Revisiting one of the flawed arguments Clinton loyalists used against Bernie Sanders...
...that was revealed to have been utterly delusional last week.
Remember their claim that Bernie had not yet been targeted by the Republican slander machine as she had been? And how we should assume that her experience with these assaults necessarily makes her much more adept at weathering them than Bernie could ever hope to be?
Here's one sample of this reasoning that I found with a google search:
Obviously, Clinton carries with her more than 25 years in the white-hot public spotlight that Sanders doesn't -- despite his career in the Senate -- and over that length of time people have been able to form opinions of her and they're ones not likely to change at this point. What you know about Hillary is what you know about Hillary. There aren't a lot of surprises. Maybe you figure this is bad for her, but in truth it can be argued that this is a positive rather than a negative because there's nothing the Republicans can throw at her that we haven't already been fed to death.
The fact that she 'was still standing', we were told, was a testament to her ability to slough off their attacks and still be able to convince most voters that she is the best choice.
What they did not fess up to at that time was that their confidence in their ability to overcome her negatives was based on their personal knowledge that they were oh-so-willing to go negative on Trump, early and often, and they were confident that they would be able to outspend him in their shared efforts to assassinate each other's character.
In hindsight, it now seems rather obvious that their strategy was to rely almost exclusively on the execution of a purely negative campaign against Trump, on a constant effort to pump out a characterization of the man that they hoped most voters would find so off-putting, so deplorable, that they would be unable to see themselves voting for him.
They were ready for a knife fight cuz they planned to bring bigger knives with them to ensure victory. They had their echo chamber all set up with the MSM and they had enough money to get their "TRUMP BAD" message out to the public. They had all the bases covered, or so they thought.
So what went wrong?
Well, they were right to recognize the importance of 1) having enough funding to defend your candidate from the negative attacks of the opposition, and 2) being willing at a certain point to 'go negative' back when your opponent's negative attacks are hurting your image in the eyes of the voter.
But it appears that Clinton's team of strategic geniuses completely ignored the importance of also having a positive 'vision' of what you hope to do for the voters if you are elected.
When both sides are willing to go negative, it is vital that you also have something positive to offer the voters, in order to make a distinction between you and the other fella. For marginal voters, both a carrot (hope) and a stick (fear) are usually needed in order for them to make a choice between two people who don't appear to like each other very much.
From what I observed, Trump did this; Hillary did not.
In the end, Hillary's negatives---earned through a lifetime of duplicity, triangulation, and connivance---were what defeated her. She had this well-practice Performance that supporters were able to suck up because they wanted so much to believe it was 'The Real Hillary', but when the swing voters reflected on her shrill denunciations---and little else---in contrast to Trump's promise of big changes, she was toast.
As smart as her team was/is re: all things political, they were blinded from an accurate grasp of Hillary's actual value as a candidate because they wanted very much to believe that the negative campaigning, the extra large war chest they accumulated, and the influence they had established within MSM would be enough to overcome her fundamental deficiencies as a candidate for President.
They were wrong.
Surely, they should be fired from the Democratic Party (figuratively speaking) for a failure so huge, for it cannot be rationally explained as anything other than the product of their profound political incompetence.
Comments
Plus the whole "most experienced" line
What wasn't said is that Her "experience" consisted of starting new fires and pouring gasoline on existing ones. Was there anything she had influence over that didn't subsequently become a catastrophe?
LOL
So true. Most of the 'experience' she boasted of was experience that revealed her to be a very poor representative the economic progressives in the Dem party or anyone who fears war...
James Kroeger
I wish I could laugh
She is a monster, as shown from the first days in office as SoS when she set the stage for the slaughters of thousands of innocents in Honduras. Throw in Haiti, Libya, Syria and her stated desire to provoke confrontation with Russia and Iran (and likely China as well)....
Between this and her false support of climate change initiatives, her husband's record regarding the plight of minorities which she continued to defend long after it became clear it was indefensible, her ties to Wall Street and support of ruinous trade agreements, and I can see no reason why she should have had my vote. Not that she needed it NY, but she never offered a message in which I could I could believe. Not like Bernie.
Trump, the con artist at least knew that you had to promise something people wanted.
"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott
Dr. Joe Mengele was a very experienced surgeon...
...just saying...
I want my two dollars!
the only way to know what Hillary was for was to visit her site
because she didn't really talk much about anything except in generalities and about how bad Trump is. Even at the end she was saying stuff like "I'd rather be talking about something else but Trump hates women".
But anyway, she's old news now. Just as Hillary lovers are freaking out and asking the Electoral College to vote for her (imagine if that were reversed! if she had won and the EC voted for Trump anyway!) so too those of use who don't like Hillary at all can start forgetting her. Her campaign was a mess, her candidacy was awful. She won the primary fight because the DNC rigged it for her. We know all that.
I guess we can give it a few more days and then we should probably start worrying about the new guy.
Hmm...
I've been noticing the calls for a united resistance to Trump as exemplified by the street protests but my suspicious mind suspects that this is the Centrist organization trying to distract attention away from their unforgivable failure.
After all, Trump has absolutely no power right now and won't until the end of January. Time spent now on symbolic resistance is IMO utterly meaningless.
Between now and then it is prime time for castigating the Centrist faction with very loud and very strident criticism from all of Bernie's former supporters, with the purpose of advancing the chances of Bernie's reform movement gaining important traction within the Dem Party.
If it fails, it fails, but missing this precious opportunity while the Centrist geniuses are still gazing at their navels every once in a while would be IMO tragic.
James Kroeger
What is strange to me about the protests right now
We have people protesting the victory of one republican over another republican.
Obama moved forward from war crimes and bank fraud.
Before we can move on we need some consensus on what went wrong so it doesn't go wrong again. The most militant Hillary supporters seem to be blaming the American people for being unworthy. They are trying to silence us.
THEY LOST. They'll lose again if we give them the chance. In the interim they can find employment with the Clinton Foundation or one of the subsidiaries within its many tentacles.
The honchos spent more time labeling voters who were unworthy of being in the coalition than soliciting votes. We need to make the reality of what happened clear beyond dispute.
If you maintain any interest in the Democratic Party, now is the time to find your voice.
The only way to know her "private position"
was to pay her...... a lot.
Her site was just reading material for the plebs.
It's tempting...
to see Hillary's campaign as a total trainwreck, the ultimate Big Fail, the smug self-assurance of the Entitled Class gone horribly wrong. But I think the truth is a bit more complicated.
What people have to face up to is that the dominant neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party, as exemplified by Clinton, Obama, Peolosi, Schumer, etc. are in almost complete agreement with mainstream Republicans (Ryan, McConnell, Jeb Bush, Rubio) on virtually everything, except for a handful of social issues that none of them care about anyway. Certainly the rhetoric on some key issues like global warming may be different, but the practical impact of these differences on a policy level is practically nil.
Both the D and R had to contend with a populist uprising within its ranks in the presidential election. The big difference between Sanders and Trump is that Sanders is the real deal, whereas Trump is no more than a crude huckster who will happily betray the "little folks" who powered him to victory at the first opportunity. This is already strongly apparent in the people he's surrounding himself with.
The Social Darwinists who dominate both major parties accomplished their most important objectives in this campaign: They defeated the genuinely populist candidate, and they temporarily sated the public's anger by giving them a new leader who at least "talks the talk", although it's all but certain that he has not the slightest intention of actually "walking the walk."
So basically, looking at Hillary's defeat as some kind of crash and burn moment for the neoliberal establishment is misguided. They were successful in deep sixing the guy who genuinely threatened to upend the status quo, and they installed as our New Leader someone who will enthusiastically embrace many of their most cherished policy goals - more fracking, more pipelines, more private prisons, more tax cuts - while simultaneously quelling much of the public's simmering anger over a rigged system that sabotages their interests at every turn.
Hillary Clinton the individual suffered a devastating loss, but on a deeper level, the "pump up the 1% and stick it to everyone else" political philosophy she represents and embodies is alive and well.
inactive account
Not really sure...
...why you perceive your points and my points to be mutually exclusive.
Schumer et al. are little different from Republicans on most economic issues, but that detectable fact we can observe does not detract from their efforts to bring about a victory by 'being clever' with a double-talking centrist manipulator.
The fact is that there are probably more than a few Dems who likely felt viscerally attracted to Bernie's message and method. They've been led down the Centrist path by their monied mentors, but they could conceivably coalesce around a Bernie-inspired reform movement.
That speculation may ultimately be way too optimistic, but now is the time to see what kind of traction Bernie's 'movement' might possibly be able to achieve, IMO...
James Kroeger
I agree....
our points are not mutually exclusive. I guess my frustration stems from the fact that almost all of the post-election I've seen has dwelt on answering the question "how did Hillary manage to blow it?", and virtually none of it pointing up the (to me) far more important reality that the oligarchy was successful in fending off the one existential threat that presented itself, and that in most respects the status quo has been nicely preserved. And in those areas where it won't be, the new reality will almost surely be even more to the liking of the billionaire class.
So to my mind, the real tragedy of the election was not Hillary losing to Donald Trump, but the fact that her campaign, in collusion with the DNC and MSM, was successful in sandbagging Bernie Sanders. The best reason to be disgusted by Hillary is not that she lost, but that she prevented Bernie from winning. Of course, this is not exactly unprecedented, as it seems the Democrats nearly always put forth a leftist, populist candidate who is ultimately slapped down by the mainstream corporate tool who's been duly anointed by the party establishment. And something tells me that even with all the teeth-gnashing we're now seeing, this reality is unlikely to be altered in 2020.
inactive account
Oh yeah
I'm totally with you on this. One rather wistful hope is that an energized B. Sanders reform push at this time might be able to amplify your key point that the Centrists and the Republicans are essentially the same collection of minions. We need to beat them over the head with this accusation until they finally cry uncle (or go join the R's as we will be encouraging them to).
James Kroeger
Beating over the head sounds good
But I doubt the centrist Repubs and mainstream Democrats will ever join forces. Far more effective for them to maintain the fiction of an adversarial system, in which they are continually butting heads over an endless series of bogus issues, so as to suck the air out of any and all efforts to offer an actual choice, as opposed to an echo.
inactive account
Do you think there's any risk in Trump just rubber stamping...
Paul Ryan's agenda, either as a political matter or as a matter of civil--for want of a better word--order?
Rubber stamping
Given the extremist, alt-right types Trump is surrounding himself with, I think it's far more likely that political chameleon Ryan will end up adopting most if not all of the Trump agenda, rather than the other way round.
inactive account
Trade, SS and Medicare are the issues I'm most interested in.
There's direct conflict between Ryan and Trump's campaign promises in those areas, yet those are areas that could blow up in Trump's face with his own constituency.
Here's another related post,
from FAIR.org: Pollls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump - But Pundits Told You to Ignore Them
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
"High-profile pro-Clinton pundit Markos"
Was bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign. Zephyr Teachout revealed that he had been bought and paid for by the Dean campaign back in the day as well, which is why he continues a vendetta to her to this day. We didn't need a picture of Markos with bulging canvas bags with big dollar signs surrounding him to know he'd been bought yet again.
Bernie was, of course, subjected to the full fire of the Democratic smear machine, as were his supporters. We still are, if you go to places like Markos' dying joint. That fact bears no small amount of relevance to last Tuesday's events, but the wrong people are getting blamed for it by the pro-Clinton media.
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Excellent find
Emphasizes the same point I'm making with some supporting statistical data.
Her repetitious hollow presentations of affected outrage were empty enough to where she actually started to make Trump sound a lot more 'authentic' to people who were also being exposed to Trump's criticism of her through their acquaintances with some of his supporters.
James Kroeger
Every time I hear the vetting argument, I heard this in my head.
Hillary Clinton fully vetted?
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TnkJ8_BmSI]
Shit Covered Boomerangs Is Not a Campaign Strategy.
Everything they threw at Drumpf stuck to her. They completely ignored framing. Making it about honesty and integrity was not a good plan for Hillary -- each attack highlighted and reminded voters of her negatives. Not having a positive goal exacerbated that problem.
The Neoliberals need to go down. I'm going to do my best to hammer Drumpf, not on the social identity front, but on the corporate sponsored public policy front. The neoliberals got to go down!
I'm sharing this article as often as possible with thinking people:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed...
I think that is absolutely the key and also the anvil that we can throw our moderate republican Democratic leadership.
“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu
The effect of a negative campaign...
The effect of a negative campaign, as any political strategist can tell you, is that it depresses voter turnout. But the Democratic Party cannot afford a low turnout, because then they lose!
Trump got FEWER votes than McCain in 2008 or Romney in 2012. But he is the President-Elect. Why?
"We've done the impossible, and that makes us mighty."
Hillary dems created an unstoppable gop bogeyman fighting Bernie
All the arguments against Sanders in the general election basically relied on Hillary democrats creating an gop where every attack was impossible to stop, counter, and fight against. They went into a captive abused spouse mode in relationship to the gop.
Wikileaks counted Russia and Putin as the most mentioned debate subjects. This is all on Hillary. Did anybody in campaign ask if Putin/Russia was the biggest issue for people in FL, Ohio, PA, MI, and WI? Did anybody notice that Hillary could barely fill a high school gym while Trump attracted thousands?
The media was so compliant in the character attacks that when Clinton had something of substance to say, she was drowned out by the media over some outrage by Trump.
Bernie had attacks from left, right and center, including media.
And including Hillary. He barely laid a glove on her and he let her off the hook on emails. So tired of Clinton camp bigotry, lies and victim cards. Please, Hills, just go away.
What went wrong? It's not rocket science. http://caucus99percent.com/content/its-not-rocket-science