Close only counts in horseshoes.
Can’t forget hand grenades.
1…2…5!
Or nukes.
That is right-out!
Also, let’s not forget about money. That’s really the main thing that kept Obama in this thing. His ability to tap this donor base really kept his campaign going. Obama is like Howard Dean in that way, but better.
He is more likeable, is a far better politician, the nation is in a different place than it was 4 years ago, and Obama actually won the Iowa Caucuses. Had Howard Dean done so, he probably would have lost still, but it’d have been a longer fight.
Ms. Clinton never looked like a winner. She “acted” like a winner, but it was an act and not a very good one. She seemed, to this outside observer, to demand your vote, she did not seem willing to convince you to vote for her, nor did it seem that she understood she had to earn it.
Mr. Obama has grace and ease, he appears natural. He appears to be undertaking a dialogue with you, as if he was a rational person talking to a rational person. It might be an act, too, I suppose, but if it is, it’s a good act. He convinced me. I can’t vote for him, but I’m up here in the Great White North rootin’ for him.
Totally. Hillary came across like this was her one and only shot at the nomination, that it was her time. She was the front-runner before anyone even voted, and losing was unthinkable. Her political career would be over.
Obama, on the other hand, gave me the impression that “Hey, I’m a one-term senator and I’m African-American. I probably don’t have a chance in hell but look at it this way: Nobody will be surprised if I don’t win. It’s a long shot. Losing to the front-runner won’t kill my career. I can have another go at it in four years or eight years. I’ll do the best I can for now and we’ll see what happens.”
Obama seemed to relax after he won Iowa. Hillary seemed tense and increasingly desperate. But she still acted like she had it in the bag when it was evident that it wasn’t. She didn’t act like an underdog. People like underdogs.
The NYTimes has a bunch of Op-Ed pieces about Clinton’s campaign: What Went Wrong?. What I found most interesting about them is that I think the pieces say more about the authors than about the campaign.
Oh, and what a weaselly, snivelling ass Mark Penn is.
I agree with this. Hillary demanded respect and your vote for no other reason than she was the front-runner and a frickin’ Clinton, dammit. Obama earned it.
I almost think Hillary would never had run unless she was convinced she was absolutely sure to win. Somebody forgot to tell her the primaries are a contest and not just a formality on the way to becoming president. Poor Hill.
What I noticed was that only one of their 13 commenters mentioned the war.
Yeppers to that.
Another thing about the whole website issue that got me was her boastful, singsong way of chanting “Hil-lar-y-Clin-ton-dot-com” like she (and her supporters chanting along) were showing off that they, too, had mastered the internet-thingy that all these clever young whippersnappers were using. “See? I’m not a withered old crone practicing the politics of the last millennium! We’re all cool, vibrant, groovy, hep, with-it–whatever you young people are doing, we can do it too, especially if you give us a few years to watch you using the internet effectively and beating our semi-functional brains in with it! Ha, ha!”
For me it was first and foremost the vote for war, followed by the censored web forum. If she is not going to be open to free expression n her site, how can she be free and transparent in any future policies?
She should have never censored her site.
Bingo! I’d call it the JFK factor.
Also, I’d say it was a matter of character. Hillary’s vote to go to war wasn’t necessarily a sign of her deeply flawed character, because many Americans supported it at the time, but her almost psychotic refusal to fess up to simply making a big mistake, a tragic error, was that sign.
And she kept on displaying that character flaw. The election was all about her–when she kept saying during her un-concession speech “What does Hillary want?” (beware the egotist referring to self in third person), the real question was “Who gives a fuck what Hillary wants?” Her incredibly weak excuse for failing to realize on Tuesday night that she’d lost, and he’d won, and it was time (long past time) to move on already, was that she needed time to deal with the harsh reality.
Needed time? Needed time?? Didn’t she notice the entire world had been telling her that she had zero path to the nomination for months now? Well, yes, she had–she complained about it incessantly, observed defiantly that people had been asking her to quit, quit now, quot already, wouldja, stick a fork in yourself, lady, etc., but still she professed to be shocked, shocked that somehow the nomination had slipped through her grasping little fingers.
The kicker was that this woman–who kept stubbornly refusing to grasp that simple truth–was the same woman who had made her case based on her ability to deal with a 3 AM phone call, the implication being that she was supremely capable of dealing with a crisis, coolly, on-the-spot, ready from day one–but somehow she couldn’t assimilate the information that she’d lost the friggen nomination in less than 72 hours?
The harsh truth is that she was an empty pants-suit, who spent 18 months demonstrating that she would say anything, do anything, talk out of any orifice, to get nominated–and we caught on to that crucial truth, and somehow managed in the end to deny her the only thing she wanted.
Which is kind of why I don’t understand people saying “She’s a good egg” after her speech on saturday. No she is not. I don’t hate her, but I wouldn’t want her for president. she’s shown the worst of her character in this procedure, and while I believe she isn’t the devil, I won’t fail to take that in account when having to put up with her in the future. Forgive? Yeah. forget. No.
Yes! That’s the perfect way to put it, and the exact same vibe I got from the way her and her audience would sing that. They would all giggle and hi-five after singing it too, like the internet was some crazy, new-fangled, untamed, exciting thing.
Compounded by some real fiscal mismanagement on the parts of Hillary Clinton & Patti Solis Doyle. They managed to burn through a lot of cash in December and January, obviously under the assumption that the race would be over early. When it wasn’t and Solis Doyle was hiding the books from Clinton and Clinton was hiding her self-loans from Solis Doyle, Clinton would spend the rest of the campaign playing catch-up. Worse yet, it was money spent on lavish treats for the campaign such as luxury hotels, fine catering, fancy transportation, etc instead of being spent on campaign offices and advertising.
I’ve heard more than one theory that the “Let’s ignore the caucus states” wasn’t entirely plain stupidity on Penn & Co.'s part but also due to a lack of resources to run field offices, work “Get Out The Vote” efforts, etc in those smaller states. What money Clinton had, she couldn’t afford to split between the larger primaries and the smaller caucuses. I don’t know if it would have changed the final results but having that reserve cash available in February & March might have made a difference.
The guy over at Electoral-Vote.com has his reasons, which sound good to me:
- She acted like she had a right to the nomination
- She actually believed it
- She forgot she was in a primary
- She didn’t understand the rules
- She ignored red-states and caucuses.
- She didn’t understand the Internet
- She didn’t run as a woman
- She found her voice too late.
She ran as the incumbent in a year that people wanted change. She kept pushing the “Ready on Day One ™” line long after it was proven to be ineffective. I think the reason that it didn’t work was that there were two takes on Hillary’s experience. Those who bought her argument that everything she did since law school was presidential-qualifying experience were already in her corner, and those who looked at her years as First Lady of Arkansas and of the US and asked “where’s the beef?” weren’t swayed by it. So I think she wasted a lot of time trying to make a point that part of the electorate had already bought and the other part were never going to.
I give Mark Penn a lot of credit for the loss. His presence on the staff guaranteed dysfunction. And if it is really true that he thought California was winner-take-all, then Hillary was very much badly served. They had a large war chest to start the campaign and spent lavishly early on (remember the Hillicopter?). It wasn’t until after Super Tuesday that they had the first inkling that the campaign wouldn’t be over on that day. Then panic set in and she decided to try the “kitchen sink” strategy. It drove up Obama’s negatives, but not as much as it did hers. Instead of being despised by Republicans only, she was now hated by many Democrats. The media soured on her and she became fodder for the late night shows.
She could have won if she had denounced her own Iraq vote as Edwards had done. If she had contested the caucus states. If Bill hadn’t enraged the black community. If she hadn’t panicked after the early defeats and gone negative. If she hadn’t had Mark Penn. If Jeremiah Wright had been discovered before Iowa. But mostly, if she wasn’t running against Obama. She was like Lou Gehrig- durable and dependable, but it was Babe Ruth and his flamboyance that filled the stadiums much like Obama did. Perhaps nothing she could have done would have overcome his natural charisma.
Which symbolized neatly, for me, the essential divisiveness of her campaign. “We’re right, they’re wrong, we have it in the bag, so we’re not giving a moment’s thought to any issues other than our own, which have been thought-out perfectly and need no reconsideration, thank you, and anyone who isn’t with the program can go straight to hell. This nomination and election are ours, and if you don’t like that, you’ll have to live with it.” Us vs. Them, Ins vs. Outs, people who are with me vs. people who are against me–I’ve had enough of that, and I caught on very early (she’s my Senator) to her politics of divisiveness: I don’t like them any more coming from a Democrat than I do coming from a Republican.
I suspect one reason a lot of Obamaites, including me, are indulging in a little malicious pleasure in her loss is the sweetness of the inevitable, never-in-doubt, down-but-never-out, never-say-die candidate finally being forked. BobLibDem is right: she oversold her qualifications, and to people who were only buyiing from her if they got a very soft sell from her. I might have bought “I think I’ve got a little more experience around the Executive branch than Barack, who’s a marvelously qualified candidate in many respects, and I think I’ll have a shorter learning curve than he will. I hope that edge is enough for the voters to pick me, because I think this is such a crucial time that even that advantage may be critical. But whichever way you go, we both will bring much needed change to the White House” rather than the message of “Ready from Day one! Wake me up in the middle of the night and tell me bombs are exploding, I’ve been there, done that, I’m totally ready to handle any crisis any day, every day, non-stop, and I’m the only one who is, not like Mr. First-term Senator who once gave one speech six years ago and is acting like he’s fit to stand on the same podium as me…”
As a talking head on MSNBC said this morning, “The Clintons will never leave the building.”