It seems like ever since Election Day 2016, twice-failed candidate Hillary Clinton has been showing great creativity in concocting scapegoats and excuses for her failure to defeat what should have been the most easily beatable Republican candidate since Barry Goldwater in 1964. Clinton has pointed the finger at almost everyone but Hillary Clinton, even though she and the Democratic Party itself bear the lion\u2019s share of the blame.<\/p>\n
Before getting into why Clinton lost, let\u2019s go over why some of her chosen scapegoats are bullshit.<\/p>\n
Did the Russian intelligence services undertake to tamper with and affect the outcome of the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems likely. Did that tampering make a material difference? Did the Comey letter to Congress, announcing the re-opening of the Email Server investigation, have a decisive effect?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s obviously hard to say but there is justifiable skepticism that either played a significant role in the final outcome.\u00a0 You still must ask, however, how was the election so close that this is a question? Faced with an incompetent racist misogynist like Trump, even a deeply flawed candidate like Clinton should have crushed him so thoroughly that a couple percentage points, either way, would be of negligible consequence. Even if the Russian meddling and the Comey letter were clearly decisive, Hillary Clinton still deserves the blame for letting the election be close enough for them to be that critical.<\/p>\n
In my earlier post about the failure of third parties, I conceded that the Democrats have one superficial point. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, the three decisive states that Trump won by a razor-thin margin, putting him over the top in the Electoral College, Jill Stein\u2019s vote totals were larger than Trump\u2019s margin of victory over Clinton. If everyone who voted for Stein had voted for Clinton instead, the Democrat would have carried those three states to a majority of electoral votes.<\/p>\n
However, that excuse attempts to deflect blame from Clinton for letting the election be close enough for Stein votes to matter. Also, Stein voters have the right as Americans to vote their conscience and cannot shoulder the blame for Clinton failing to hold onto voters who backed Barack Obama in the previous two elections. It\u2019s not their fault that Clinton couldn\u2019t articulate a sufficiently compelling reason for them to vote for her instead of Jill Stein.<\/p>\n
Finally, as I have said in other posts, the real problem, in this case, is our First Past the Post voting system and the Electoral College, both of which serve to punish voters who support minor party candidates.<\/p>\n
Another refrain was that certain traditional Democratic voting blocs, specifically African-Americans and Latinos, failed to turn out in sufficient numbers to support the party\u2019s candidate. This pathetic excuse betrays the institutional arrogance of the party establishment, which sees minority voters as the Democrats\u2019 birthright, that these groups are somehow duty-bound to support the Democrat because the Republicans are, well, Republicans. This is identity politics at its most cynical.<\/p>\n
Those voters didn\u2019t \u201cfail\u201d to vote for her. Hillary Clinton failed to give those voters a compelling reason to vote for her.<\/p>\n
Clinton\u2019s status as The Inevitable One, the First Female President by Birthright, was virtual gospel to the Democratic Party establishment, and her defeat at the hands of a toxic misogynist like Donald Trump made it almost too easy to blame the misogyny of the voters for her loss, but reality gets in the way of this claim.<\/p>\n
First, Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes, so if we had a genuinely democratic election for president, the United States would have elected its first female president by a comfortable margin (although not as comfortable as the popular margins by which it elected and re-elected its first black president).<\/p>\n
And if you look at the states where Hillary lost the election, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, more people there voted for a woman (either Clinton or Stein) than voted for Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
I believe that, especially in those three states where Clinton lost the election, that any candidate that ran on a genuinely progressive platform of economic populism, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, would have crushed Donald Trump and his xenophobic fake populism. Hillary Clinton\u2019s gender was the least of her problems with those voters.<\/p>\n
Does misogyny still have a real and ugly presence in this country? Of course. Did some voters not vote for Clinton because she was a woman? Maybe, but I suspect those voters already had other reasons to vote against her.<\/p>\n
What were the real reasons? Read on.<\/p>\n
Hillary Clinton lost the election, narrowly, in three states that Barack Obama won by comfortable margins in 2008 and 2012. Many of the Trump voters in those three states voted for Obama in the previous two elections, slamming a torpedo into the idea that all Trump voters were motivated by racism. But why did she lose those voters? Now we get to the nub of the issue.<\/p>\n
If you look closely at Hillary Clinton\u2019s relatively short list of political campaigns, the record is not very impressive.<\/p>\n
In her first campaign, the Senate campaign in 2000, Clinton was initially losing in the polls to Mayor Rudy Giuliani, only overcoming that lead as the wheels came off the mayor\u2019s campaign (and his marriage). Rick Lazio, a relative unknown, took over but despite outspending Clinton by a wide margin, he never offered much of challenge.<\/p>\n
In her 2006 re-election contest, the Republican effort to find a viable challenger was too sad to be called a farce. Thus, in her two Senate elections, Clinton coasted to victories in a Democrat-friendly state without being seriously tested.<\/p>\n
Clinton went into the 2008 Democratic Presidential primaries with the aura of inevitability around her.\u00a0 She had the name recognition, the money, and the support of the party establishment. Her only opposition was a first-term Senator from Illinois with a funny name, but he wasn\u2019t expected to put up much of a challenge. Barack Obama was just staking his claim for 2012 or 2016, or so they thought. Hillary Clinton turned out not to be as inevitable as originally believed.<\/p>\n
After four years as President Obama\u2019s Secretary of State, Clinton ran again in 2016 and the road to the nomination looked much clearer than it had been in 2008. Her only challenger was a self-described socialist who apparently was born before the invention of the comb. Bernie Sanders\u2019 campaign initially produced only knowing chuckles from those few who were paying attention, but after Sanders took 22 primaries and served notice that the progressive wing of the Democratic party meant business, no one was chuckling. Fortunately for Clinton, the Democratic National Committee was far less neutral in the primaries than they were supposed to be.<\/p>\n
In the general election, the only obstacle between her and the White House was a political amateur and failed businessman who had entered the race for the Republican nomination declaring that Mexican immigrants were mostly rapists (although some might be good people). He insulted a war hero. He pretended to raise money for veterans but kept the money for himself until called out for it. He was caught on tape almost boasting to Billy Bush about committing sexual assault. He suggested that a female journalist on Fox News who asked him tough questions was on her period. He urged people at his rallies to beat up protestors.<\/p>\n
This man is now our president because former Obama voters in three states preferred him to Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n
Why? I\u2019ll get to the substantive reasons later, but the superficial reason is that she is not effective on the campaign trail. Her speaking style reminds me of a middle school principal giving detention to the entire student body. She doesn\u2019t uplift, but bellows, hectors, and harangues.<\/p>\n
The first President Clinton and President Obama, whatever you think of them as presidents, were natural campaigners, projecting an outward aura of empathy that made people want to trust them. Even George W. Bush, who had to be one of the least truthful people to occupy the Oval Office since 1974, seemed more genuine in speeches than Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n
Bernie Sanders is perhaps the least polished speaker in modern political history, but there is no mistaking his sincerity. Elizabeth Warren may lack subtlety, but she practically oozes a sense of earnestness that makes you automatically want to root for her.<\/p>\n
\u201cGenuine,\u201d \u201cempathetic,\u201d \u201csincere\u201d and \u201cearnest\u201d are not words that leap to mind while watching Hillary Clinton speak in public.<\/p>\n
Make no mistake. Hillary Clinton is 100,000% more qualified for the job of president than the current buffoon-in-chief. I don\u2019t know her personally, but I\u2019d guess she\u2019s probably more effective and relatable in a one-to-one setting. Most successful people are. That\u2019s not how voters get to know presidential candidates, however, and Clinton\u2019s inability to create any sense of a personal connection with large crowds has been her Achilles Heel throughout her political career. It has certainly prevented her from overcoming her more substantive deficiencies.<\/p>\n
This probably hurt her more in the 2008 primaries than it did in 2016, as candidate Obama was able to make his opposition to the 2003 Iraq War a point of contrast between him and Clinton. Of course, in practice President Obama was not substantially different on foreign policy than a President Hillary Clinton probably would have been, especially with Clinton serving as Obama\u2019s Secretary of State, where Clinton pursued a muscular foreign policy agenda that showed her vote in favor of the Iraq War was neither a fluke nor an aberration.<\/p>\n
This probably hurt her less in 2016 only because Trump had nothing resembling a coherent foreign policy agenda (and still doesn\u2019t more than a year into his presidency), and Sanders ran on economic justice issues.<\/p>\n
The fact that Hillary Clinton had a more intimate relationship to Wall Street than Stormy Daniels has with her co-stars is probably less problematic than a lot of other issues, if only because a fawning, subservient attitude toward the economic elites is not even remotely uncommon in Washington. It does, however, make it hard to separate yourself from the likes of a narcissistic and entitled trust-fund baby like Donald Trump, and it makes it easy for voters to think of you when he promises to \u201cdrain the swamp.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even if there were nothing improper about the Clinton Foundation soliciting huge donations from nations like Qatar and Saudi Arabia while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, the stench of apparent impropriety is strong enough to knock out a bull elephant. It looks a lot like pay-to-play foreign policy, and you know what they say about something that looks and quacks like a duck.<\/p>\n
The Clinton name, the brand that made Hillary Clinton the presumptive front-runner in both 2008 and 2016, is a double-edged sword these days, three decades removed from their first appearance on the national political stage.<\/p>\n
As President, Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Many of those working-class whites who voted for Obama twice blame NAFTA for their jobs disappearing and blame Bill Clinton for NAFTA. When Trump railed against NAFTA and TPP, those voters listened.<\/p>\n
In a sense, Hillary Clinton is married to one of the biggest albatrosses around the neck of her campaign.<\/p>\n
But there is also a deeper problem expressed in the current division between the establishment wing of the Democratic Party and the insurgent progressive wing. The Clintons are the face of that party establishment, which took power in 1992 as the \u201cNew Democrats,\u201d a more pragmatic, business-friendly brand of Democrat.<\/p>\n