6
   

Why did Clinton get her clock cleaned

 
 
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2017 03:25 pm
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/19/why-hillary-clinton-really-lost/

By Robert Parry

An early insider account of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, entitled Shattered, reveals a paranoid presidential candidate who couldn’t articulate why she wanted to be President and who oversaw an overconfident and dysfunctional operation that failed to project a positive message or appeal to key voting groups.


Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters in Phoenix, Arizona. March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
Okay, I realize that people who have been watching Rachel Maddow and other MSNBC programs – as well as reading The New York Times and The Washington Post for the past four months – “know” that Clinton ran a brilliant campaign that was only derailed because of “Russian meddling.” But this insider account from reporters Jonathan Allen and Annie Parnes describes something else.

As The Wall Street Journal review notes, the book “narrates the petty bickering, foolish reasoning and sheer arrogance of a campaign that was never the sure thing that its leader and top staffers assumed. … Mr. Allen and Ms. Parnes stress two essential failures of the campaign, the first structural, the second political. The campaign’s structure, the authors write, was an ‘unholy mess, fraught with tangled lines of authority, petty jealousies, and no sense of greater purpose.’”

The book portrays Hillary Clinton as distant from her campaign staff, accessible primarily through her close aide, Huma Abedin, and thus creating warring factions within her bloated operation.

According to the Journal’s review by Barton Swaim, the book’s authors suggest that this chaos resulted from “the fact that Mrs. Clinton didn’t know why she wanted to be president. At one point no fewer than 10 senior aides were working on her campaign announcement speech, not one had a clear understanding of why Americans should cast their vote for Mrs. Clinton and not someone else. The speech, when she finally delivered it, was a flop – aimless, boring, devoid of much beyond bromides.”

The book cites a second reason for Clinton’s dismal performance – her team’s reliance on analytics rather than on reaching out to real voters and their concerns.

There is also an interesting tidbit regarding Clinton’s attitude toward the privacy of her staff’s emails. “After losing to Mr. Obama in the protracted 2008 primary,” the Journal’s review says, Clinton “was convinced that she had lost because some staffers – she wasn’t sure who – had been disloyal. So she ‘instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the [email] messages sent and received by top staffers.’”

Nixonian Paranoia

In other words, Clinton – in some Nixonian fit of paranoia – violated the privacy of her senior advisers in her own mole hunt, a revelation that reflects on her own self-described “mistake” to funnel her emails as Secretary of State through a private server rather than a government one. As the Journal’s review puts it: “she didn’t want anyone reading her emails the way she was reading those of her 2008 staffers.”


Sen. Bernie Sanders speaking to one of his large crowds of supporters. (Photo credit: Sanders campaign)
But there is even a greater irony in this revelation because of the current complaint from Clinton and her die-hard supporters that Russia sabotaged her campaign by releasing emails via WikiLeaks from the DNC, which described how party leaders had torpedoed the campaign of Clinton’s rival for the nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and other emails from her campaign chairman John Podesta, revealing the contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street banks and some pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.

WikiLeaks has denied that it received the emails from Russia – and President Obama’s outgoing intelligence chiefs presented no real evidence to support the allegations – but the conspiracy theory of the Trump campaign somehow colluding with the Russians to sink Clinton has become a groupthink among many Democrats as well as the mainstream U.S. media.

So, rather than conducting a serious autopsy on how Clinton and the national Democratic Party kicked away a winnable election against the buffoonish Donald Trump, national Democrats have created a Zombie explanation for their failures, blaming their stunning defeat on the Russians.

This hysteria over Russia-gate has consumed the first several months of the Trump presidency – badgering the Trump administration into a more belligerent posture toward nuclear-armed Russia – but leaving little incentive for the Democrats to assess what they need to do to appeal to working-class voters who chose Trump’s empty-headed populism over Clinton’s cold-hearted calculations.

The current conventional wisdom among the mainstream media, many Democrats and even some progressives is that the only way to explain the victory by pussy-grabbing Trump is to complain about an intervention by the evil Russians. Maybe Maddow and the other Russia-did-it conspiracy theorists will now denounce Shattered as just one more example of “Russian disinformation.”

The Times’ View

The New York Times’ review by Michiko Kakutani also notes how Shattered details Clinton’s dysfunction, but the newspaper inserted a phrase about “Russian meddling,” presumably to avoid a head-exploding cognitive dissonance among its readers who have been inundated over the past four months by the Times’ obsession on Russia! Russia! Russia!

However, the Times’ review still focuses on the book’s larger message: “In fact, the portrait of the Clinton campaign that emerges from these pages is that of a Titanic-like disaster: an epic fail made up of a series of perverse and often avoidable missteps by an out-of-touch candidate and her strife-ridden staff that turned ‘a winnable race’ into ‘another iceberg-seeking campaign ship.’

“It’s the story of a wildly dysfunctional and ‘spirit-crushing’ campaign that embraced a flawed strategy (based on flawed data) and that failed, repeatedly, to correct course. A passive-aggressive campaign that neglected to act on warning flares sent up by Democratic operatives on the ground in crucial swing states, and that ignored the advice of the candidate’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, and other Democratic Party elders, who argued that the campaign needed to work harder to persuade undecided and ambivalent voters (like working-class whites and millennials), instead of focusing so insistently on turning out core supporters.”

So, perhaps this new book about how Hillary Clinton really lost Campaign 2016 will enable national Democrats to finally start charting a course correction before the party slams another Titanic-style campaign into another iceberg.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

 
dalehileman
 
  -3  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2017 03:43 pm
@edgarblythe,
Quote:
paranoid ... couldn’t articulate ...and who oversaw an overconfident and dysfunctional op...that failed....


So Ed how wold you compare her w/guess who
0 Replies
 
Setanta
 
  6  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2017 07:44 pm
That's all over analyzed. She behaved as though the convention were a coronation, and that come November, she'd be the new president. She ran a crap campaign, and didn't put up a fight.
0 Replies
 
ehBeth
 
  2  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2017 10:23 pm
Let's see now.

She got the most raw votes in the primary.

She got the most raw votes in the general.

That's not the definition of getting one's clock cleaned.

The results tell you quite a bit about American electoral districts and the truly bizarre electoral college system.

Should small populations states have as much influence as large population states? no. just no.

Should electoral districts be organized by race? no. just no.

Should racially-sorted districts have different voting resources. no. ******* no.
ehBeth
 
  1  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2017 10:27 pm
@edgarblythe,
edgarblythe wrote:

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/04/19/why-hillary-clinton-really-lost/

The current conventional wisdom among the mainstream media, many Democrats and even some progressives is that the only way to explain the victory by pussy-grabbing Trump is to complain about an intervention by the evil Russians.



that's a heaping pile of bull-crap

hard to figure out if the book or the review is denser
McGentrix
 
  -3  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2017 10:55 pm
@ehBeth,
ehBeth wrote:

Let's see now.

She got the most raw votes in the primary.


Doesn't matter, she and the DNC colluded to disenfranchise Sanders.

ehBeth wrote:
She got the most raw votes in the general.

That's not the definition of getting one's clock cleaned.


Well, she did lose the election. Just like Gore did. You'd think the Dem's would understand how the system works by now.

ehBeth wrote:
The results tell you quite a bit about American electoral districts and the truly bizarre electoral college system.

Should small populations states have as much influence as large population states? no. just no.


How do you figure they do? You think Delaware had as much influence as California did? Do you think small states should have less influence then?

ehBeth wrote:
Should electoral districts be organized by race? no. just no.


They aren't.

ehBeth wrote:
Should racially-sorted districts have different voting resources. no. ******* no.


They don't because they aren't. Is shitty everywhere.
McGentrix
 
  -4  
Reply Mon 24 Apr, 2017 10:56 pm
@ehBeth,
You seem awful offended for a non-citizen. What gives?
0 Replies
 
edgarblythe
 
  1  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 04:53 am
The article neglects to cover how many voters saw her as criminal, related to Benghazi and emails, or how many rejected her on grounds she is but a front for big money interests.

Now the election is over, you can tell Clinton's coat tails were to the negative. Instead of bringing in more congressional seats, seats were lost. Which leaves one to ponder how she would have fared in her first 100 days.

The problem is systemic with the Democratic Party and why I now call establishment Dems the Dinosaur Dems. Even when they retain the White House they steadily give ground to the Republicans, and now Republicans control most state houses, the SCOTUS, POTUS, both houses of congress. Yet, they point to Clinton's share of the popular vote as a symbol of vindication. They opt for the status quo, for the most, in the face of the reality, preferring to lose elections than to allow in real liberals.
0 Replies
 
Olivier5
 
  2  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 05:20 am
@ehBeth,
ehBeth wrote:
hard to figure out if the book or the review is denser

The review was mean spirited and has telltale signs of rightwing nuttiness (eg its obsession with "mainstream media") but the book is probably okay. Clinton DID fail to enthuse.
0 Replies
 
Olivier5
 
  3  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 05:24 am
@McGentrix,
Quote:
Do you think small states should have less influence then?

A direct voting system would be less open to manipulation and fraud. What's wrong with one man one vote?
McGentrix
 
  -3  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 07:11 am
@Olivier5,
Olivier5 wrote:

Quote:
Do you think small states should have less influence then?

A direct voting system would be less open to manipulation and fraud. What's wrong with one man one vote?


Other than tyranny of the majority you mean?

What happens if the majority of people oppose gay marriage? Or abortion? Or want to ban a religion? Or make NASCAR an official sport?

The US is not designed to be a pure democracy and it would never work here.
Olivier5
 
  3  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 08:03 am
@McGentrix,
Do you prefer the tyranny of the minority? If the majority of voters should NOT decide an election, who should?

Power to the people!
0 Replies
 
georgeob1
 
  0  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 08:40 am
Some interesting reports & commentary from Edgar on the recent Book by Jonathan Allen, "Shattered" concerning the Hillary Clinton campaign. I suspect the internal conflicts and errors he depicts are largely true. Indeed many were already evident to most casual observers. However I also suspect that somewhat similar, if perhaps less intense, accounts could be written about most political campaigns, including those of the winners.

The inevitable sources for this material include key figures in the campaign organization who are often likely to have a very different perspective from that of the candidate herself. Moreover they have a natural , very human, desire to absolve themselves of blame for the defeat - and no where else to put it than on the candidate.

For me the really interesting question is how the Clinton establishment in the Democrat party managed to anoint Hillary as the only possible candidate for the 2016 election soon after her defeat by Obama eight years earlier. The absence of any real competition for her from within the Democrat Party during Obama's 2nd term was quite surprising to me. I don't think that prolonged status would do any candidate real good and, for someone as power-seeking as Hillary, its corrosive effects appear to have been severe. I believe that is the real story here.
edgarblythe
 
  3  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 08:53 am
They were going to cram her down our throats, willing or not.
0 Replies
 
tsarstepan
 
  1  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 08:59 am
@edgarblythe,
Quote:
Why did Clinton get her clock cleaned

So she could properly tell time with a working timepiece?
0 Replies
 
edgarblythe
 
  2  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 09:17 am

Trump’s Foreign Policy: 100 Days of Global Bafflement
By AARON DAVID MILLER and RICHARD SOKOLSKY

By most traditional measures, the Democratic Party hit rock bottom at the outset of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The Democratic National Committee was leaderless and in shambles. Congress and the White House were under Republican control, as were about two-thirds of the statehouses. Perhaps the most popular national figure associated with the party, Sen. Bernie Sanders, refused to even call himself a Democrat.


Yet Trump’s first 100 days in office appear to have resuscitated the party, if for no reason other than the rank-and-file loathe him so deeply and furiously. Grassroots activism and organizing is surging. Irate Democrats are flooding GOP town halls even in conservative states like Idaho and South Carolina. Small-dollar fundraising is also on fire — six of the 10 Senate Democrats up for re-election in states Trump won collected over $2 million in the first three months of the year. For some of them, that represented more than had ever been raised in their state this early in the election cycle.

But while the president has generated a vibrant culture of resistance on the left, it’s obscuring the depth of the hole that the Democratic Party still finds itself in. A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows more Americans view the party negatively than positively.


“We have a new energy but we don’t have a new brand,” said Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, who gained national attention in November for unsuccessfully challenging House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for her leadership role. “I would think that if the Democratic Party had a halfway decent national brand or an exciting, affirmative agenda, that we would have been able to get at least a couple more percentage points in the Georgia [special election where Democrat Jon Ossoff fell just short of 50 percent last week]. We had a great candidate and great energy running under a very negative brand.”

The brand is only part of the problem — the party's central infrastructure itself is in need of an overhaul. Democrats got dragged back into a redux of the presidential primary fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders during the first month of Trump’s presidency in the race for the DNC chairmanship between former Labor Secretary Tom Perez and Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison. That divisive fight appears poised to resurface in May, with the beginning of the DNC's “Unity Commission” meetings to reform the presidential primary process, featuring representatives hand-picked by Clinton and Sanders themselves.

While many individual Democratic officeholders are cash-flush — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for example, brought in more than $5 million from January through March on her way to building out a campaign account of more than $9 million — the national party itself raised just $23.6 million in the first three months of the year. Compare that to the RNC's $41 million-plus, powered by Trump. And while new DNC Chairman Perez is criss-crossing the country trying to restore trust in his institution and heal the raw wounds from 2016’s presidential primary, party leaders acknowledge that their rebuilding project — both at the DNC and at the state level — needs to be a comprehensive one after November’s shocking losses and the down-ballot massacre of the previous eight years.

They’re still in the beginning stages of mapping out that path: the DNC has yet to announce the hire of an executive director or senior staff in many prominent units of the building, and no plan to conduct any sort of autopsy or accounting of the 2016 election cycle has been circulated.

It all adds up to a Democratic Party suddenly fueled by a massive outpouring of energy but without the established power structures to channel and amplify it. Recent Democratic special election candidates in traditionally conservative House districts in Kansas and Georgia performed over 20 points better than the party’s nominee had in November, yet they still fell short of picking up the seats.

At the moment, it’s a party in which Washington is learning to follow the grassroots’ lead. On Capitol Hill, Democratic senators’ practice of rejecting as many of Trump’s nominees as possible started once protesters and constituents began to demand it with massive letter-writing campaigns, organizing nationwide resistance to new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and even forcing Warren, the liberal hero, to apologize for her initial move to allow a vote on new Housing Secretary Ben Carson to proceed.

National party committees, meanwhile, started funneling campaign cash to special election candidates in Kansas, Georgia, and Montana only after the liberal Daily Kos site put them on the map by focusing attention on them.

Indivisible, a group that came together after Trump was elected, has provided much of the fuel for town hall protests and local organizing around the country. Run For Something, another new organization formed in opposition to the president, is also stepping into the void, one of a handful now providing individuals with resources and information they need to run for office.

“It’s clear in this moment where the center of political gravity is. You don’t get the 20-point swing in deep red Congressional districts without a genuine, very organic grassroots surge of energy and attention,” said MoveOn.org executive director Anna Galland, referring to the pair of recent votes. And that energy, she said, is slowly translating to Washington — not the other way around. “What I see is a grassroots hurricane of bold, principled, opposition from our elected officials to the unprecedented threats posed by this administration.”

Trump’s attempts to push an Obamacare repeal, a border wall, and various iterations of his travel ban have also motivated a drove of new candidates to jump into the fray ahead of 2018’s elections, including in a handful of deep-red states where some Democrats now feel like they might — just maybe — be able to compete, against all odds.

Rep. Beto O’Rourke, for one, is challenging GOP Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas — as Republican a state as there is, but one where a recent poll showed a tied race, even as the national party largely ignores O’Rourke’s bid.

At the presidential level, Trump has had an equally catalytic effect: Up to 30 Democrats are in preliminary considerations — or the subject of preliminary conversations — about possible 2020 presidential runs.

“The first 100 days has been Dickensian: the best of times, the worst of times,” said ACLU political director Faiz Shakir, whose group raised an eye-popping $24 million online during the weekend after Trump announced his initial ban on entry from citizens of a handful of Muslim-majority countries. The 97-year-old organization subsequently launched its first organizing push. “On the one hand, we’ve experienced a tremendous rebirth of civic activism on a mass scale. But on the other hand, we’ve seen such harm unnecessarily inflicted on so many lives because of Trump’s policies. The civic activism can and will be sustained if political leaders demonstrate that they are able to meaningfully resist the worst of Trump’s excesses. And so far, the good news is that it’s working.”
Olivier5
 
  1  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 09:44 am
@edgarblythe,
Interesting, thx.
0 Replies
 
Foofie
 
  -1  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 12:53 pm
@McGentrix,
McGentrix wrote:

Olivier5 wrote:

Quote:
Do you think small states should have less influence then?

A direct voting system would be less open to manipulation and fraud. What's wrong with one man one vote?


Other than tyranny of the majority you mean?

What happens if the majority of people oppose gay marriage? Or abortion? Or want to ban a religion? Or make NASCAR an official sport?

The US is not designed to be a pure democracy and it would never work here.


Let's not forget that, if the Presidential election was just based on votes, then the candidates would not visit all states, nor try to win votes there, and just have a campaign that promised goodies for the masses in a few megamopolises. The next thing we'd have is red states seceding?
Foofie
 
  0  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 01:01 pm
@georgeob1,
georgeob1 wrote:

Some interesting reports & commentary from Edgar on the recent Book by Jonathan Allen, "Shattered" concerning the Hillary Clinton campaign. I suspect the internal conflicts and errors he depicts are largely true. Indeed many were already evident to most casual observers. However I also suspect that somewhat similar, if perhaps less intense, accounts could be written about most political campaigns, including those of the winners.

The inevitable sources for this material include key figures in the campaign organization who are often likely to have a very different perspective from that of the candidate herself. Moreover they have a natural , very human, desire to absolve themselves of blame for the defeat - and no where else to put it than on the candidate.

For me the really interesting question is how the Clinton establishment in the Democrat party managed to anoint Hillary as the only possible candidate for the 2016 election soon after her defeat by Obama eight years earlier. The absence of any real competition for her from within the Democrat Party during Obama's 2nd term was quite surprising to me. I don't think that prolonged status would do any candidate real good and, for someone as power-seeking as Hillary, its corrosive effects appear to have been severe. I believe that is the real story here.


A day after the election, on radio, some pundit believed that those rural voters (aka, white Protestants) in the swing states came out to vote this election, and did not vote in the prior two elections. That skewed the pollsters algorithm when multiplying the numbers from telephone polls against the number of voters in the last election. Why didn't the "rural voters" vote in the last two elections? My thinking is that they had no antipathy to Obama winning, since it would look good in the history books, for posterity, and more importantly, Scalia was still alive. Those Evangelicals are really concerned about late term abortions being legalized for all, in my opinion.

And, as you might be quite aware of, this country has some very different thinking demographics that are sort of like the Smurfs in the forest - one can forget that they are there, but they really are, in great numbers too.
georgeob1
 
  -1  
Reply Tue 25 Apr, 2017 01:27 pm
@Foofie,
I think the perch on which you presume to look down on the masses is much less lofty than you imagine.
 

Related Topics

 
  1. Forums
  2. » Why did Clinton get her clock cleaned
Copyright © 2024 MadLab, LLC :: Terms of Service :: Privacy Policy :: Page generated in 0.07 seconds on 12/07/2024 at 02:22:13