign staff that the other campaigns had and those campaigns underestimated his resources because of this. But Obama was able to develop non-professional campaign staff to an unanticipated degree - enough that he was able to use these non-professionals to fill the roles that the other campaigns were using professionals for.
This true but it’s more a matter of circumstances rather than planning. Obama was the only candidate who could afford to stay the course. His original plan worked at the beginning and continued to work throughout his campaign. Clinton, McCain, and the other candidates were more chaotic because their original plans didn’t work and they had to re-invent their campaign strategy in mid-run. It’s easy to remain calm and collected when everything is going according to plan.
Before she went negative, Clinton led Obama among black voters by as much as 40%. (cite) Once he sprang ahead, she went negative, but that resulted in a strong shift among black voters to Obama. By the end he was getting 90% of the black vote. That made it even harder for her to play catch-up.
I’m a Limey and have no dog in this fight but I’ve got to say that for some reason,maybe body language or facial expressions Hillary always seemed to come across as insincere.
I’ve no doubt that she was totally genuine and honest throughout the campaign but that was the perception that she gave me and talking to other people about it all but one agreed with me.
Now I know that hard logic means that you vote for the policies and not for the personality of the candidate but IRL that is not always the case.
I still honestly cant put my finger on the reason for my distrust in her,its not fair and its not rational but thats my perception of her.
Hillary’s strategy was for there to be no campaign. She tried to win the nomination before anybody had ever cast a vote. It was simple: old party hands, all Clinton supporters from back in the day, set up the proportional representation rules which favored the early leader. Then she gathered up all of the reliable Democratic fundraisers and started asking them for commitments early, with the implicit threat of being left out in the cold when she won. She flinched last on the Michigan ballot, and got herself a poison pill of delegates – everyone knew they’d be seated at the end, so any competitor’s delegate lead had to include enough delegates to counter a Michigan seating.
So she tried to steer the rules of the game to her advantage and then let the race play out as it must… and Obama took the rules Hillary had established and beat her by playing that game perfectly in every district of every state.
I should add that the main reason the popular vote was as close as it was, in the end, was that Hillary closed the gap considerably in that metric in what a sports fan might describe as ‘garbage time.’ It’s like the RB for a losing team who gains a whole bunch of yards on the ground when his team’s down by 4 TDs late in the game, and the other team’s going, “fine, run all you want.” The RB might even be able to equalize the yards gained by the two teams. So what? Run, baby, run!
The popular vote wasn’t close while the outcome was still in doubt. Obama basically punted WV, KY, and PR because he’d effectively won already. The popular vote was never close in any way that mattered.
ETA: damn, really meant to post this in the other thread, and I think I still will. But no reason not to post it here, too. Feel free to respond to it in one place or the other.
She voted for the war. She never got far enough from that.
Her hubby was the guy who started NAFTA leading to CAFTA and workers getting shafta.
Apparently women rallied but just not enough.
Little Nemo, in posts 30 & 31, makes some strong points as to why Hillary lost. She was unprepared, took for granted that her nomination was a foregone conclusion, became deluded by it to the point when reality started to present the fact that she was losing, she took too long to accept it, and with no plan B, screwed herself. That’s what you get for being cocky enough to think you won’t have any real competition.
And I agree Lust4Life, her smile did make her look disingenuous. Especially when it’s obvious your campaign is having some major problems, and she continues to talk as if they weren’t happening. Also, a negative campaign always looks defensive in my eyes, and usually ends up back firing.
Being President is about the kinds of decisions you make under stressful situations as well as good planning and learning when to listen to your gut, rather that the traditional voices of “well that’s how we’ve always done it in the past; that’s what’s always worked before.” Looking at their respective campaigns, it’s easy to see which would make the better President.
Also, on YouTube, the videos put up by the Obama campaign were open to comments and, as far as I could tell, that meant open to ALL comments, negative as well as positive. The Clinton campaign’s videos (such as they were) on YouTube did not allow comments.