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Notes -
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/hillary-clinton-election-president-loss
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/20/why-hillary-clinton-lost/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-hillary-clinton-lost-bad-campaign-perspec-20161114-story.html
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-ol-le-kamala-harris-hillary-clinton-20190126-story.html
All deride Hillary's supposedly obvious and massive flaws as a candidate, while ignoring that she was inches from winning. Massively flawed candidates don't end up there. Massively flawed soccer teams don't lose on penalties in the world cup final, they fail to qualify for the tournament at all. Hillary was a hugely talented presidential candidate who ran a very effective campaign (especially behind the scenes and within the establishment) who lost to another hugely talented political/media savant.
2nd place finishers are always underrated in today's culture.
Maybe it's a scapegoating thing. Losing always tends to make people suddenly notice all your flaws and laser-focus on them, trying to fit them into the explanation of why you didn't come in 1st.
It's more a combination of the adulation heaped on the winner and the just world fallacy. 2017 Trump is the most powerful man in the world, 2017 HRC paid $1 for a coffee like everyone else. If that came down to luck, it makes the world too frightening for most people.
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I disagree with your Hillary point, in that I disagree with your evaluation of how hard it is to do what she did. Given how sloped the media and social media environment is, my prior is that any Democrat that doesn't win in a landslide is a schmuck.
Sure, but the primary accomplishment is beating a bunch of other Democrats. Beating them so bad, so conclusively, they didn't even show up. Hillary was a football team so fucking good that the whole rest of the division said "2016 is more of a rebuilding season for us."
Did you see who was available? They said that because it was literally true. Basically everyone's been bemoaning what Obama did the the DNC's bench since 2014.
Elsewhere in the thread, other replies insulting Trump and refuting my claim that he was a good politician, argue that the 2016 Republican primary challengers were all chuckleheads too. At some point, we have to accept that somebody somewhere is good at winning elections, after all people keep doing it. If all the mainstream Rs and Ds were really this bad at politics, the weirdo 3rd parties we all support might actually win on occasion.
Jeb was pretty uniquely bad, and had gobbled the institutional support, which made the rest of the field weird. In the end the other problem was Ted Cruz was the Trump challenger the people wanted, but none of the institutions wanted to try that until way too late.
John, My Father was a Postman, Kasich basically ego'd Trump to a smooth victory instead of what could have been an interesting match.
Highly on brand for Cruz to be disliked by those who actually work with him:
HRC didn't face those fights, because she dealt with them in advance behind closed doors. Through carrots or sticks, off camera, she prevented the pompous assholes with (D) next to their name in the senate from showing up to derail her candidacy. That's what made her unopposed coronation as the D nominee such a signal victory and mark of political talent, she lined up all that support behind her in advance without a fight. Where Barack or Kerry or Mittens had to fight tooth and nail to get the nomination from a dozen other equally ambitious candidates.
I mean, you make some good points, but I'm still confused who cleared the deck for her and why she was somehow so much better at it 8 years after failing said task to lose to a Jr. Senator from IL, who she was trouncing going into primary season. Klobuchar is one, meaningless name. She couldn't even compete with Sanders and Biden in 2020.
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Note that each of those articles were written after the fact. None of those outlets, especially not the Grauniad and Chicago Tribune, would have countenanced the possibility for Trump winning prior to November 7th 2016.
For reference here is the Culture War thread from the week of the election.
Exactly, after events happened some people were claiming that was inevitable and obvious despite claiming exactly opposite before event.
I agree with you, I'm just pointing out an obvious problem with @FiveHourMarathon's alleged evidence, and offering counter-evidence of my own. The thing about going back to the thread from the day of is that even though a lot of the more ardent Clinton supporters have since deleted their posts, you can see the shift happening in real time as Trump goes from "joke candidate who will never win" to "president-elect".
I'm not really sure what the problem is, so either it's so obvious I'm missing it or we've lost the plot here.
The whole original context of that link dump was supporting @orthoxerox comparison:
The whole point is that the newspapers (and internet blowhards) went from pre-election/prewar certainty that Clinton/Russia would win in a brutal stomping, to finger-wagging smug certainty that "everyone knew Clinton/Russia's campaign was fatally flawed and that Trump/Ukraine were guaranteed a win." With the side dish of "Trump/Ukraine supporters weren't brave smart contrarians because they were just pointing out the obvious things we all knew."
This whole "Hillary and Trump were both trash politicians" thing quickly requires that "Rubio and Cruz and Bush III and every Democrat who stayed out of the race for fear of Hillary are all Trash Politicians" and then once you start working your way down we haven't had a decent politician since like Nixon or LBJ. Clearly someone is winning all these elections, and since nobody else can, we have to assume that the winners are pretty good at something.
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Here's where you lost me.
Hillary is a good servant but a bad master, by which I mean that having her in your administration is not a bad idea, but letting her be the boss giving orders to everyone else is a bad idea. I genuinely feared that if elected she would pick a fight with Putin to show off how strong she was, and I haven't changed my mind on that since.
Her campaign was trying to copy that of Obama, with the fixed notion that "Big Data won it for him". Adulatory articles in the media and online about how sophisticated it all was, that the old days of candidates on the doorstep were gone with the Ark, how Robbie Mook (and boy did nominative determinism strike again) was a genius. The campaign, in fact, got so cocksure they spent more time knifing each other in the back as to who would get the closest access to The Empress and thus the pick of the choice spoils once she was enthroned and the handing out of plum posts was in her gift.
Both comedians and current affairs shows made great hay of laughing at the very notion of Trump even having a snowball in Hell's chance in the election. There is still great Schadenfreude to be gotten from watching the smug prognosticators ending up with egg on their faces in videos like this. How's your "it'll be interesting tomorrow night when Hillary Clinton wins that Donald Trump will have lost this election from the very first day he announced" looking now, Hillary Rosen? Or your "big beautiful brown wall", Maria Cardona?
Afterwards, of course, everyone had hindsight as to what went wrong and what she should have done and how she should have listened to Bill when he was telling her when and where to campaign. The fact is, she was not very likeable with little to no charisma as a candidate, she seemed to change her mind with every wind that blew from focus groups, and the "basket of deplorables" remark - made to a fundraising dinner for rich LGBT folk where she and they laughed at the very notion of the plebians - didn't help her at all to overcome the "scolding schoolmarm" image.
I mean, she was the architect of the Libya intervention, which went spectacularly badly. Similarly, she was in favor of Iraq II, which also went spectacularly badly. Her domestic proposals - notably Hillarycare - bombed spectacularly. She didn't have a significant record of either drafting/sponsoring major legislation while she was in the Senate, or being a particularly-effective bureaucrat while at state.
No, I don't think that having her in an administration would be a good idea.
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I think Hillary was a massively flawed candidate because it was so close. 2016 was a cripple fight, not a clash of the titans. Trump was an appalling candidate and in 2016 he didn't have incumbency or anywhere near the fully developed cult of personality he did by 2020. Clinton had a trainload of baggage, including an active FBI investigation and decades of GOP attacks. I think it's quite probable that if Tim Kaine (or almost anyone basically competent who wasn't as politically radioactive as Clinton) had been at the top of the ticket then the Democratic candidate would've won handily and we'd be talking about how weird it was that the GOP nominated an insane reality tv star as their candidate. Conversely, someone like Rubio or Jeb might've been mediocre candidates in the grand scheme of things but they probably would've mopped up Hillary.
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I find it entirely normal that journalists try to come up with all sorts of explanations for an election outcome that was relatively surprising. So the arguments in these articles don't strike me as anything extraordinary. But they aren't the equivalent of the revisionist narrative, to the extent that it even exists, that "Trump was going to win anyway".
Yes, inches from winning against someone universally derided as a laughingstock! That's hardly an argument against her being deeply flawed.
But Trump isn't universally derided. He is, in fact, immensely popular.
As far as I can tell, Trump and his presidential bid was universally derided as a laughingstock by the great majority of polite society and the mainstream media. In retrospect, we know that he was popular, that much is true.
"Demeaned by polite society" isn't the same as "universally derided". Yes, Blue Tribe -- both its left wing members and right wing members -- revile Trump. But they are not everyone.
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I guess we disagree here. If political skill is a concept that exists, Trump has it. He KOed Republican primary challengers like he was prime Tyson, one after another. He built a base of enthusiasm like nothing we've seen before or since.
That says more about the rest of the challengers than his political skills, I think.
Assuming elections are basically real (and this conversation is kinda dumb if we assume they aren't) then it's sorta bass ackwards to say that nobody who wins elections nationally or in big states is good at politics. They went through a selection process where hundreds of smart talented guys would have wanted their spot, and they won, they clearly had something the other guys didn't.
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Obama. Just like Trump, Obama's cult of personality hollowed out the infrastructure of the party he hijacked, upending more "establishment"-connected figures left, right, and center. Also like Trump, Obama's coalition was not associated with any particular policy innovations, but generally was based on vibes ("he's young! Slim! Black! At home in celebrity culture!") that eventually settled into having most relevance in culture war issues that the candidate himself historically flip-flopped on (Trump on abortion, Obama on gay marriage). The parallel isn't exact, but it's a lot stronger than it seems like it should be on the face of the matter.
Maybe it's a perspective thing, but I don't recall Obama ever having Trumpian levels of support. The biggest thing with Trump was the grassroots nature of his support, which maybe Obama never had the chance to form because the media loved him so much. Trump supporters made their own billboards for him. Obama never had that kind of spontaneous outpouring of faith, outside of the Black community.
My experience is that Obama's support among the people was equivalent to Trump's, but that Obama also had the media fawning over him, which amplified the personal charisma to legendary proportions. I say this as someone who voted for Obama when I first turned eighteen, so I was in the enthusiastic youth cohort.
Huh, maybe I just missed it in context. I found Obama's supporters to be more issue bound than Trump's have been, but I was young so who knows really.
Obama got more people praying than the Second Coming would, man. I was right there in the thick of it -- he was a rockstar, not a politician.
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This is so obvious I feel dumb for not noticing it. And Obama left the DNC amazingly unsupported by the end of his presidency, too. You kind of expect Trump to not give a shit about the GOP, but surely Obama cares about the institution of his party, right?
(I think Obama kept his email fundraising list out of the DNC's hands, but I am having trouble googling this to confirm.)
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Massively flawed candidates absolutely can get close to winning if they have found ways to use back-channels to force out opposition before elections start.
I believe that if the democrats had run Webb or Sanders they would have beaten Trump handily, but instead they ran a candidate who was literally the poster child for "Corrupt Washington insider" against a candidate who's whole brand was essentially "to hell with those guys" and were surprised when it turned out that "to hell with those guys" was a fairly widely held sentiment.
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I am not much of a Hillary Clinton fan, and I think you might be overstating her qualities: I do think that she seems to have a certain negative charisma, and unlike soccer teams competing for a spot in the World Cup final, she actually never went through the lengthy vetting at lower political levels that most Presidential candidates do Her only elective office was US Senator from NY, where she ran effectively unopposed in the Democratic primary in a state in which the Dem nominee is a virtual lock in the general election.
That being said, another data point in favor of your argument is that she did exactly as well as predicted by models based only on underlying fundamentals of the election (i.e., that ignore candidates, polls, etc).
Your description of her Senate run overstates her case a bit. New York is seen as a Democratic lock now but in 1999 it was widely believed that Rudy Giuliani was going to run for the open seat, and he was expected to beat every Democrat who had expressed interest at the time. After Clinton threw her hat into the ring the field, such as it existed, stepped aside as the party believed that only a candidate with Clinton's star power would be enough to challenge Giuliani. So right off the bat, she had the crowd cleared for her and didn't even have to run in a competitive primary. Then, Giuliani's marriage fell apart right around the time he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he decided not to run. Now she's running against Rick Lazio, who was less well-known and more conservative than Giuliani. And she underperformed here, too. Though she ended up winning by 12 points, polling was much tighter than anyone had anticipated; Lazio made it a real ballgame. More importantly, though, while 12 points is a healthy margin, Al Gore ended up winning the state on the same ballot by 25 points. In other words, a significant number of Democrats decided that they'd rather vote for a Republican nobody than vote for Mrs. Clinton. This should have been a prodrome for the future but the Democratic establishment never quite got it. It's no coincidence that when Democrats nationwide were given a choice they chose freshman Senator who had made a good speech a few years prior despite the "aura of inevitability" the party sought to create. It was no coincidence that after the part establishment sough to rectify this in 2016 by clearing the field to an unprecedented degree an old socialist who would have been a fringe candidate in any other election threatened to win the nomination, and was possibly only thwarted by the specter of superdelegates whose assumed positions made all media reports look like Clinton had the nomination locked up before the first primary.
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I agree on all your negative points, I really disliked her and most every policy she stood for. And, fwiw, when I say "Hillary" I think it's best to just include "the Clinton machine" or "Hillary's advisers" and "Bill working for Hillary" within the shorthand "Hillary." Because it's not really possible to separate them in any meaningful way. It's like using "Taylor Swift" as the shorthand for "Taylor Swift's musical production team" when talking about who tops the charts.
But I still think you're underrating the value of the behind the scenes wrangling she was able to engage in to achieve those stations of power without getting elected in an open competition. Tons of people would love to get parachuted into a safe Senate seat, she got it. She finished second in 2008 to a generational talent in Obama. She cleared the decks of primary challengers before running in 2016, her only opponents were joke candidates. Having the political skill and wherewithal to avoid having to fight a real primary is an underrated ability in America. It's like being such a dominant light-heavyweight that all your would-be challengers go up to heavy or down to middle because they already know they won't beat you. That's a singular achievement! Compare to Biden, who had to slog through a dozen idiots and a few good candidates; or Mitt Romney, who probably has a much better shot in 2012 if he doesn't get dragged for months by Santorum over his weak conservative Bona Fides.
In a similar vein, Mitch McConnell is the most talented politician of our generation, and he gets consistently underrated because it is almost all behind the scenes stuff, off camera stuff, that makes him great.
Yes, this is true; however: 1) As you note, I think this was more a function of the Clinton machine, rather than her per se; 2) I took the OP to be talking about her electability in a general election, rather than her acumen at negotiating intra-party politics and/or the [invisible primary])(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_primary)
So, ability behind the scenes, ala Mitch McConnell or someone who might well have him beat, Willie Brown is not the same as ability as a candidate.
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But is is really healthy to have such a lock on your national party that no meaningful opposition can run against you, you own them due to lending them money and having a firm grip on the pursestrings of campaign money so that you can funnel it where you want it (if the allegations are to be believed ), and your campaign is run basically on the idea that "it's my turn now, given that Obama stole my chance in 2008"?
I mean, it is great political machine manoeuvring to plan for years to run your campaign to get elected to the highest office in the land as your right, and to be able to get parachuted into a safe seat so you have the minimum necessary experience in office as yourself (rather than on the coat tails of your spouse) to run, and to have bribed/persuaded/terrorised other rivals off, but is it really good for the body politic no matter which party does it, in any country?
I doubt it's good for the long term health of the body politic, and you shouldn't throw hard sliders if you want to keep your original elbow ligaments, but we're not here for the long term we're here to win elections/baseball games. Saying someone who was a couple of lucky breaks from winning the presidency of the United States of America was a bad politician is a rabbit hole of constantly claiming that everyone is shit that leads nowhere useful. Somebody is good at winning elections because somebody keeps winning them.
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