I kind of feel the sentiment of dread here too.
On one hand good for her for publishing the book and supporting it with a tour. I am sure that was part of a healing and decompression process and I don’t want to weaken that.
On the other the last thing Democrats need is Hillary and 2016 being so squarely in the spotlight the last two quarters of this year.
I dunno man, I kind of feel the opposite.
“Hey, don’t like what happened in 2016? TOO BAD HERE’S SOME SALT IN THE WOUND. GO FUCKING VOTE NEXT TIME.”
Amen to that.
Isn’t that kind of the problem though?
The message in 2016 was “Look how deplorable the other guy is, you should vote for me even if you have to hold your nose.” I really think Dems need a message beyond Trump and his supporters are despicable so you have to pull the lever for D cause reasons.
I don’t just want a party of opposition.
Maybe that was the message – and in all honestly it wasn’t a great message – but the reality was YOU SHOULD HAVE VOTED BECAUSE IT WAS A FUCKING ELECTION.
Didn’t like Clinton? Boo fucking hoo. I bet you like Trump less. Fucking crybabies. I’m tired of it.
I’m sympathetic to that feeling, but humans don’t seem to work that way. The takeaway, I fear, will be “See? Both parties suck and all politicians suck. Why bother voting?”
I know a lot of people didn’t vote, but a lot of people always don’t vote.
The people who swung the election were lower income factory job blue collar workers in swing states. They voted for Trump because he was promising them jobs. They didn’t like Hillary because a) conditioning and b) she said stuff like “of course coal jobs have to go” (and we nodded along with her).
Those people aren’t going to say “damn, I wish I’d voted” and they aren’t going to read into any nuance in Hillary’s book. They are going to hear from late night comedians and radio guys about how Hillary is still out there whining about losing an election and they are going to say “what stupid democrats” or for a lot of them “what a dumb bitch”.
But it won’t matter because we’re still more than a year out from the next election.
She gave lots of speeches with policy detail.
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/speeches/
There’s 12 pages of links to her speeches and many of them address major issues with proposals to deal with them. Here’s some random screen caps on topics from the first few pages:
I get that Americans don’t give a crap about policy, but somehow that also means Democrats don’t stand for anything?
From the Coates piece I linked in another thread, I doubt catering to coal miners would have swung the election:
An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated the median household income of Trump supporters to be about $72,000. But even this lower number is almost double the median household income of African Americans, and $15,000 above the American median. Trump’s white support was not determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascar dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.
Of course, Hillary actually had detailed policy proposals on all manner of issues, whereas Trump had smirks and #MAGA. I will grant that saying ‘check out my website’ during a debate commits the fatal flaw of assuming a literate electorate.
Dems do need a message beyond ‘Trump is too terrible to be president,’ and yet that message alone would have been sufficient to elect Hillary had the electorate been worthy of its charge.
Yeah, Clinton’s campaign was way deeper on actual policy than any other campaign in recent years. Much more than Trump, and way more than Obama ever was in his campaigns. Her plans were dramatically more thought out than Sanders’ plans too, none of which were workable as he presented them.
Folks just ignored it all. Doing homework is boring.
Yeah, the Hillary Clinton “This is what happens when you don’t eat your vegetables” Tour isn’t something I want to witness, and I supported her pretty strongly.
I do realize I was oversimplifying (intentionally) in my comment upthread. I know that Hillary had very detailed and articulated policy statements.
However, I think her campaign team, most Democrats, and much of the left-leaning electorate (including myself) rested on our laurels thinking that Trump would never be elected and that Hillary would win from the sheer force of people’s terror regarding Trump. We now know how wrong we were.
Continuing to think that voters will vote for a Dem because of how disgusted they are with Trump is just continuing the fallacy from 2016. Hillary being in the spotlight is not going to help either.
I think the deeper fallacy is believing that our electorate is responsible enough to govern itself. I’m deeply pessimistic on this point now. Of course Dems ought to do whatever is practical to regain power, but if I ever had any faith in some intrinsic wisdom of the American people, it’s dead.
But isn’t that really at the root of this? Like, no one wants to eat their veggies and work hard. They just want the Donald to hand them money and jobs out of thin air… oh, and make sure people who aren’t white don’t get those handouts.
No one wants to eat their political veggies. If they did, Walter Mondale wouldn’t have lost in the worst landslide ever, and George Romney would’ve succeeded Lyndon Johnson in the White House.
The trick – and one Hillary never did very well – is to get people to eat their vegetables without knowing they’ve done so. You can be a policy wonk in the sheets, but you better be a movement leader in the streets.
I get her point, but not listening to stupid men leads to poor election results.
Apparently listening to stupid political consultants does as well.
Cable news was too busy focusing on the spectacle. Policy is boring compared to the horseshit Trump was doing and potential crimes that Clinton did, so they focused on that. Like they pretty much always do. Ratings > policy and thought every single time.
