Shadow1980 said:
Well, she isn't completely wrong.
I will say that personal responsibility definitely cannot be ignored. A large part of why she lost can easily be attributable to running a terrible campaign. Most notably, she didn't make enough visits to important swing states. The "Blue Wall" was always made of thin material; while Michigan and Pennsylvania did go consistently Democratic from 1992 to 2012, and Wisconsin from 1998 to 2012, they were usually by narrow margins. Obama got the biggest margins of victory, but he was a damn good candidate. There's a reason why Republican candidates still campaigned heavily in those states even though Bush Sr. was the last to pick up any of those three.
She also didn't do enough to counter Trump's focus on jobs in the Rust Belt. Trump's overt appeals to racists got him huge brownie points with his base, but you don't win elections with just your base. You have to appeal to independents/undecided voters to get them to vote for you. While Trump did get an overall lower share of the vote than Romney did in 2012, that wasn't evenly distributed, and he saw huge improvements over Romney in the Rust Belt, a region where blue collar workers have seen the factories close up and their jobs move overseas. There's a reason it's called the Rust Belt, after all. Say what you want about whether or not that
But there's more to it than running a terrible campaign. The Clintons have been Public Enemy Number One among Republicans for the past 25 years. Some criticisms may or may not have been legitimate, but most of it has been a witch hunt. We still hear about Whitewater to this day (even though Ken Starr basically exonerated them) and you couldn't go a day in 2016 without "Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!" and "What about her emails?". We still hear people refer to outright conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and "The Clintons murdered Vince Foster!", which are often spoken of as absolute truths rather than wild and fantastic allegations with no basis in reality. I have never seen a specific Democrat hated so much. The Clintons, and Hillary in particular, have become convenient folk devils for the right, and they've stayed consistently on message for many years trying to tell anyone who would listen that the Clintons are the worst Americans ever.
Perhaps Hillary's biggest mistake wasn't so much running a sub-par campaign, but running for president at all. She had to have known that the Republicans, and especially a troll like Trump, would do everything in their power to drag her through the mud. At minimum, she should have run the most serious and diligent campaign of her life. Actually, let me one-up myself here: she should have campaigned harder than any other presidential candidate ever, period. Trump may have been and still is deeply unpopular, but Clinton knew there was a lot of baggage attached to her family name. Of course, there's still an argument to be made that being on the defensive constantly would have been a bad move as well, but any presidential election with Hillary Clinton, even if it had been 2008, would have been all about her and would have been constant attacks from her opponents, and would have been a largely defensive one no matter what.
But all that being said, our shitty electoral system can't be dismissed as a factor. Yeah, yeah "She knew the rules of the game," blah, blah. It's still a game with shitty rules. There's probably a damn good reason why no other nation with an executive president, nor any state in the union, has an electoral college. It's a shitty system that exists purely because of politics and compromise, not because it was a great idea conceived by wise, nearly godlike men. Even most Republicans thought the electoral college should be abolished back when Obama was President. But then came the night of Nov. 8, 2016, upon which time they suddenly they fell in love with it. I wonder why the sudden 180... The election of 2016 is probably the best case for serious electoral reform since the Compromise of 1877.
Finally, there's the Bernie Bros who either decided to vote third-party or sit at home on election day. I've never seen that much butthurt over a candidate losing the primary in my lifetime. It's not like the Dems pulled a Hubert Humphrey and put in a candidate that primary voters didn't support. Hillary got the most delegates. Bernie did better than anyone expected and showed that America may be ready for a real left-wing populist, but, unlike Obama, he never had the support of a majority of Democratic primary voters. Bernie Bros can make up all the excuses they want, but even in a squeaky clean primary Bernie would have lost. And when he lost, any real progressive worth his salt would have bit the bullet and pulled the lever for Hillary Rodham Clinton on election day, because no reasonable, thinking person who's left-of-center would ever think that she would be just as bad as Trump.
Those Bernie Bros either forgot the lesson of 2000, or were too young to remember that election, or they just don't care. Ideological litmus tests are largely bullshit. "Hillary isn't a true liberal" is a refrain of "Al Gore isn't a true liberal." The Bernie Bros who voted third party or sat at home because their guy didn't win the primaries are just as responsible for Trump as Nader voters in 2000 were for Bush. Elections aren't for pitching electoral temper tantrums over your guy not winning the primaries. You vote for the candidate who you agree with the most in the primaries, but if they don't win, come the general election you should still vote for the major party candidate that's closest to you, and if you're left-of-center, that's going to be the Democrat. I for one voted for Sanders in the primary, but come election day, I still voted for Hillary with no hesitation or reservation, because whatever her flaws were, whatever issues I may have disagreed with her on, I knew Trump would be infinitely worse, and lo and behold I keep seeing myself proven right every day that passes with Trumpster Fire still occupying the Oval Office.
And that's all I have to say about that. |
