Thinking about Hillary and her missed chance of being the first woman President of the US I wondered whether she could have pulled it off if she’d beaten Obama for the Democratic nomination and run against John McCain in 2008. Would she have beaten him? She would have had the advantage of the unpopular Bush Presidency and the reluctance of voters to give any one party three successive terms. But would that have been enough to overcome the clear dislike which many voters feel for her?
I think myself that she probably would have won. If so can you imagine how she must feel towards Obama? The guy robbed her (in her eyes) of making history by making history himself!
The country was is pretty dire straits in '08, so a potted plant (or is it a ham sandwich?) probably would have won, as long as it didn’t have “R” next to its name on the ballot.
So, yes, we missed our chance for a woman prez for a while (but we did get a black one, so that’s something).
I assume she feels like Karl Malone. Had Karl played in any other era, he and his Utah Jazz would have surely won at least one NBA championship, perhaps more than one. Alas, he played during the peak Michael Jordan/Bulls era.
I always assumed that Clinton would have won in 2008, but now I’m not sure. Yes, things were a lot more favorable for Democrats then, but would she have been able to paint John McCain as four more years of Bush and herself as an agent of change? Because that’s the feat Obama pulled off. I don’t know that Clinton could have done it. McCain had a proven record as a reformer and frequent dissenter against Bush. Only someone with Obama’s slick packaging could have done what he did. It was a feat on par with making John Kerry seem like a coward. Clinton’s team was just never that good.
I realize that this is just speculation, but I’m curious as to how history would have played out had Hillary Clinton won the Democratic Nomination in 2008. Had she performed slightly better during the primaries, it would have been Obama who would have stepped aside - and I really think we would have had our first female President in 2008… perhaps even with Obama as her VP. The reason I believe this is that even had she not won as decisively as Obama did - circumstances were favorable enough for the Democrats that I believe she would have won against McCain.
Then - I guess the question becomes where would we be today. I’d say that there would be a fairly good chance that Clinton would not have been able to win re-election in 2012. Would it have been Romney in that year? Yeah, probably… he was ‘next’ in line. Would have been close though.
Which brings us to 2016 - and in this alternate reality, perhaps it would have been Obama winning. In this scenario, there would not have been a great opportunity for a Trump rise. I think part of the reason he had success in our reality was due to him being the third ‘try’ after the Republican failures of 2008 and 2012 - which made conditions more favorable to him.
In the alternate reality scenario, we would be flipping sides every four years - less favorable for a Trump candidacy.
Of course, it is really hard to speculate, because simply changing one result (who wins in 2008) would have led to countless other changes - large and small. However, I do feel that Clinton would have most likely been unable to win re-election, and that Obama would have tried for the Presidency again, likely winning in 2016.
Bush’s popularity was in the high 20s/low 30s. We were in a war that had little public support at the time. The economy tanked a few months before the election. Whoever the Democrats nominated was going to win.
I doubt it. As many people hated her as much back then, and there wouldn’t have been anywhere near the hate for McCain as there was for Trump to nearly offset it.
She lost to Trump. She has never won a tough election in her life.
The Democrats paved the way for her Senate election in New York and we did the same for POTUS, unfortunately, the United States as a whole is not as safely Democratic as New York.
It would have been a tight race but the market crash could have finally thrown it to Clinton, able to remind people of the good times in the 90s. OTOH with Clinton nominated it would not have been Sarah Palin in McCain’s ticket so he would not have THAT albatross on him.
Then… who knows… the Tea Party may have remained mainly an anti-neocon, economic populist insurgency in the GOP, without the toxic racial or “social issue” undertones of opposing Obama for the sake of opposing him. The 2010 midterm would have likely gone against her but not to the degree of the “shellacking” in our Real World.
I doubt she would have beat McCain. The tanking economy was front-and-center, and I think people were looking for hope-change and someone to blame (as always?). Obama hit the right notes with his combination of charisma and Evil-Wall-Street/regulators-asleep-at-the-wheel pitch. McCain had the whole “maverick” schtick and was assigning blame to Freddie/Fannie, so he was selling his own narrative on the matter.
I don’t think Clinton could have pulled it off; she’s an intelligent policy wonk, but not a well-rounded politician. I think 2016 demonstrated she’s somewhat tone-deaf when it comes to reading audiences, and establishment politics wasn’t going to cut it in any case.
So what are her policy differences with Obama? The one which comes to mind is that she is substantially more hawkish, and thus probably there would be much greater U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.
I think the more enlightening question has always been that his rhetoric aside, what were Obama’s differences with Clinton? In reality, there were none except on foreign policy.
Democrats probably would have been better off if Clinton had won in 2008, because Obama would be both more experienced and tapping his new coalition for the first time.