Obama won because he managed to convince people that he represented change. The rest of the party never pulled that off [1], and Clinton didn’t even try.
[1] Unsurprising, because they don’t.
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Yeah, but neither did he. He just was very convincing.
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Yup.
The transition of the GOP into a full-fledged fascist party is new, but they’ve been a blatantly racist party for decades.
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Yeah.
Folks really should’ve paid more attention to his book. He was quite up front about his non-radicalism in that.
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Now I just feel like we have had this exact conversation before 
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So…Warren 2020, everyone?
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I’m in if she is, but frankly it would be hard to blame her if she decided not to put herself through that ugly mess.
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I think she just said she was going to run for reelection in 2018, so she’s definitely up for staying in politics until 2024, at least.
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Yes, but putting herself out there as a target in a nationwide presidential campaign is a whole new level of unpleasantness.
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I live in Pennsylvania, where Hillary Clinton lost by a shit thin margin.
Running against Obama 08’, Bill Clinton was 4 blocks from my house on worn old aluminum sided house making the case for Hillary to an entire neighborhood full of people. They loved it.
Fast forward 2016. Clinton does little outside of “safe” zones. They spent a shit ton of money on useless online spam advertising, but provided ZERO F**KING SIGNS. All you saw, wherever you went was Trump signs. The psychological result of no Clinton signs can’t be understated in my opinion.
I went to see her speak towards the end. They picked tiny urban venues. Long lines of people in the cold turned away. The campaign feared a story about how nobody showed up. There were people standing in the cold for 3 hours, we couldn’t even get a damn wave.
Was there misogyny in this election? Absolutely. To an absurd and repulsive degree. But having been on the frontline where the battle was lost I say unquestionably that she was a moronic candidate that deserved to loose.
Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, and Walter Mondale. What next great self aggrandizing seat cushion must we be forced to choke down next while they simultaneously collapse in flames?
On the other hand we have Carter, Clinton and Obama who at least did their best to perform the traditional american “awe shucks” voting ritual long enough to get the job done.
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Clinton kinda ran a bad campaign, strategy wise. I saw it characterized as hubris, the assumption that she’d win, and the poll data definitely backed that up. Outside of 538 which gave Trump, what, 25% chance, and so many people thought that was nuts, virtually nobody had a plausible scenario where Trump would win. And who needs data, just look at the damn guy, if elected there’s no question he’d be the worst leader we’ve had in two hundred years. Who would possibly vote for that kind of incompetence? Which brings me to…
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Many of us really, really underestimated the degree to which a sizable portion of the population just hated Hillary. I mean fuckin’ hated her guts.
Whether #2 is rational or sexism based I have no idea. I get it. In the end, it came down to too many people just hating Hillary’s guts. I don’t agree with that, I don’t think she was any worse than a hundred other career politicians, but fine. Whatever. It’s over and done. I just wish the Republicans could have mustered someone, freakin’ anyone, that wasn’t the worst president in the last 200 years.
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Was that really that much of a factor, though?
Trump got basically the normal GOP base, the same folks that voted for Shrub. Clinton got the normal Dem base, minus the extra working class voters that Obama brought in, plus a few million extra (justifiably) panicked middle-class liberals in the coastal cities.
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From the post-election analyses I’ve seen, when they interviewed the undecided voters, it was cited frequently. They hated her, to the point that Trump became an option.
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I’m not denying the possibility of what you’re arguing, but everything in that link says that Trump was much more unpopular than Clinton. And it doesn’t say anything about undecided voters.
I don’t doubt that the GOP base hated Clinton with a burning passion. But they hated Obama too, and I’m not sure that it swung many votes. Those folks were never going to vote Democrat.
Clinton’s unpopularity amongst Dems helped give Bernie a chance, but it doesn’t seem to have cost her much of the normal pre-Obama Dem base. The fear of Trump seems to have largely countered the personal unpopularity factor. She did a lot better than Kerry, and he was mocked more than hated.
Were genuine “undecided” voters a significant factor in this election? I can see a voter being undecided between voting for one candidate or not voting at all, but it’s hard to imagine any remotely sane voter being undecided between Trump and Clinton near election time.
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It helps a lot when every other Democrat of consequence stays out of the race (until a little known curmudgeon who’s not even a Democrat shows up and nearly beats her), and when the party machinery puts a five pound thumb on the scales in her favor.
Given that the DNC had been taken over by the Clinton family and their hangers on in the same way that a caterpillar is taken over by a parasitic wasp, it would have been damn near impossible for her to lose the nomination. Nonetheless, she gave it a good try.
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Actually, it doesn’t, but why let facts get away with your personal attacks? I am a woman and I am a feminist, and I am sick and tired of alleged progressives patronizing women, wrapping it all up in hand-holding. You are not fooling anyone with a brain.
Where did the Clinton apologists get taken for a ride? On the Crybaby Express? Get off that track because it’s a trap. Do people actually think they come off as smart and more enlightened than others by making things sound more complicated than they actually are?
And do they actually understand the concept of feminism, because it sounds as if there are a whole whack of sexists pretending they are progressive, but their reaction to Clinton’s loss is very demeaning to women.
Because they would rather infantilize a grown woman who lost an election by making her sound like a poor little girl getting bullied by the big kids on the playground. It is not women are equal to men with their help, but women are equal to men — period. Women own their own victories, but they also own their own defeats. Just like men. Clinton won the popular vote. Millions of people voted for the woman. She got endorsements from very powerful people. The POTUS was stumping for her like nobody’s business. She lost all the same because she doesn’t know how to fight. She behaved like someone who got things because others gave it to her all her privileged life, and, you know what? It showed. She is not a street fighter. She left her defences down by not campaigning in vulnerable areas, and Trump punched her where her guard wasn’t up.
It’s just like boxing. You keep your guard down in the ring where you absolutely know that there is nothing but punches flying, and then blame someone else for finding an opening you left unguarded and then hit you there? You handed that whack to your opponent; just own up to it because if you keep denying it, then you are never going to change your behaviour and you are going to lose every time.
Misogyny did not shape that election. Mental laziness and arrogance did. This patronizing treatment of women who fail in their goals is nauseating. Women cannot progress if they don’t own their mistakes. They can never learn, grow, or change if they can’t defeat their own monsters or face their own failings or see reality. If we can’t change and we fail, then we are not worthy of trying again and again. Feminism is about not being hampered by failure and when you have knuckleheads writing that women are incapable of taking on misogyny and are forever trapped by it, you have a group of people setting women back.
And they have no right to sabotage us like that.
Men are allowed to fail and try again individually and as a collective. Men study the victories and defeats of other men and use history as their maps. A woman fails and it is all a vast right-wing conspiracy that the misogynists are more powerful, smarter, and capable, and women can never be seen as less than perfect; so she is shackled by her past, never being allowed to grow as future contenders are automatically dismissed because women are seen as weaker than men.
Women need experience so they can improve their methods and mindsets. We are stuck in some demented fairy princess hell where a woman is a prisoner of her own environment because she can never grow as a human being since the scary monsters will always win despite the fact she is “perfect”. What a horrible lie and rig.
Well, guess what? We are not fairy princesses. We are not sheltered little girls or delicate Victorian ladies or damsels in distress who can’t take criticism or are so mentally fragile, that we are unteachable. Women can’t progress if we are sheltered from facing the sting of losing a brawl, prevented from going back and reflect on our newfound experience, and then try again, perfecting how to obtain and use power in a post-progressive world that works to our natural thoughts and feelings. Women don’t have their own Sun Tzu or even Alinsky. We are in the dark where men have hundreds of years of a head start in that regard. Those texts did not wallow how some opponent was going to shape their battleground — they were about taking your reality regardless of how rotten it is and making it work for you.
So enough blubbering in your weed cloud about how some big meanies exercised their democratic right to choose someone else and didn’t fall for your sophistry. Stop sabotaging us with manipulative Vox-aganda that treats women as girls. Clinton screwed up big time. The end. You don’t lobby for a job that requires you to exercise power against obstacles and then your apologists claim you are powerless against obstacles. Then why are you campaigning? To show up the boy in the fifth grade who called you a snot with germs? And if women are so ineffectual against misogynists, then why did you recruit one to run for president? Was it a pity move or was she some sort of window-dressing to make the left look more enlightened than the right?
Because that is what all that wallowing and temper tantrums are implying and it is becoming increasingly offensive.
And the GOP are going to take full advantage of this misguided immaturity for all it is worth. No wonder they got control of every position of power that matters when their rivals were talking themselves into a defeatist and helpless attitude. Worse, there are too many people attacking and dismissing those who are questioning their whimpering.
Stop infantilizing women. Stop patronizing them. Stop lying to them by telling them they are not making mistakes that are preventing them from succeeding. Stop enabling delusions that are holding women back.
Women are not idiots. They are more than capable to of refining their theories and strategies to be more effective and accurate ones. Once upon a time not that long ago, women couldn’t even vote. We defeated the misogynists then when we had to face reality and then we changed that reality one brawl at a time, winning more and more battles before we won that war. It’s time to face reality again, and making excuses for losing a critical battle just delays the inevitable.
And Vox needs some serious lessons in reality. If that poorly thought-out essay was supposed to be taken seriously, it missed the mark, and now thanks to that sophistry, all I have are visions of Clinton being a contestant on Wipeout, getting all wet because she got bounced by the Big Balls…
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Up until 2008, the sample size of women making a serious run for the office was zero.
Since then, the sample size is two. HRC 2008, and HRC 2016. 0 for 2.
Before we conclude that misogyny is an impassible barrier, rather than an difficulty which can be overcome by the right candidate, we need to re-run the experiment with some non-HRC samples.
I guess the attempted subtlety of my comment on this upthread was a mistake. I’ll try to spell it out more carefully in future.
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Well said. You are clearly causing a few ungoodthink meters here to peg at doubleplus.
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You are an excellent example of why people hate “feminists”. Whether you are one or not, you say you are and then present facile and twisted arguments pretending that reality doesn’t exist. And nothing new, even. Nothing worth responding to.
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Up until 2008, the sample size of women making a serious run for the office was zero
Any run should be considered serious.
The misogyny directed at women that didn’t make it as far was present as well. In the past two cycles it’s easy to recall how Michele Bachmann, Jill Stein, and Carly Fiorina all were characterized negativly to some degree with the misogynistic ‘crazy woman’ label.
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