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There's Something About Hillary




In case you haven't heard, Hillary Clinton has a new book out.   Not surprisingly, response has been all over the board, largely because she seems to take pretty much everyone to task, except herself, for her electoral loss.

One of her favorite targets is Bernie Sanders, who she thinks undermined her in the primaries, and laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's "Crooked Hillary" campaign.  That's a pretty bold assertion, especially given that he campaigned for her quite actively in the general election, particularly in the Midwestern states where she was most vulnerable.

What's most interesting in her attacks on Bernie is that she portrays him as a shallow politician, pushing gimmicks rather than solutions.  She compares him to the "deranged hitchhiker" in Ben Stiller's There's Something About Mary.  Not having seen the movie, I had to watch a clip to familiarize myself with this character.

It seems Hillary picked up her metaphor from a meme, which has been floating around the past few years, rather than the movie itself.  The "deranged hitchhiker" is how she feels about Bernie for crashing her party.  That damned sense of entitlement.

It wasn't so much that Bernie was pitching "abs routines," as he was pushing her further to the left than she wanted to go.  The minimum wage battle was a classic one.  Hillary opted for the more conservative $12/hour, whereas Bernie wanted $15. Bernie didn't do this just to make it bigger.  This was the minimum amount deemed to be a "living wage."  Several cities had already adopted the $15/hr. minimum wage and Bernie stood by it.  After a whole lot of hemming and hawing, Hillary decided to go with $15 too, as she saw this was the direction the Democratic Party was headed.

But, Hillary doesn't stop there, she goes after the "so-called Bernie Bros," who she claims harassed her supporters on line.  That maybe so, as in this day and age pretty much anything goes on line, but Bernie's supporters cut across gender lines.   There were a lot of women who had concerns with Hillary, as made painfully clear in the general election, when she failed to nail down white women.  To be fair, white women generally vote Republican but here was a white woman running for president.  Surely, she could do better than 43 per cent!

For a self-described political wonk, this seems to be a very glaring mistake, especially when one of Bernie's most visible supporters was Susan Sarandon, an actress loved and respected, although some of that respect probably fell off after her strident comments during the general election.  Susan made no apologies for her disdain of Hillary.

Where Bernie had difficulties was in allying minority voters to his cause.  Here, Hillary was able to outstrip him and ultimately secure the Democratic nomination.  He didn't stand a chance throughout the South, and Hillary thrashed him in California.  However, none of these states mattered in the general election except maybe Florida.

The states that did matter were the Midwestern states, seen as a  Democratic "blue wall."  Bernie beat her in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana and Minnesota.  As it turned out, Michigan and Wisconsin were very pivotal states, which for some odd reason she chose to limit her campaign.  I suppose she felt she had these states in the bank, particularly Michigan, which Obama won by 450,000 votes in 2012.  Obama had won Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin by more than 1 million total votes.  Kind of like spotting Team Hillary 21 points in a football game.

In the end Bernie won 23 states, not because he "impugned" her character, but because there were a lot of folks in the Democratic party who didn't want Hillary, or felt that Bernie stood for something bigger.  It was basically a repeat of 2008, in which she entered the campaign as a heavy favorite only to be outmaneuvered by a younger, more dynamic Barack Obama, who took full advantage of the discord in the party.

Her big advantage this time around was that she had the Democratic establishment in the bank, having secured all but a relative handful of superdelegates before the primaries began.  This put Bernie in a 500 delegate hole, which he was never able to get out of.  It also helped that she faced no challenge from the Democratic orthodoxy.  The other "Democrats" who ran were also outsiders like Bernie, and dropped out within the first few weeks of the primaries.

It seems that Hillary no more wants to confront the truth of this election than do her most avid supporters.  This is what could do lasting damage for the Democratic Party, as there are many Democrats who hold onto Hillary as if she is the Susan B. Anthony of our generation.  It's just too bad she got tripped up by a "deranged hitchhiker" like Bernie Sanders.

Comments

  1. I never thought Hillary was a strong candidate. Her candidacy shows, or so it seems to me, that the "establishment" has too much to say about who gets the nod. But I'm curious about what you think drove her disconnect with white women, assuming it wasn't good old fashioned sexism.

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  2. It is odd to me that she couldn't crack white women. But, reading a few articles on the subject, it appears her support of abortion hurt her among this electorate. She became viewed in the same light as Gloria Steinem and other prominent feminists, who actively supported her. The inability of the feminist movement to welcome pro-life women, as seen in the March on Washington, has been one of its biggest hurdles in bringing women as a whole into the movement. Abortion is a very divisive issue among white women. This seemed to bother white women more than did Trump's well documented misogynism.

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  3. The fact that pro-life and pro-religion voters backed Trump tells me all I need to know about both groups. They vote Republican, even when the candidate is a complete ignoramus. And how could Clinton have "courted" pro-life voters? Either one believes abortion should be legally available or one doesn't. As for misogyny, most women must deal with that in their own household. I'm not surprised it didn't cost Trump more support.

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  4. I don't think it is that clear a divide. Abortion has been used as a way to divide the electorate. The vast majority of women want equal pay for equal work, which was the aim of the Washington March, but when organizers wouldn't welcome pro-life women they played right into Republican hands.

    As for the campaign, Hillary pretty much played it to the middle. She pretty much avoided abortion all together. Unfortunately, she wasn't able to get women to focus on equal pay, health issues and Donald's blatant misogyny. The Republicans were effectively able to demonize Planned Parenthood as a code word for abortions, and she did little to counter those perceptions.

    Ultimately a campaign is about setting the tone that favors your candidacy and the Hillary campaign failed to do that, which is why she fared no better among white women than did Obama, Kerry and Gore before her.

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  5. Well at least we won't have her to consider as a candidate any longer. Would she have made a better president than Trump? Undoubtedly.

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  6. That's for sure. I have no answer for why she lost to someone like Trump. I don't think the Republicans expected her to lose either. They invested all their energy in maintaining their hold on Congress, and it seems that their efforts in the Midwest carried Trump into the WH. I think they are even regretting that now.

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