Hillary Clinton: Classic or Dud?

by "we" you mean "ILX," not "the other people who are not white or men who voted for her."

She ran a fine campaign against an unconventional candidate against; she would've beaten any other candidate.

cross out "against"

man, your floor for "a fine campaign" surprises me.

isn't there a baseball game on or something

Way better than Dukakis, Mondale, and Kerry? Wayyyyy better than Gkre?

a fine campaign would have had a message beyond "that guy is ka-raaayzee" imo

But she didn't visit Michigan, which as we all know was the only swing-state she lost.

ok I guess "america is already great" was the other, even worse part of the messaging xp

also "I have experience, Kissinger is my friend and Nancy Reagan was an AIDS activist"

she definitely ran a campaign that would have worked against a conventional candidate. can't fault her for not adjusting, i guess

a fine campaign would have had a message beyond "that guy is ka-raaayzee" imo

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Tuesday, May 2, 2017 1:49 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

listen i looooooove to relitigate the fucking election but this received-wisdom-among-hardcore-leftists reductive ass view of her campaign is fucking stupid

what was her vision for the country beyond "third term of obama" brad

Just curious: Why isn't 'third term of obama' good enough?

i feel like people voted for obama

as their wages continued to stagnate

they voted for HIM, yes.

"third term of incremental gains for some while a widening chunk of the country burns" takes a way more skilled pol to sell imo

She would've won against a more conventional candidate.

She would've won if Comey hadn't made his late October announcement, of which there's plenty of data showing.

what was her vision for the country beyond "third term of obama" brad

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Tuesday, May 2, 2017 4:59 PM

is your name Mark Halperin?

no, thank god

"third term of Obama" is not the same message as "that guy is ka-raaayzee"

She is a policy wonk; her entire platform was built upon the idea that people should bring her problems and she would sit down with her team, study precedents and statutes, and forge a consensus-friendly answer that would benefit as many people as it could to the best of its ability. It's not a sexy platform or one that easily breaks down into soundbites but it is pretty much exactly how you need to run a government serving a plethora of needs and competing interests, not all of which are easily dismissed as cranks and unimportant.

Also, how much of that widening burning chunk of the country is due to states voting in obstructionist Republicans who do not have any ideas to bring to the table beyond trickle-down economics and "everything Democrats propose is evil and wrong because they allowed a black man to run for President"?

People who are Democrats will vote for the Democrat against this generation of nu-Reagan nihilists -- and a female Democrat. That was reason enough. It's not that hard. I'm quite sorry you can dismiss women and the blacks suspicious of Sanders so easily (and I was a fervent Sanders supporter in the primaries); they would be most likely to be hurt by a Trump administration and Congress working in sync.

But, sure, yea, fine, she shouldn't have spent so much time turning him into Darth Vader -- in part because he was.

has anyone else read Shattered yet?

fwiw unlike uhh a lot of people apparently I'm not necessarily convinced Bernie would have won

Why should we? It looks like we're writing our own versions.

xpost

she definitely ran a campaign that would have worked against a conventional candidate. can't fault her for not adjusting, i guess

― k3vin k., Tuesday, 2 May 2017 20:52 (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one of the main things to fault her campaign on, really.

DJP otm

After the last few months, a third term for Obama sounds enticing. Or, for that matter, a third term for Bill. Or first term for Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, or Hillary. Maybe none of those is what we would design from scratch, but any of them would represent an improvement over Yamilton.

But sure, yeah, let's rev up the neg-on-Hillz machine anew.

what was her vision for the country beyond "third term of obama" brad

just out of curiosity, what was McCain's vision beyond "third term of GWB"?

(not being sarcastic here, I really don't remember)

In the last three months she ran against a candidate she portrayed as an incoherent racist and a buffoon who represented a threat to the world.

Guess she was wrong.

i don't know if bernie would have won either. probably had similar chances, maybe less, who knows

the suspicion regarding bernie was afaict due to the fact that he was viewed as a carpetbagger -- which isn't even wrong, it was his first time running for national office so obv he didn't campaign much in the south unlike some people who spent the last 20 years running for president with longstanding ties to the community. i understood the reason for their relative popularity with the dem base and didn't really begrudge them for preferring hillary. but i don't feel as though i am obligated to agree with their choice

sarcasm deems

when Obama first got elected he was saying he would have voted against Iraq. in his book, it was all over his website. it was a big reason he was so popular.

thks, i figured it was a strange one but americans are bad at humour so yknow

brad I fully understand that all this relitigation is tiresome as fuck, I do hope (and I think most of us can agree on this?) that if anything good comes of this mess it's that there's a broader field of candidates next time around and someone who isn't Sanders is around to eg fight for single payer, higher minimum wage, and maybe, just maybe, not being a gigantic hawk (Sanders also sucked on that)

people should bring her problems and she would sit down with her team, study precedents and statutes, and forge a consensus-friendly

so, "all the best people"

what happened to 'campaigning in poetry'?

i just flipped today seeing a clip of her on CNN going "Comey, Assange etc". Disappear.

Comey and Assange should both def be disappeared

brad I fully understand that all this relitigation is tiresome as fuck, I do hope (and I think most of us can agree on this?) that if anything good comes of this mess it's that there's a broader field of candidates next time around and someone who isn't Sanders is around to eg fight for single payer, higher minimum wage, and maybe, just maybe, not being a gigantic hawk (Sanders also sucked on that)

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Tuesday, May 2, 2017 2:25 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i also hope for this

How exactly do you run against a candidate like Trump? Outside of visiting the Midwest, what should she have done differently? The campaign was so strange. Every single thing Trump said or did was national news, while Hillary's dense policy speeches got no coverage whatsoever. Trump could say something stupid like "Obama and Hillary founded ISIS!" and talking heads would debate whether or not that was true for an entire day. Trump could get positive coverage by not tripping over his dick for 24 hours, whereas nearly every single story about Hillary was negative. Trump's supporters didn't care that he was unqualified or a bigot - in fact, they loved him for it. What do you do?

move left to inspire some of the 45% that doesn't vote imo

to summarize somebody's tweet i posted a few months ago, "We're going to give you a job and let you see the doctor."

Xpost a lot of the infighting can be attributed back to the spareness of that primary field. Other serious candidates, (especially pushing more progressive challenges) vying for it would have diluted the false dynamic, excessive villainizing that took hold.

yeah I'm clearly no Hillary fan but the DNC are many orders dumber

How exactly do you run against a candidate like Trump? Outside of visiting the Midwest, what should she have done differently? The campaign was so strange. Every single thing Trump said or did was national news, while Hillary's dense policy speeches got no coverage whatsoever. Trump could say something stupid like "Obama and Hillary founded ISIS!" and talking heads would debate whether or not that was true for an entire day. Trump could get positive coverage by not tripping over his dick for 24 hours, whereas nearly every single story about Hillary was negative. Trump's supporters didn't care that he was unqualified or a bigot - in fact, they loved him for it. What do you do?

If the Clintons were as nefarious and connected to shady dealings as people want to think they are, they would have had Trump killed.

move left to inspire some of the 45% that doesn't vote imo

Clinton DID move left and was roundly criticized by people on the left for it.

Xpost a lot of the infighting can be attributed back to the spareness of that primary field. Other serious candidates, (especially pushing more progressive challenges) vying for it would have diluted the false dynamic, excessive villainizing that took hold.

Clinton's biggest weakness as a candidate is that it did not actually matter what she said or did; a significant percentage of the voters who would agree with a large amount of the things her platform represented were going to reject her out of hand or look for reasons not to support her because she is Hillary Clinton (as evidenced by this thread).

I mean an actual left candidate, not someone whose rhetoric pivots on occasion

yes, we didn't believe a goddamn word of her Bernie impersonation

AND, so far it seems the takeaway from this election that is ringing true with white (male) Democrats is "we need to be more racist in order to get votes", which is going to lose them so many of the votes they already have that we should all really just start hoarding now and wait for 11 more years of blatantly incompetent Republican government to roll through the country before voters start thinking "maybe we should pay more attention to the ramifications of these policies rather than just following whoever yells at brown people the loudest".

imo Dems don't need to "win back" white racist blue collar voters as much as they need to energize and turn out *other* groups of voters - youth, latinos, etc. I'm always irritated when people act like the electorate is a fixed thing, instead of something that shifts and mutates depending on who's on the ballot, who's enfranchised, and who's motivated.

ie as if you can't win a majority in Michigan unless you get some old, uneducated white racists to vote for you

How exactly do you run against a candidate like Trump? Outside of visiting the Midwest, what should she have done differently?

I think she could have tried to appear more human, less scripted - more 'delete your account' tweets, unprepared zings in the debate etc.

the fact that people feel so removed from hillary clinton the human being made it easier to attach all kinds of nonsense to her, whereas trump's 'realness' let him get away with murder