You started the discussion by implying the United States was responsible for Qaddafi’s murder/assassination, but you’ve offered no proof and you won’t/can’t explain how your vague “western” qualifier includes but does not include the United States. Out with it, please–your extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Due to her hawkish interventionism, her willingness to sacrifice popular liberal causes to pragmatic service of corporate powerbrokers, sexism and ageism among the voting age population, and (most of all) decades of relentless and undeserved* demonization by right wing political media, Hillary Clinton is an incredibly divisive figure. Almost any other Democratic candidate could have beaten Donald Trump, and if through direct divine intervention she had been miraculously elected, her government would have been more spinlocked and less capable than any administration of my lifetime.
It’s not entirely (or even mostly) her fault, but she is not a good candidate for high office, and never has been.
* in my opinion, of course, as is everything I’ve written here.
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I predicted a Trump win myself, which made me a target for ridicule before the election, and for rage afterwards.
Correctly predicting the Democratic party’s self-sabotage doesn’t disprove my opinion; it supports it.
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She also could’ve beaten Trump, if it weren’t for the Russians, Comey, and Assange and co (and various other useful idiots). Not that she was the perfect candidate or anything, but it was certainly not all her own fault. And nor were other candidates guaranteed to beat Trump either, I don’t think Bernie would have been a shoe-in either.
When the primaries were still ongoing (but towards the end, maybe 2-3 weeks prior to CA) a friend and ran the current demo numbers, and applied historical voting patterns (basic assumptions, i.e. vote share nominees receive from party members.)
The numbers looked terrible for Clinton, no matter how we tried to massage them. Essentially, she needed a historic win among independents, whereas Trump merely needed to win I’s by a few points. For many of the reasons you’ve already mentioned, this was clearly an insurmountable condition.
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It definitely wasn’t, the national polling was pretty much accurate at the end of the day (one of the reasons the polling got the result wrong was they didn’t bother to do much of it in the states that proved decisive). But there was a sharp tightening of the national polls right after the Comey statement just before the election, if that hadn’t happened she would have had a fairly comfortable EC win (even if it would have been still a lot tighter than expected in those states no-one expected her to lose). My main takeaway from all of that wasn’t that she was a poor candidate (though again, I don’t think she was perfect), but more than the public are very easily manipulated by inconsequential nonsense.
Right there with you.
This, also, was a known quantity from well before day 1.
Clinton had 30 YEARS of baggage to tack every new allegation onto- No matter what anyone could have possibly come up with, they would have been able to find a (real or fabricated) prior situation in her history to tie it to. It made anything thrown at her look like a recurring pattern. It’s not extremely difficult to anticipate that just maybe that may make her a high risk candidate.
Fuck, I’m not even going to question whether she was a bad person for the job. ALL I WANT at this point is for the Hillary supporters to admit that yes, they KNEW THE RISKS- That they were aware of the tactical challenges of dealing with the polarization, degree of opposition, and amount of existing negative press, and believed they could convince people to change their minds about all of it.
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Trump had 50.
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and all we needed was one person to break their NDA and release that tape. smh.
The flip side of that is that when someone’s political career has survived 30 years of relentless scrutiny you can be reasonably assured there isn’t going to be a huge surprise scandal from their past to throw off the balance of the election at the last minute. And in fact no new scandal DID surface; the opposition just kept repeating “BENGHAZEEEMAILS” over and over.
I voted Bernie in the primaries but I suspect I still would have learned some unflattering and problematic things about him had he been subjected to the mud-slinging scrutiny of a general election campaign.
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And much worse, and almost all deserved- But we’re not talking about him because nobody predicted him as the GOP nominee back when she was making her initial plans to run.
I’m talking the initial choice to throw her hat into the ring, and the DNC deciding to back her on it.
That is true, but it also means that you’re starting from a position where everybody has already made up their mind about your candidate.
This is great if they universally have a 70% approval rating, but obviously a steep uphill battle at best when it’s anything lower than 55%.
edit:
Which was really the thing that scared me about her as a candidate- Say what you will about the legitimacy of her detractors, but those people are fanatical about how much they hate her. Like, even compared with Obama, they literally view her as the devil incarnate. I could never imagine a scenario where the left managed to whip up as much Pro-Hillary frenzy as there was opposing her.
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The Democratic Party should totally nominate somebody with as much baggage as possible in 2020, just to test this theory again. Who could they get?
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Well, Hillary, obviously.
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Jimmy Carter is still alive, and eligible to run again. Great idea!
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Anthony Weiner!
Who else would obviously be such a disaster that they will be MAGICALLY IMMUNIZED against SURPRISE disasters? There must be more examples. This is such a great strategy.
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But this wasn’t what happened, look at my comment a few posts back, the polling differences from the weeks in the run up to the election showed that not everyone had made up their mind. At the start of every US election each candidate basically has a minimum of 30-40% in the bag from party loyalists. Event Trump, human pond scum that he is, started with that base as a minimum.
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I don’t know what to tell you then. Like I said, the analysis was made sometime in May, looong before Comey. IMO, this election was all about how the independent vote went- party ID on both sides were at historic lows, barely more than half the electorate combined.
That was exactly why we weighted our analysis with historical patterns. Typically, candidates receive ~92-93% of affiliated voters, which held true or closely so in this election as well. All across the rustbelt, Trump won with independents, trouncing Clinton in Ohio for the exclamation point (and really, really affirming my decision to never go home.)
tldr: Our hypothesis was that Clinton needed to win yuge with I’s. Over the course of the election, she never once hit those numbers in polls- LR trends of Clinton amongst I’s were shaped like gentle waves, never really spiking in either direction. For many reasons, amongst them the ones @Medievalist mentioned, I concluded that she could not possibly gain the ground she needed. Her tires were flat, and it showed in her campaign’s absence from nearly every key state.
I don’t think Clinton’s a bad person, at least in the sense that she certainly believes that her efforts are for good. I don’t think she’s a very good politician, however, and her lack of political instincts blatantly apparent to me at least, up to and including her most recent tv appearance. It does not help that she appears to be surrounded by yes-folk. I sincerely believe that if Clinton had not run from the start, any number of Democrats, a dozen at least, would have beat Trump. Sanders might not even have run at all, or at least a much more marginal impact. Her insistence on running made a legitimate contest of ideas in the Democratic party at large impossible, and I don’t think that costs from the decision have been fully accounted for yet. Party approval ratings are terrible right now, as bad or worse than Trumps, an absolutely absurd yet very telling fact.
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This was the argument that Clinton supporters made, and it really wasn’t a bad argument until it was proved wrong.
Now that the election is over and lost, maybe we can stop dumping on Clinton? The Democratic party has never been a pacifist party, and while Democratic presidents from Roosevelt on have been willing to intervene aggressively in foreign affairs, that willingness - however misguided - has been based on trying to right wrongs, not on manifest destiny or greed or expression of testosterone as with the other party.
As for the economic policy, like anyone on the left I deplored the rise of the DLC, but I see its support of global banking interests and the rest of its economic policy as based on a genuine belief that this is good for the economy and ultimately for the people, not on the pure greed and love of class stratification that characterizes the other side. The Clintons, Al Gore, Al From, Sam Nunn, Harold Ford, even Dick Gephardt, these are all people with whom I have had strong policy disagreements, but they were/are all dedicated public servants who don’t hate poor people and don’t think the function of government is to redirect capital from the people into the pockets of the God-appointed few.
HRC is a centrist mainstream Democrat with a lifetime of public service and an unimpeachable track record as social progressive, and doesn’t deserve this continued criticism, as legitimate as it was to raise it during the primaries.
[quote=“M_Dub, post:10, topic:100676”]
The United States didn’t assassinate Qaddafi.[/quote]
Well, we tried, but that was under Reagan.
I said it in '86, and I’ll say it now: I don’t think the US should be flying into other countries to kill elected leaders, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over Qaddafi’s death.
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[quote=“Medievalist, post:22, topic:100676”]
Almost any other Democratic candidate could have beaten Donald Trump
[/quote]I think more accurately, “almost any other Democratic candidate could have won Michigan.” I think there is a huge underestimation on the GOP’s interference in PA voting, and the fact that OH is deep red at this point. I mean, a democrat would have had to flip a red state to win the election deep. Even WI looks closer than it really was with their entirely GOP government from state to federal.
[quote=“caze, post:25, topic:100676”]
She also could’ve beaten Trump, if it weren’t for the Russians, Comey, and Assange and co (and various other useful idiots). Not that she was the perfect candidate or anything, but it was certainly not all her own fault. And nor were other candidates guaranteed to beat Trump either, I don’t think Bernie would have been a shoe-in either.
[/quote]HRC’s campaign certainly had the worst luck of any campaign I can remember (she even caught pneumonia that caused her to pass out in public too, and the far-right media was already passing around conspiracies of body doubles and health problems), and historically campaigns have been her weak point (not shocking) despite being very capable by all accounts once in a position.
But she also fucked up a lot and the people she considered to be her most capable campaign managers did an even worse job by hiding the truth from her, and Trump had a shockingly good data-driven team. Trump’s team realized he just needed to be racist in the Midwest and Florida a bunch of times to win more votes than other GOP candidates.
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On topic:
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Greenwald might as well be any Fox news talking head when it comes to Hillary Clinton. He attacks her nearly constantly, and pretty much no matter what the topic is even after the election. He’s a very smart guy, and he has plenty of good points but it gets stale.
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