Why did Clinton lose?

ebrown_p wrote:

This depends, of course, what your definition of "liberal" is... but this claim seems ridiculous when you compare Obama to other candidates like Kucinich, or even Edwards.

I wish that Obama were more "liberal" (with the assumption that liberal means having positions closer to mine).

How much more liberal could he be?

He's THE most liberal Senator, as rated by liberal groups.[/u][/i]

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Senate/senator_ratings-2005.html

real life wrote:

ebrown_p wrote:

This depends, of course, what your definition of "liberal" is... but this claim seems ridiculous when you compare Obama to other candidates like Kucinich, or even Edwards.

I wish that Obama were more "liberal" (with the assumption that liberal means having positions closer to mine).

How much more liberal could he be?

He's THE most liberal Senator, as rated by liberal groups.[/u][/i]

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Senate/senator_ratings-2005.html

But the ACLU, which happened to be the most aggressive grader, did not give him a score. If they gave him a 78 (that is the average they gave to the those with overall scores greater than or equal to 90 and the same as H. Clinton), his overall score drops to 95 putting him at the same level as the junior senator from NY.

engineer wrote:

real life wrote:

ebrown_p wrote:

This depends, of course, what your definition of "liberal" is... but this claim seems ridiculous when you compare Obama to other candidates like Kucinich, or even Edwards.

I wish that Obama were more "liberal" (with the assumption that liberal means having positions closer to mine).

How much more liberal could he be?

He's THE most liberal Senator, as rated by liberal groups.[/u][/i]

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Senate/senator_ratings-2005.html

But the ACLU, which happened to be the most aggressive grader, did not give him a score. If they gave him a 78 (that is the average they gave to the those with overall scores greater than or equal to 90 and the same as H. Clinton), his overall score drops to 95 putting him at the same level as the junior senator from NY.

Why the contrived effort to lower his liberal rating?

Senator Obama is at most marginally more liberal than Senator Clinton but the difference is negligible. The two are essentially identical ideologically based upon our DW-NOMINATE scores estimated from all roll call votes cast in Congresses 1 - 110 (through the 1st Session of the 110th, 2007). (The House and Senate were scaled together simultaneously using the 630 members who served in both Chambers -- see our Technical Issues page for all the information about estimation issues and how the graphs below were constructed.) Clinton and Obama have served together since 2005 (Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004 and Clinton was elected to the Senate in 2000, so they have only overlapped for 3 years).

The two are by no means the most liberal Democrats in Congress. There are a total of 286 Democrats in the 110th House and Senate (counting replacements). There are 88 members to Obama's left -- 8 Senators and 80 Representatives. The 8 Senators are Feingold (D-WI), Whitehouse (D-RI), Sanders (I-VT), Boxer (D-CA), Kennedy (D-MA), Brown (D-OH), Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Levin (D-MI). Between Obama and Clinton are 8 members -- one Senator, Akaka (D-HI) -- and 7 Represenatives. To Clinton's right there are 188 Democrats -- 40 Senators and 148 Representatives. There is no overlap of the two political parties. They are completely separated ideologically.

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

engineer wrote:

real life wrote:

ebrown_p wrote:

This depends, of course, what your definition of "liberal" is... but this claim seems ridiculous when you compare Obama to other candidates like Kucinich, or even Edwards.

I wish that Obama were more "liberal" (with the assumption that liberal means having positions closer to mine).

How much more liberal could he be?

He's THE most liberal Senator, as rated by liberal groups.[/u][/i]

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Senate/senator_ratings-2005.html

But the ACLU, which happened to be the most aggressive grader, did not give him a score. If they gave him a 78 (that is the average they gave to the those with overall scores greater than or equal to 90 and the same as H. Clinton), his overall score drops to 95 putting him at the same level as the junior senator from NY.

Why the contrived effort to lower his liberal rating?

Did you look at the table to understand my comment? I don't need to contrive to lower his rating because it isn't that high. A month or so ago, someone linked to a site that judges each senator based on how they voted with their party. Obama is a "rank and file democrat", similar to Clinton. Comparing to the table linked above, I noticed that the lowest rating that each senator typically received was missing for Obama and therefore ignored. That makes the other web site I looked at more representative.

Nice try, engineer.

Obama's rating from ACLU is much more liberal than you tried to make it.
Currently 89. And apparently only 'that low' due to missed votes when he was out campaigning.

http://action.aclu.org/site/VoteCenter?congress=110&repId=25424&session_num=0&page=legScore

Underestimating the YouTube factor -- It wasn't just that she talked about dodging sniper fire when reporters who had been on the trip had video proof that she didn't. Or that her husband said something on a radio show and then tried to tell reporters that he didn't say it. It was that those about-faces and many more were immortalized on the Internet, allowing foes to pass them around like baseball cards -- endlessly reliving the worst hits of the campaign.

The Clintons, Bill in particular, seemed unprepared for the instant fact-checking and worldwide distribution that the smallest lies get online. It defused one of his biggest weapons, the ability to make any statement sound like the God's truth with his combination of personal charm and ex-Presidential authority. It also made him look whiny and evasive when complaining about press coverage that exposed his obfuscations.

Needless withholding of information that isn't damaging -- The Clintons gave Barack Obama weeks of free milage on criticism that they refused to release their tax records until close to this year's filing deadline. I knew the Clintons were too smart to have anything really damaging in the material -- beyond the fact that they've made a lot of money outside the White House. But this dynamic is something Carl Bernstein dissects in his book about Hillary, A Woman in Charge. In the book, he describes how Hillary Clinton fed some of the trumped-up scandals which bedeviled their presidency, simply by her lawyer-like refusal to release documents which might have proven their innocence. If she becomes a VP nominee, expect a struggle with Obama's camp over Bill releasing the name of donors to his presidential library.

Reliving the Whitewater/Lewinsky press dynamic -- I get that the Clintons feel persecuted by the press because of all the Mickey Mouse crap that went down during the Whitewater/Lewinsky/Impeachment debacle. But when the dust cleared, the president had lied to just about everyone, and the lot of a politician is to endure constant vetting. Acting like a victim every time the press wrote a tough story on them, the Clintons just encouraged irritated journalists to nail them even harder. Isn't it better to pull a McCain and charm them into submission?

It remains an enduring legacy of the conservative media machine -- and their own past mistakes -- that a couple so admired by the public has such awful relations with the Fourth Estate.

Reliving the Whitewater/Lewinsky press dynamic -- I get that the Clintons feel persecuted by the press because of all the Mickey Mouse crap that went down during the Whitewater/Lewinsky/Impeachment debacle. But when the dust cleared, the president had lied to just about everyone, and the lot of a politician is to endure constant vetting. Acting like a victim every time the press wrote a tough story on them, the Clintons just encouraged irritated journalists to nail them even harder. Isn't it better to pull a McCain and charm them into submission?

Nothing went wrong. Hillary Clinton was emotionally outgunned, just as Bill Clinton outgunned his rivals in 1992.

The pundits and pollsters had it backwards. People didn't vote for Obama because they preferred his message of change to Hillary's message of experience. They preferred his message of change because in their gut they preferred Obama. When all the other candidates scrambled to be the agents of change after Iowa, it didn't matter where they put their spare change because they weren't Obama.

As the first woman to have a serious shot at the presidency in our nation's history, who would have reversed virtually every decision George W. Bush made over the last eight years, Hillary Clinton could legitimately argue, as she tried to do after Iowa, that she offered the best of both worlds: change and experience. What she, her pollsters, and the chattering class mistakenly believed, however, was that Obama had somehow found the right one-word magical amulet, and that they just had to own a piece of the amulet. But that view neglects the fact that virtually every challenger in the last century -- including Bill Clinton ("change vs. more of the same") -- had used the mantra of change, and some won with it while others hadn't. John Edwards frequently spoke of "change -- big change," but he didn't win the nomination in 2008.

What is perhaps most remarkable in all the post-mortems to the Clinton campaign is how little we have heard what is both the most obvious to the naked eye and the best supported by data: It's the emotion, stupid. The reason Hillary Clinton opened a large early lead against her Democratic rivals and seemed invincible was not that she is phenomenally competent and intelligent, which she is. Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Bill Richardson are also phenomenally competent and intelligent. What launched her campaign were the emotional associations people had formed between eight years of the Clintons in the White House and eight years of peace and prosperity. I never heard her campaign complain loudly when journalists used the term "the Clintons," despite the firm conviction of many talking heads that Bill Clinton was a tremendous liability to his wife's campaign. They understood that she needed not just her rock-solid understanding of "the issues" but the power of association.

In fact, what led her to come roaring back -- too little, too late, it turned out --i n the last three months of the primaries was a failing economy that reminded blue collar and rural voters just how much their lives had improved during the Clinton years (reinforcing the emotional associations that had originally made her candidacy seem inevitable) and her relentless attacks on Obama. Those attacks drove her already high negatives up (a risk she had no choice but to take) but also drove his positives down and his negatives up (i.e., changing voters' gut-level feelings about him), and raising many Democrats' worries (fueled by the Jeremiah Wright story and his comments in "liberal San Francisco") about his capacity to lead, his capacity to win, and his capacity to defend himself against the attacks conservative groups will no doubt throw at him in what will likely be the dirtiest general election campaign in modern American history.

The survey data from the last forty years of presidential elections are crystal clear: "The issues" are a distant fourth as predictors of voting behavior. The best predictors are people's feelings toward the parties and their principles (which are obviously of less relevance in primary than general elections because the competitors draw on the same wellsprings of partisan sentiment). The next best predictors, and the ones of most relevance in the primaries, are the feelings the candidates elicit from voters. Next in line are voters' feelings toward the candidates' personal attributes. Among those personal attributes, the lowest on the list of predictors of voting is competence.

At base, Americans want to know three things about candidates: Do they share my values, do they care about people like me, and do I feel in my gut I can trust them to pursue those values and interests faithfully?

Hillary Clinton ran on issues and competence, focusing, like every Democrat who has failed to win the presidency in the last 40 years, on the factors least predictive of electoral success. She spent too little time creating a compelling, consistent personal narrative that could weave together her own life history with the state of a nation yearning for a different kind of leadership, and too little time attending to the negative stories told and retold about her during nearly two decades of savage Republican branding. She could have told the story of how she grew up in a traditional American -- and Republican -- home in Illinois; lived through the changes of the 1960s and learned the lessons we all learned as a nation, that we cannot be true to our national ideals while showing intolerance or prejudice toward anyone, whether women, African-Americans, or the conservative hate group de jure; but that she never forgot the traditional American values she learned at home that have been appropriated by Republicans but do not belong to them, such as hard work, personal responsibility, patriotism, and a commitment to our nation's security. A master narrative that wove together those elements would have provided a compelling alternative to the story of Hillary as triangulating, poll-driven opportunist that led many to distrust her.

Anyone who doubts that the same emotional dynamics that have, empirically, been central to the success or failure of presidential candidates over the last 40 years were central to Obama's defeat of the seemingly invincible Senator from New York should simply go back to the tapes of the Democratic primary debates and the Gallup polls from last summer through mid fall, when Obama was running a much more traditional, issues-oriented Democratic campaign -- as Hillary continued to rise in the polls, eventually breaking 50% among likely Democratic voters in October of 2007. But that all changed with his electrifying, game-changing performance at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa. There, he stopped campaigning like Adlai Stevenson and started campaigning like Barack Obama, and the rest was history. After that point, there was nothing Hillary Clinton could do but to go negative, which took him down a notch but reinforced her already high negatives.

There are a lot of reasons Hillary lost. You can dissect the strategy and get to the "how" but I don't think anyone (in the press, I haven't read this thread) is correctly ascribing the importance of what I consider the most influential "why" factor: the differences in their original Iraq positions.

Iraq has been compared to Vietnam in many silly ways. But the greatest similarity will be in its political influence in politics over the next generation. It is the most polarizing political event in my lifetime and is the main reason candidates like Obama and Ron Paul are setting records in fund raising and are very popular among my generation and among "centrists" even when they are not politically centrist. There is a generation of eligible voters to whom domestic policy like health care takes a backseat to the clusterfuck that is Iraq.

Invading Iraq was a deeply unpopular war at the height of its popularity, and the lingering occupation and realization of its human and financial costs has convinced the overwhelming majority of those once in favor of the idea of its recklessness. Those who opposed it all along remember being ashamed of the Democrats for sheepishly accepting the war and the politicians who opposed it then stood in rare company amongst their peers for their act of political bravery.

It doesn't hurt that Obama is a supremely gifted politician. Bob Kerry, who lost to Bill Clinton, says that "If Barack Obama had been born 10 years earlier and had been a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1992, neither I nor Bill Clinton would have defeated him" and goes on to call Obama "a candidate with greater skills than any candidate her husband had ever faced in his life." That may be true, but what lends that charisma credibility is his judgment on Iraq, and what gives his campaign the groundswell of support for "change".

Bush did not just spend all his newfound political capital on this pet Project for the New American Century but he also spent years of Republican political capital.

I remember being at an Obama event in Iowa, and the row of volunteers at each door was four people deep. You weren't getting in there without giving some bit of personal contact information. Got a cell phone? Scott Goodstein ran their text messaging campaign. Enter your zip code and you'll be activated when volunteers are needed in a particular state. The way the campaign worked volunteers into a system orchestrated by professional organizers was staggering both in its scope and its efficiency. They built an email list that is estimated to be somewhere between 4 and 8 million, some say as high as 10. Then they worked it. And worked it. Every email solicitation is now a fundraising motherlode.

Clinton, by comparison, ran Al Gore's 2000 campaign. She may have raised more money than any other Democratic presidential candidate who came before, she may have had a formidable machine, but she was blown away by an organization that executed a nearly flawless mastery of new social networking technology. State after state, her team thought she didn't need to compete. Under an old model, maybe not. But Obama's organization brought manpower and resources to every state that the Clinton team just did not see coming.

The effect this has all had on modern politics has yet to be measured. But think about it: in February, the month that Obama raised $55 million, he did not host one single fundraiser. Clinton, on the other hand, was tied to a system where her time was spent courting big-dollar donors. Which has the effect (potentially) of freeing a candidate from saying one thing to the public, with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge to the folks writing the checks. Now the public are the folks writing the checks.

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Micah Sifrey writes today about what this all means for the future of politics. If Obama carries this sort of organizational ability and infrastructure into the Oval Office, what kind of transformative effect will it have on the way he governs?

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The Clinton campaign might very well have worked in 2000. But in 2008, it was Tower Records. Obama was Napster. Meanwhile, they're rubbing sticks together at the McCain campaign