Democratic (Party) Direction

Hillary ran the dumbest campaign in American history, probably

That's a high bar

She was a perfectly qualified candidate endorsed by a popular incumbent president and she lost to a man of clownishly obvious malevolence. There are myriad ways to explain this away but come on, she would have won if she spoke to people's concerns even a little bit. Her campaign was at once stodgy and vacuous.

I was even on board during the campaign, a "steady hand" was enough for me and I was into the prospect of a woman finally becoming president. But in hindsight I see so many issues with what she did, how many voters she just wrote off, not even trying to pierce the right wong bubble to expose their lies about her, lies even centrists came to believe because of their ubiquity

As I recall, Trump was so good at sucking all the attention of the media toward himself that unless HRC had proposed something extreme or radical there was no way her policy proposals could break through to anyone's consciousness. And other than the fact of her gender, HRC was the antithesis of extreme or radical. Trump, otoh, was provocative in ways HRC could never compete with. This was a function of the two candidates and their personalities, not some deep malfunction in the Clinton campaign.

I think she should have tried to defend herself from Trump's slander rather than try to take the high road assuming right thinking people would see through the lies.

Trump basically said she took bribes while sec of state, using the clinton foundation as a front. A well executed "how dare you" could have shut that stuff down imo

Nobody on either side had ever encountered a phenomenon quite like Trump's campaign, so there were no wise old gurus to consult on effective countermeasures. Ted Cruz thought he had all the angles figured and went down in flames.

Like, force him to back up the insinuations, to stick to a coherent accusation. The rumors about Hillary spread like weeds and I think that was a major factor in her loss.

Trump sprang so many wild hares running, at such short intervals, that "forcing him" to stick to a coherent accusation was a non-starter. No one could keep up with Trump's pace of lying and crazy promises long enough to pin him down to any of them.

oh cool another post-mortem

Trump basically said she took bribes while sec of state, using the clinton foundation as a front. A well executed "how dare you" could have shut that stuff down imo

― Treeship, 12. marts 2017 21:31 (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lol. At the second debate, after Trump said he'd hire a prosecutor and get her lucked up, the moderators cut off her response to ask about her emails. No way a 'how dare you' would have done anything.

I hope any time-traveling ilx0rz are scrupulously taking notes here, so they know what to change in the alternate timeline

Adam B's proposal probably the best one: "imo we should ban political threads completely"

xp Well then her people should have been more aggressively debunking that bullshit. I'm sorry. I know Democrats who felt there was something fishy about the emails; the conspiracy spread far beyond the right wing bubble and infected everything else. I blame Hillary's campaign for not effectively countering this disinformation strategy and I want the Democrats to have a plan to face down bullshit like this when it inevitably pops up in future elections.

Sorry for going down this rabbit hole again

oh cool another post-mortem

Is there anyone here who doesn't think 'left' is the answer, though?

Up

@irl
Astounding study: Clinton’s message was devoid of policy discussions in a way not seen in the previous 4 contests.

http://mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/blog/2016-election-study-published/

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Sunday, March 12, 2017 4:00 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I will bet you ten jillion dollars that you didn't read that link, since it doesn't say what I'm certain you think it says, and instead deals entirely with television advertisements.

I kind of share Treeship's frustration w Democratic Party's inability to combat the smears. I was hoping that Bernie would have been picked for VP slot at the time because they clearly lost control of the messaging. It was a unique situation overall to be attacked by both right AND left and have FBI intervene near the end. Also they inadvertently became the most transparent campaign in history via the leaks, who else could hold up to the scrutiny of their private communications made public like that? Ultimately it was disconcerting that Ellison wasn't picked as Chair since it seemed like he could have helped unify the divide, although I like Perez..

Oh great, the guy Bernie backed to run against DWS spreading the "Seth Rich was murdered by the Clintons" conspiracy. Clearly there was some degree of craziness that spread. Very hard to beat that stuff back. https://twitter.com/tim_canova/status/840810444839354368

Seriously annoyed by Clinton murder conspiracy theories. Mainly because if they were true, Anthony Weiner would be a dead man.

This paragraph from a recent post by Scott Lemieux pretty much says it all about the Podesta emails (emphases mine):

The purpose of the leaks and how Wikileaks framed them was precisely to sucker journalists into covering anodyne behavior as if it was scandalous. There are numerous factors, but one — which we also saw with respect to the Clinton Foundation — is that once editors and journalists have invested enough time in a story they’re very reluctant to conclude that Al Capone’s vault is in fact empty. It’s very hard to imagine even Clinton haters as obsessive as Fang and Greenwald writing a story about Hillary Clinton engaging in completely unexceptionable media engagement strategies any minimally competent campaign engages in if the story had been obtained from conventional sources, let alone hyping their “findings” as if they had he 21st century Pentagon Papers on their hands. (AFICT, neither particularly cared about the other Hillary Clinton EMAILS! scandal the Beltway media was rubbing its thighs bloody over.) What made Assange’s ratfucking work is that the reveal of SECRET EMAILS created an air of conspiracy around even the most inane trivia, and also played into a narrative that the DNC RIGGED the primary by [causal explanation absent.]

things i learned in this thread: blaming the victim is totally cool.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/magazine/democratic-party-election-trump.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

https://twitter.com/SeanMcElwee/status/841335564225912833

it's insane how shitty the Democratic party is

Yeah, if you're going to make *anything* a litmus test for party membership/support/resources, make it voting rights, for both moral *and* strategic reasons.

We should never vote for any Democrats because some of them are just complete suckers

Such a policy is exactly how evangelical whites got so much power in the legislature; by being merciless in withholding their votes from hypocrites

"We should never vote for any Democrats"

even i the nihilst loon of ilx doesn't practice this, so who ya arguin' with, Red Ryder?

We should never vote for any Democrats because some of them are just complete suckers

― El Tomboto, Monday, March 13, 2017 1:41 PM (seventeen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No one should ever voice any criticism of Democrats without having someone make this facile point

not to beat this horse dead and bloody again, but I really do wish that Clinton had spent less time harping on the racism/sexism angle and more focusing on how shitty/unethical a businessman Trump is. they made those pretty effective ads with people whose small businesses went under because Trump stiffed them, and decided not to show them, instead playing the same sexist remarks over and over again, which I think really started to fatigue people and make it wish it was all over

It's like ilx rly

i think the problem was that it was all over the media anyway, it's not like anyone was going to see it reframed in an ad and think "ohh she's got a point, that Hollywood Access tape was not cool..." It turned the election into a debate about whether or not that kind of shit was right or wrong, when it shouldn't have been a debate. It should have been like, well yeah he sucks of course, there's no need to address that point over and over.

and yet here we are

No, pointing out that he was an incompetent schemer as a businessman would probably have gone a long way. IMHO, the campaign stuck to his repugnant social stances and manners because that resonates inside the chamber, AND it's something Hillary was unassailable on.

If they wanted to call him an incompetent businessman she might have had to respond to accusations that she's never run a lemonade stand, etc. so they just avoided that.

The Clinton campaign wasn't dumb, or dastardly, they were risk averse and they kept to their bubble, which is bad, but they also won by 3 million votes, so really, fuck everything

it seemed like either she had to appeal to her base or turn off people on the right, and flooding the airwaves with clips of Trump saying bigoted things isn't going to do either. it wasn't like the people who voted Trump heard the Access Hollywood tape and went "hell yeah", but rather that they're just words, and they're sick of people getting offended by words. I always thought "this dude knows basically nothing about government or foreign policy and probably couldn't pass a 5th grade Civics test" was a better line of attack.

but that's what his voters wanted!

Alfred also OTM

A lot of people hate the word "hypocrisy" especially when it's used to try and make them look dumb

"this dude knows basically nothing about government or foreign policy and probably couldn't pass a 5th grade Civics test"

this is basically a pro-Trump t-shirt

But if he had been relentlessly painted as an irresponsible, bankrupt fraud, maybe things could have been different. Maybe she could have won by 6 million votes!

Fuck everything.

frogbs, who do you think Hillary's base is?

the GOP has wanted dumbfucks who know jackshit about governing since January 1981; to know shit about governing is to imply that you WANT to govern, and governing is not in the GOP's longterm plan.

I can't get why my Dem friends don't want to understand this. Politics isn't rational!

i think Dems consistently overestimate their own inherent appeal, the appeal of celebrity supporters, and underestimate the ability of more centrist conservative voters to be swayed into more liberal voting patterns (and underestimate their ability to be swayed back with strategic fearmongering.)

underestimate the ability of more centrist conservative voters to be swayed into more liberal voting patterns

the Hillary campaign overestimated Dem appeal to these so-called centrist conservatives.

i think they overestimated Hillary's appeal!

my opinion probably isn't as informed on this subject but I think the Dem message is attractive yet they've been habitually bad at putting it out nationally since....well, forever. except for Obama.