Timex
3978
She would have been a former senator and secretary of state who was extremely well informed on foreign and domestic policy, and could speak competently about it.
It could backfire. She might cause some folks to bust with that strategy.
The biggest reason Hillary won the primary was her last name, and all those old black churchladies who voted for her based on it. (Loyalty’s a big thing with that crowd).
That’s the crowd that is most heavily going for Biden and Bernie this time, esp Biden.
In my mind, the argument over whether a “safe moderate” or progressive candidate would do better misses the point.
People on forums like this, we follow policy details, we judge on policy details, so we assume everyone else does too. But I am willing to bet that the policy differences separating the viable Dem candidates mean a lot less to their chances to win, than their ability to campaign without sending the message that huge blocks of voters are culturally, morally, and intellectually unfit. (And whether a candidate is able to control their campaign such that their surrogates refrain from such stuff.)
I live in a rural red county, and Trump is going to poll over 50% here. But someone whose rhetoric stumbles into “clinging to guns and religion” or “deplorable” territory is going to poll in the 20-30% range, while someone who attacks Trump and his policies and puts forward a progressive agenda – without implying there is something wrong with rural people or religious people or (above all) people who own guns, that candidate is going to poll is going to poll more around 40%.
Now, in my state, it doesn’t matter. A tiny handful of metropolitan counties will overwhelm all the 20-30% Trump counties, and the state will go blue. But in A LOT of other states, this is not true. The metropolitan areas are not large enough to overcome wipeouts in the rural counties.
So when people say they want a strong progressive, I’m always listening to what they mean by that. If they mean “strong on liberal positions” well that is just great. But if they mean “firebrand willing to tell the other side just what total assholes they all are” then I see it as a death wish.
Cause in the end, most voters do not follow policy details carefully, but they are highly sensitive to the possibility that a leader has it in for them and people like them.
Matt_W
3981
Has she? She supported Pelosi’s bid for the Speaker’s gavel. And she’s specifically said she doesn’t have a special relationship for or against the Speaker. She’s taken several principled votes against the caucus, but they’ve never been decisive. And the two bills she’s sponsored sit firmly within her purview as a member of the House Financial Services subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Financial Institutions.
Here’s a kind of funny thing. An AOC quote from her recent New Yorker interview:
I was assigned to two of some of the busiest committees and four subcommittees. So my hands are full. And sometimes I wonder if they’re trying to keep me busy.
Cue Fox News, Townhall, Redstate, Breitbart, The New York Post, The Washington Examiner, etc etc all running stories about AOC whining and “Yeah, AOC, you’re there to do a job” and “Hur hur hur”. These stories were picked up uncritically by MSN and news aggregators.
Now here’s the quote in context. After explaining why she decided not to join Pelosi’s select committee on climate change (lack of mission, no subpoena power, no rule against fossil-fuel money), she said:
So I think that, ultimately, I’m fine with the decision, especially given the committee assignments that I was ultimately given, which were very intense and very rigorous. I was assigned to two of some of the busiest committees and four subcommittees. So my hands are full. And sometimes I wonder if they’re trying to keep me busy. [ Laughs .]
This is how they work. Public perception of her is inevitably colored by the right-wing media filter. I mean who cares what Breitbart says? Except that it gets picked up by MSN and Yahoo News and etc. Ocasio-Cortez isn’t a radical. She’s not trying to hog the limelight. She’s not particularly brash or forceful. She’s not a vanguard, and she’s not trying to defy the leadership. She’s very good at social media, and she’s incredibly good at not being baited and staying on-message, given the spotlight on her and the amount of invective that comes her way. But she’s also “just” a freshman Congresswoman, 6 months into her first term of office.
I’m not sure she would have been if she weren’t a Clinton.
Timex
3983
By all accounts, Clinton performed both as a senator and as secretary of state with a high degree of competence. She always did her homework, and prepared for the job she was tasked with. She wasn’t coasting along on name recognition.
It’s impossible to know what Hilary Rodham would have become solely on her own merits. High powered attorney, politician, dunno. The point of departure is in the 70s (60s?) so I’m not sure this speculation has much value. It’s possible to acknowledge her competence while also saying that her 2000 Senate run was enabled by her having been First Lady.
A google search indicates lots of media was talking about Jill Stein as a spoiler for 2016.
My sense is that she was very competent in these jobs, but that she probably got those jobs on the basis of her name.
And that points up one of her main problems – she had extremely little background in “getting the job” which is to say campaigning. I mean, she did things within Bill’s campaigns, but she was not being tested personally, not getting experience at running such a thing. And she turned out not to be very good at it.
It is one of our systematic problems, that being good at running for office and being good at holding office are quite different things, two skills that do not particularly correlate.
Matt_W
3987
People think such weird things about Hilary. She’s been working on political campaigns since she was 13 years old. There’s probably no person on Earth who has done more work and seen more of the inside of political campaigning for national office than Hillary Clinton.
But that is not the same thing at all. I worked in schools since I was 5, I was employed there since I was 21. But none of that is any test of whether I would make a good principal or superintendent.
Running for office is a very different thing than being a campaign worker or spouse of a candidate. And Hillary turned out to be missing some essential qualities, just as, if I had been appointed principal, I would have turned out to be missing essential qualities.
Matt_W
3989
The same qualities that McCain and Kerry were missing, despite being many-term Senators. The same qualities that Romney was missing despite being a former governor? I mean there are probably a bunch of reasons someone can point to for why Hillary lost, but “missing some essential qualities” for campaigning is a hard sell without enumerating them. There’s no evidence that she was a bad campaigner except that she lost. But I think it’s definitely possible to be a good campaigner and still lose. Donald Trump was a fucking terrible campaigner by any metric: polled terribly, raised almost no money until he was the nominee, committed gaffes on a daily basis, couldn’t retain staff, had no operation, ran a complete shitshow of a convention, etc. What “essential quality” did he have, except for somehow tapping directly into the mainline of America’s racist id? Is that the quality Hillary was missing?
Which ones? Didn’t more people vote for her?
Menzo
3991
By all means, let’s have yet another discussion spanning hundreds of responses about why Clinton lost in 2016. We haven’t beaten that horse to death.
magnet
3992
Hillary was elected to the Senate twice. Prior to running for president, she had already won as many elections as Elizabeth Warren has.
That’s like saying scoring a C on an easy test is a good thing. That was a very winnable election by a landslide and she managed to lose.
People lose elections, it happens. It was her job to win and she did not. That said, the Hillary was a sucky candidate because she lost meme is a deeply misogynist trope, because no one seems to be disqualifying losers like Bernie (loser), Biden (serial loser), Obama (loser who couldn’t even win an election for the House), and so on. Hell, Bill Clinton lost his re-election bit for Governor quite badly, and no one said he was a bad candidate and a loser.
It’s especially bad when people contend she wasn’t electable but decline to say what they mean by ‘electable’.
With the charisma of Amy Klobuchar or Michael Bennet or possibly Kristen Gillibrand. I am sure she’d be polling about 1% right now.
Timex
3996
This seems like a dumb way to pick a nominee.
Exactly this. I’m not suggesting that Hillary is incompetent (she is clearly incredibly gifted intellectually). But to suggest that her success has little to do with her husband is also facile. (Who knows, the same could potentially be said of Bill with respect to his wife - they are clearly the definition of a power couple.)
