@Setanta,
I assure you that I do not agree with anything Max has to say.
Here's a little object lesson in campaigning in a critical, close race. Nixon won the 1968 election with a very narrow plurality, while securing the Electoral College by a large vote. There were two factors in this, being the conventions and the Dixiecrat vote. Wallace and LeMay took five southern states, but those electoral votes would not have put Humphrey over the top. Although many people point to Robert Kennedy's campaign, he was trailing Humphrey by hundreds of committed delegates at the time he was shot and killed. In the end, Nixon beat Humphrey by only a few more than a half a million votes. (Compare that to HRC's plurality over Plump.) In my never humble opinion, what torpedoed Humphrey was timing.
The Republican convention opened in the first week of August. The Democratic convention was delayed by exactly three weeks, so as to celebrate the birthday of LBJ. Nixon had three weeks to campaign, unanswered by the Democrats. When Humphrey did start his very aggressive campaign, he startled all the pundits with the rapidity of his closing on Nixon. Those three weeks proved to be crucial, and I believe cost Humphrey the election.
In late September, some guy came around to the Student Union at the university I attended and asked a few of us if we wanted to get five bucks for a couple of hours work. Naturally we said yes, the minimum wage was $1.60/hour, which is actually a good deal more in purchasing power than the current minimum wage. (In fact, they gave us ten dollars each, more than the take-home any of us would have gotten for a day's work.) We went up to the ballroom, and discovered that they wanted us to set up for a Democratic fund-raiser to be held that evening. While we were setting up, this suit breezes in, and I realized it was Humphrey. One of his handlers was trailing him muttering "Mr. Vice President, Mr. Vice President" and being resolutely ignored by Humphrey. He asked the four of us to join him at a table, and as we did, the handler started to tell him why there wasn't time. I really can't imagine Humphrey being willfully rude to anyone--and he turned and smiled at the man and said: "Would you wait out in the hall?" The guy went red in the face, and then he left the room.
Humphrey then spent the next twenty to thirty minutes asking us questions and
listening to the answers. He knew the war was the most important thing on our minds, and he answered candidly--except for a few time when he declined to answer, which I suspect had to do with classified information. It was an amazing interview, completely private; the clincher was that in 1968, none of us were old enough to vote. I think Humphrey made up the distance with Nixon because he was obviously sincere and spoke honestly with the people he addressed. I believe those three weeks cost him the election.
Now look at HRC. She sat around with her thumb up her *** for three weeks after the convention, which she treated as a coronation. When combined with her apparently unplanned campaign, it cost her the election,
even though she still won the popular vote. HRC had no James Carville to run her campaign. Whoever was at least nominally responsible should be drummed out of politics. But HRC herself deserves all the opprobrium for her loss. She sat around on her dead *** and then ran an idiotic campaign. She did not assert herself, and she certainly should not have put up with Plump's antics during the debates. She blew it, big time, and we are all suffering the consequences of her ineptitude.
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