Quoting the Clintons’ long time pollster, Stanley Greenberg, James Freeman writes some things that a lot of people need to hear:
In the magazine American Prospect this week, Mr. Greenberg writes:
The Trump presidency concentrates the mind on the malpractice that helped put him in office. For me, the most glaring examples include the Clinton campaign’s over-dependence on technical analytics; its failure to run campaigns to win the battleground states; the decision to focus on the rainbow base and identity politics at the expense of the working class; and the failure to address the candidate’s growing ‘trust problem,’ to learn from events and reposition.
He goes on:
Another problem was that both Mrs. Clinton and her predecessor thought the Obama years were better than they were. Writes Mr. Greenberg, “Obama and Clinton lived in a cosmopolitan and professional America that wasn’t very angry about the state of the country, even if many of the groups in the Clinton coalition were struggling and angry.â€
Following on John Judis’ recent conclusion that identity politics is a loser for Democrats, Mr. Greenberg’s analysis of what happened in 2016 gives this column hope that future Democratic candidates may spend less time trying to inflame racial divisions and more time trying to understand the concerns of average voters.
That’s a lot more like the world I’ve seen around me. It’s the world of prosperous party apparatchiks in both the Republican and Democratic parties who are working hard to inflame passions but not nearly hard enough to solve problems.
There’s one remaining problem with that analysis. It doesn’t give nearly enough credit to Trump who capitalized on the incompetence but at least it’s a start.
Boy, oh boy. Both Greenburg’s and your concluding statement could have been written by me. I felt that way from halfway through the campaign. The mistake I made was in believing that breaking through the media slant and din was impossible. I was wrong. And kudos to Trump.
But the media aspect it informs subsequent coverage. Not only are the vast majority of major media types Democrats, but they are pissed to be demoted in influence and to be called out. I would change only one word. Replace growing in Greenburgs first citation to “longstanding.”
I kind of blame Democratic electoral problems on “identity politics.”
For example, I’m not sure how many American school children are confused little boys who want to piss sitting down like “the other girls” and how many football linebackers are sexually reconstructed cheerleaders, but I suspect the number is WAY under a million, and I suspect the average American elementary or high school is not troubled by this “problem” every single year. Democrats might have waved the transsexual bathroom issue aside by suggesting that people act with tolerance, empathy, and “Christian compassion.” Instead, they amused themselves by pretending this was the greatest civil rights crisis since Rosa Parks got yanked out of her bus seat.
A bad decision in retrospect. Worrying about small towns without jobs in the Rust Belt would have garnered more votes. If the Democrats had noticed small towns in the Rust Belt often had jobless problems. They didn’t notice, again in retrospect. At least the ones at the top of the party, focused on Washington DC, NYC, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other declining communities, failed to notice.
I could be charitable and suggest that Democrats offered no cures for Midwestern ills because they saw the problems but had no easy solution other than “Elect enough Democrats that we run all of the Federal government.” But I’ve never seen or heard liberals pushing such a strategy, so I continue to think Democrats — and mainstream media — had a blind spot for the Rust Belt. The emergence of heroin and fentanyl usage as a “new” American story, which seems to have festered quietly for twenty years, until it could explode after the inauguration of Donald Trump, suggests as well that Democrats have systemic problems making sense of the Midwest.
I’m not sure if this properly a topic for political scientists to consider or psychiatrists.
Looks to me like Clinton chose to learn from the 2008 campaign by obsessing over it, determined to re-assemble the so-called Obama Coalition without realizing it never existed.
Alternative Ben – blacks were more galvanized by the first black candidate than women were by the first woman candidate.
Bingo, Guarneri. Clinton had problems among women, first of them being her, ah, husband.
Second being her spareness with the truth, and third being that a lot of those women were married to “deplorable” men.
How she could possibly call herself a politician escapes me.
Hillary’s sort of a creature out of Frankenstein, a monster constructed by Republicans. My recollection is way back in the 1970s, when Bill started into Arkansas politics, they kind of made it a big thing that his wife wasn’t just someone who kept house, she was a hard-working high-paid *Corporate Lawyer*. She and Bill were BOTH real professionals, shiny and bright edged and thoroughly modern! Vote for Bill Clinton, and get Bill & Hillary together!
Seems to have worked like a charm in Little Rock, but the banner didn’t fly so high in Washington. Republicans were incredulous when Bill talked about Hillary tackling health care at the start of his first term, and horror struck when it dawned that the Clintons actually meant it.
I’ll leave open how good or bad Hillary’s health plan was — it’s been a long while, and at the time I wasn’t that much interested. The thing that matters is that since 1993 or so, destroying both Clintons has been a major concern for Congressional Republicans and their backers. Vince Foster, TravelGate, White Water, all that stuff. And God’s gift to Republicans, Monica Lewinski and Paula Jones, and 17 Arkansas state troopers being uncertain about whether they’d ever noticed their governor behaving improperly with young ladies.
So naturally, Hillary just had to run for office, to convince the world and her enemies and maybe herself that she was just a good a politician as Bill, and maybe better, if not by innate politicial skills and charisma, by sheer hard work and mastery of details.
Which worked up to a point. She got elected senator right off in 2000 and re-elected in 2006, and seems to have done well enough, although I can’t recall her involvement in anything special. In 2008, she ran for President, doing respectably, but not so well as Barak Obama. She could have stayed in the Senate but chose instead to be Obama’s Secretary of State, where her record was … she kept busy.
So she’s entitled to call herself a politician, as much as anyone elected to a reasonably high office, especially one re-elected. Was she a popular figure? I suppose so, but then she was a senator from New York precisely because New Yorkers shared her politics; it wasn’t like she had spent years gaining their love and respect.
Was she a good politician. Ummm. She was free of accusations of scandal while she was a senator. No one charged her with taking bribes, until she started giving talks to bankers ten years later. No one alleged she took drugs, or posted images of her genitals to young fans, or proposed federal judgeships for mafiosa. No one complained of her log-rolling or influence peddling in the Senate (I actually think these wonderful 19th century political maneuvers are a while lot harder to accomplish in the modern political world, so maybe this aspect of Hillary’s virtuous behavior doesn’t really merit such praise). Anyhow, I’d rate her as OKAY rather than GREAT. Which might be adequate. It takes time and temperament and the right set of circumstances (and maybe the right set of constituents) to be a Great Politician, and all those things failed to converge for Hillary Clinton. In 2008 and in 2016.
Moving on from the fantasy fiction section of the bookstore…..
She was hired at Rose for political considerations, playing the hard working lawyer when convenient, but using a big, strong man (while at home baking cookies) to advise her on lottery odds cattle futures trades and using low level associates to paper land deals. Gotta make a living, you know.
She was a carpetbagger do nothing senator, capitalizing on hubbys name. A Secy of State who gave us Libya and introduced us to the finer points of offensive You-Tube videos. Traded state influence for money – gotta make a living, you know – destroyed evidence etc etc etc.
Yeah, a victim of a vast right wing conspiracy. Oh the good she would have done mankind….