And it should not have been. A sufficiently worthwhile, hard fighting Democratic candidate could have blown through it. But, the former Senator from Wall Street could not.
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If you are arguing that a obstacle is an excuse to lose, then you will always lose. Life is nothing but obstacles. People come from wars and make it without anything but getting kicked in the teeth, and yet they are grateful for making it.
This whine-fest has gone far enough. Instead of being grateful that Clinton had big, unprecedented advantages, people are stewing. She had it far easier than many other female candidates who actually won their elections. If people were truly progressive and liberal, they would admit she made mistakes that caused her to lose…but then learn from them and go back in the ring, knowing more than they did before. People are working themselves in a frenzy, making a bad situation worse. Clinton is not a victim. She tried and didn’t make it. We all have enemies, obstacles, and all sorts of garbage hanging over our heads at every given moment. For some of us, we get off on chaos trying to smack us around because we smack back. Sometimes we win, and sometimes we lose, but we learn, modify our behaviour and get back in the saddle.
People should move away from this useless holding pattern because it doesn’t help. I don’t know when excuses of scary monsters became such a posh security blanket, but that blanket reeks!
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That sounds suspiciously similar to people who blame disenfranchised minority communities for their own situations so they don’t have to deal with systemic discrimination.
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I seriously doubt that you will find very many people on this forum making such a claim; she’s hardly a “beloved” figure here.
I don’t know why it’s so hard for so many people to just accept that it was the combination of many levels of fuckery; including misogyny, bigotry, nativism, xenophobia, ineptitude in the Democratic campaign, political tone deafness, voter apathy and low information voting/protest voting.
Why so many people seem to insist upon seeking out ‘one sole cause’ for this current clusterfuck when it was clearly a perfect storm of shitty factors is beyond me.
You’re right about one thing though, if nothing else; blame solves no problems, and it’s pointless to argue over whose fault it is now.
It really does, but I chose to ignore the apparent tone; in hopes of avoiding another ginormous wall of TLDR.
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Your heroic daydream is exactly what she did do, for decades, since long before you were born. Yes, her campaign made a number of mistakes, but I’ve never seen one that didn’t. It’s not enough of a reason to explain the outcome.
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You are really flogging the straw man arguments here, likening one of the most privileged women on the planet to beleaguered, under-valued minority communities.
Hillary Clinton lost in large part due to her unseemly and obvious disdain for the majority of the electorate. I voted for her without enthusiasm, because my choice had been knocked out in the primaries, and my lack of enthusiasm was shared by millions.
Her ‘I’m owed it’ attitude lost her the election. She is one of a number of upper echelon politicians who’ve failed to achieve the Presidency due to the stink of entitlement and the poor campaigning it engenders (i.e. Bob Dole, Al Gore, and the elder Bush’s second term). Perhaps one of the best arguments against the impact of misogyny is exactly how she lost: due to hubris, like so many powerful uber-men before her.
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You are aware that for most of the history of our nation women weren’t even allowed to vote, right?
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[quote=“LapsedPacifist, post:28, topic:92409”]
If Warren had run, she would have won. Easy.[/quote]
Lady Catherine de Bourgh has said much the same thing.
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Over 90 years ago, in federal elections, yes. In many western states we’ve had the vote for more than half of the nation’s existence. (Note the formal removal of the vote from women at the turn of 19th century). The elite among women in that era were – then as now – far better off than beleaguered, under-valued minorities. You are relentless in trying to drag the comments away from the characteristics Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump share: Great wealth. Public acclaim. Fawning acolytes. Tony schooling. Age and eminence.
Misogyny is real and it impacted her campaign. But, she was running against a clownish ape of a man, and lost on her own. Irrespective of Putin’s meddling.
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Yes, you’re right. And how nice, that we have such a long history of rampant misogyny and sexism in American culture, if not politics, from which to draw such conclusions.
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I don’t think you are going to understand how things went wrong for your party unless you do unbiased analysis of people’s motivations. You cannot realistically start with the default assumption that anyone who disagrees with you has to be misinformed or evil/racist/misogynist. In this election, you cannot even assume that people who voted for the other candidate did so because they really like that candidate.
I did not oppose Clinton because of misogyny. I would have loved an opportunity to vote for someone like Anne Richards. But she cannot run any more. Golda Meir was also not available.
And I don’t like Trump. To me, he seems like a 10 year old’s vision of how a tycoon would look and act.
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Every social & economic factor played a role in her loosing. It was simply a horrendous election cycle.
The idea being put forward here is not “every person who voted against Clinton was primarily motivated by misogyny.”
The idea being put forward here is “misogyny was a substantial force in shaping this election and a major reason for Clinton’s loss.” I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever to make me question this. There were other factors at play in the election as well, but those factors are not what this article is about.
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The economy is growing, liberal social views are more popular than ever, and Trump was a historically unpopular candidate. Plus Clinton had worked to secure every institutional advantage possible within the political establishment.
Yes, misogyny played a role in the election; the blatant double standard of Trump’s sexual history makes that obvious. It may even have been a large enough factor that a candidate as bad as Clinton might have succeeded if not for that disadvantage.
Obama was an unusually good politician, who managed to get elected despite the disadvantage he faced in dealing with a racist electorate. Clinton was an unusually bad politician, whose failure to get elected was the result of a vast host of factors in which misogyny was only one part.
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[quote=“Wanderfound, post:54, topic:92409”]
Obama was an unusually good politician… Clinton was an unusually bad politician
[/quote]I don’t know how one holds this view.
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The election of Obama demonstrates that Obama was an adroit enough campaigner to win despite racism. The non-election of Hillary demonstrates…well, you know.
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Speaking in terms of electability rather than policy.
Obama was an inspiring speaker who managed to successfully project the illusion that he was much less conservative than he really is.
Clinton herself admits that she lacks talent at electoral politics.
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Oh please; don’t try to paint her as a terrible campaigner when she was the first woman in history to win the nomination of a major political party. (And I say that as someone who voted for her opponent in the primary.)
She needed to successfully overcome a lot of deep-rooted sexism just to get in the game. And in the end she still got more votes than any white man who ever ran for the office.
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Liberal views are strongest in cities which is where most of the people are. Which is way Clinton won popular vote. It’s also where most of the diversity is in relation to race/ethnicity & culture.
Economically, the government & GDP account for job creation, it doesn’t account for which jobs are being made. As it is known that the middle class has not had a growth in salary the same why the upper/elite class has. So even though at a macro level the economy is doing fine at a micro level it is stagnate.
And it is because she was establishment that ended up alienating the voters. There was a lower voter turn out this election which only amplifies the fact that people felt let down on both sides -but- the trumps felt like a score to settle.
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Ok, that makes perfect sense. Obama is one of the best campaigners there has ever been in the history of the United States, he even turned his background into a well-pitched strategy to court superdelegates by claiming and following through with opening the door to an unprecedented Democratic strategy to bring people to the polls. It worked so well that the GOP was able to turn it against him immediately and cut deep into his 2008 base with ridiculous conspiracies and built power from the ground up, easily outspending Democrats (with the message of saving money) to take all levels of congress and legislature and massaging the 2010 census into North Carolina’s voting districts.
Where you and I agree is that it will take someone like Ellison at the helm of the DNC to effectively use a strategy to counter this damage and make things more fair with the will of the people, but Obama was only great at winning campaigns for Obama and not the party.
EDIT
I should mention that the GOP strategy was to prey on race openly, both in attacking minorities and in convincing poor white people they were not poor and it was the others that caused their lives to suck.
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