Excuse me. But … seriously?
Anyone who reads this post should also read this. I feel like spiking a football. (And then kicking it in a few people’s faces.)
*******
Anyone who played a role in “clearing the field” for Hillary Clinton—anyone who did—should be categorically removed from consideration as DNC chair. And the idea that Clinton herself should weigh in during the selection process is disgusting. She couldn’t forgo her and her husband’s speaking engagement to Morgan Stanley scheduled for after her announcement of her candidacy until she was intensely pressured by members of her campaign, and the $225,000 speaking fee, because of her close ties to some top Morgan Stanley executive, who’d worked for her State.
And she was limited to a campaign based mostly on Trump’s insults and temperament and sexual assault admission, because she couldn’t credibly campaign on much of anything else—least of all on the Democratic Party platform—because she was paid huge speaking fees by a Goldman Sachs and some foreign banks in the two years after she left State.
She wanted so badly to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling. She just wanted those speaking fees more.
She barely campaigned, except privately with moderate Republican donors, beginning the very morning after she secured the delegates for nomination by winning the California primary in early June, and except to troll for endorsements from high-profile Republicans.
That absence campaigning extended to never submitting to, say, a Sunday-talk-show interview or interview with any other journalist, in which she could have, maybe, mentioned some of those Platform proposals, explained them, and then used them at, like, rallies—for fear of being asked about, say, those speaking fees. Her own or her husband’s. Or the $18 million her husband received over a period of four or five years from a for-profit university I exchange for the university using his name as a board member.
I’ll grant that she herself apparently has given no indication that she wants to weigh in on the issue of the choosing the next DNC chair. That’s someone else’s comment, not based on anything other than, I guess—well, gee, it’s just too hard for all of us political types and political journalists to ween ourselves from the Clintons.
But don’t. Just. Plain. Don’t. Clinton won the popular vote, by about two million votes, apparently; not a tiny margin. But she didn’t win the Upper Midwest, nor Pennsylvania, because she just couldn’t run as a populist change agent, because she so, so wanted those speaking fees. So she didn’t win the White House.
____
UPDATE: I just signed this petition, and wrote in the comment field that many, many of those Midwesterners who put Trump over the top in the Electoral College will in the next day or two that they were conned, and will want a Mulligan in the form of an Electoral College vote that reflects the popular vote, which Clinton won by about two million votes, apparently. I supplied the link to this article.
I invite you sign it, for the same reason I did. Or for any of the other reasons connected to impropriety, Comey and the FBI/Giuliani fabricated FBI leak being just one possible one. Another is the treatment of Black voters and those who attempted to vote, in North Carolina and Wisconsin.
Go for it, folks.
Update added 11/11 at 5:19 p.m.
____
SECOND UPDATE: I just read this Politico article posted last night, titled “Clinton aides blame loss on everything but themselves,” and subtitled “‘They are saying they did nothing wrong, which is ridiculous,’ one Democrat says.” It’s chock full of dumbfounding information, but one thing that repeats what I’d read elsewhere is this:
And some began pointing fingers at the young campaign manager, Robby Mook, who spearheaded a strategy supported by the senior campaign team that included only limited outreach to those voters — a theory of the case that Bill Clinton had railed against for months, wondering aloud at meetings why the campaign was not making more of an attempt to even ask that population for its votes. It’s not that there was none: Clinton’s post-convention bus tour took her through Youngstown, Ohio, as well as Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, where she tried to eat into Trump’s margins with his base. In Scranton and Harrisburg, the campaign aired a commercial that featured a David Letterman clip of Trump admitting to outsourcing manufacturing of the products and clothes that bore his logo. And at campaign stops in Ohio, Clinton talked about Trump’s reliance on Chinese steel.
But in general, Bill Clinton’s viewpoint of fighting for the working class white voters was often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map. At a meeting ahead of the convention at which aides presented to both Clintons the “Stronger Together” framework for the general election, senior strategist Joel Benenson told the former president bluntly that the voters from West Virginia were never coming back to his party.
I don’t get it. Why did these people think that blacks and Latinos and millennials and college-educated whites weren’t interested in the economic and power-structure changes that white working class Midwesterners are interested in? Don’t all those groups like Elizabeth Warren’s primary message? And, point by point, don’t most people who comprise those groups like most of Sanders’ points and agenda?
West Virginians did’t vote for Obama. Either time. Blue collar whites in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Pennsylvania did. Both times. Was it Bill Clinton who was confused, and wanted Clinton to campaign in West Virginia? Or was it Clinton herself, and her campaign folks, who were confused and thought that blue collar whites weren’t key parts of the Obama coalition in the Rust Belt and elsewhere in the Midwest?
Here’s a new one to me, and it really did stun me, although it shouldn’t have because it’s really standard Hillary Clinton:
“They spent their time protecting her, explaining her, defending her, with all these issues, the speeches, the Foundation, the emails — that became the energy of the campaign,” sighed one longtime Clinton confidante.
The paid speeches and the glitzy fundraisers, they said, did not paint a picture of a woman connected to the real suffering in the country. But that, they said, was just who Clinton was after so many years in the spotlight. “Her outlook is, ‘I get whacked no matter what, so screw it,’” explained one longtime confidant. “I’ve been out here killing myself for years and years and if I want to give the same speech everyone else does, I will.”
That first sentence, of course, is what we all knew and heard and saw. But it did bring back that feeling of mystified anger that this stuff, rather than policy issues (including structural ones), was what her campaign really was about, month after month, including during the primaries, but thoroughly during the general election campaign. That stuff and her attacks on Trump that rarely actually touched on economic and fiscal policy or anything much of substance, but instead just reiterated, again and again, what everyone knew as well as she did.
But that quote inside the quote in the second paragraph is crazy. She didn’t want to run for president again, at this stage of her life. And she had no particular overarching message to run on, other than “It’s time to break the glass ceiling,” as if this was what was of uppermost concern to most women, or something.
So why the hell did she? Why the hell did she?
This article is a fascinating account of absurdity. Still … I’m glad I signed that petition.
Update added 11/11 at 6:49 p.m.
Time to move on, Bev.
Not yet. I just signed this petition:
https://www.change.org/p/electoral-college-electors-electoral-college-make-hillary-clinton-president-on-december-19?recruiter=405283456&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink.
I just updated the post on this.
Jack D….Ditto
Maybe you don’t realize this yer, Dan, but we’ve just elected Paul Ryan president, with both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court as cheerleaders.
Politico has a feature story today saying that the Sanders army is taking over not just the DNC but state Party operations as well. By force, of course. But blog posts, especially grass roots ones, help this. a lot. Schumer didn’t suddenly decide to back Ellison yesterday because he wanted to.
If President Ryan is to be effectively resisted in any important respect, this is the avenue for it: Massive grass roots anger, translating into threat of losses in the 2018 election cycle.
It’s clear from this essay by Yves Smith that she’s profoundly naive in prediction about the nature of the Trump presidency: She thinks the issue is whether Trump will be able to co-opt congressional Republicans. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/voters-repudiate-clinton.html
But as the events and reports in the last to days make clear, I was right all along: Trump is already co-opted by Ryan.
Edgar Ryan and Charlie Trump. Trump was Ryan’s and McConnell’s Trojan Horse.
So the same Democrats who were ready to remove the Democratic elector in Washington state for saying he wouldn’t vote for Clinton now want 40 or so Republican electors to do the same thing?
I am just beginning to understand how stupid, worthless and ridiculous the Democratic Party has become in the last ten years. No wonder she lost
Be careful Emichael is going to pop in and scold you for stepping out of line, then later MS 57 will pop in and scream obscenities at you .
That’s what has impressed me about the die hard Hillary fans hereabouts , their calm demeanor and overall sunny dispositions.
Yup, Beverly. Hillary is damaged goods of her own making. If the Dems were smart they would walk away as fast as they can but I doubt they will be that strategic.
They’re about to be forced to be that strategic, tonu, whether they know it yet or not.
Bev, sorry to say it but this is an annoying post. You are willing to sign a petition that says, in part, “Mr. Trump is unfit to serve. His scapegoating of so many Americans, and his impulsivity, bullying, lying, admitted history of sexual assault, and utter lack of experience make him a danger to the Republic.”
If you can sign-off on that, why, then, do you criticize Hillary for emphasizing those same character flaws of Trump in her campaign? This was never a campaign about policy ideas. Trump did not win on policy ideas, indeed he had NO serious policy ideas. Those Midwest blue-collar workers did not go for Trump over ACA or Dodd-Frank or NAFTA. Trump was this year’s shiny new toy who rode the same anti-establishment wave that Obama rode in 2008, except that in this case the wave was purposely enabled by a petulant Republican congress using gridlock and government shut-down as their means back to power. This was not a personal failure by Hillary, notwithstanding your righteous indignation about her taking speaking fees.
I didn’t write the petition, and didn’t like that part of its stated justification. I wrote my open justification; several sentences. I wish I’d saved a copy of what I wrote, or taken a screenshot of it, but I didn’t, so I can’t reprint it here.
You can believe it was mostly the doing of Hillary herself, but she made the basic economic arguments cogently and with apparent feeling in speeches and in the debates — to the extent in those fiascoes, anyway, that any pertinent questions were asked. The speeches and a couple of gauzy events she didn’t believe she needed to cancel, or even contributions from some liberal billionaires, did not need to compromise anything. Things like that were nothing new with Democratic candidates, and the platform was still the platform, and it was very, very different from the Republican platform.
The same lack of any argument characterized the disastrous campaigns in 2010, 2012 and 2014, elections without Hillary to put the kibosh on anything. Even Obama’s 2008 campaign had little economic substance to it. It seems to me it’s the entire DC-based Democratic leadership and consulting class that is so utterly clueless about what real strategy is. Just running on the platform instead of treating it as ancient history would have made a difference — at minimum enough to win those states with one percentage point margins.
We have to get the incompetents out of the picture if anything is going to change.
God. You’re delusional if you think it was trivial that Clinton had to be all-but-tackled by her campaign staff and outside advisers to keep her from pushing her husband to speak at Morgan Stanley for a fee of $225,000 DURING her campaign because her friend and former aide at State was now a top executive there, knowing that this would become public in tax returns released before the general election.
And if you think her speaking fees for speeches as SEVERAL international financial institutions, three speeches a Goldman alone, wasn’t a double mega-hindrance—a big problem I and of itself, but an even bigger problem in that it kept her from telling the public that Trump’s campaign was funded in substantial part by two billionaire financial industry families and that these people were advising Trump on policy proposals and potential appointees, and that a think tank funded by one of them was actually writing his proposals—you must be living in a different election cycle.
And if you really can’t distinguish between Clinton talking about her own economic policy agenda and TRUMP’S, and if you think that the cutesy line “trumped up trickle-down” was quite specific enough, and didn’t think that maybe this needed to be specified in, say, ADS and maybe even TV interviews, and in SPEECHES and at RALLIES—and that maybe, just maybe, she should told the public, again and again and again, that Trump’s campaign was being funded by two oil billionaires, one of whom was set to become his Interior secretary—and that maybe Trump was the very opposite of a change agent, you’re an idiot.
The public didn’t know ANY OF THIS. But you think that trivial? Even in her final ad runs in the last two weeks of the campaign HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. They were the same old, same old: the Khan father, the mocking of a reporter who has a physical disability, Trump’s erratic and shouldn’t’ have the nuclear codes. Tell people what they already know, know, know, but not what they don’t know, at least if what they don’t know is that Trump is controlled by financial services industry and oil industry billionaires and that their think tank is writing his fiscal and regulatory policies and selecting his appointments.
No, never tell them THAT. Uh-uh. They might actually realize that Trump-is the-opposite-of-change-agent.
It’s people with your mindset that made Clinton the nominee. So screw you. You and your ilk made your bed, but you also made mine and a lot of people’s who knew better.
Bev – There are no Mulligans in golf. Those that think there are fools who do no know the rules. This election is over – sign all the petitions you like – it will not change a thing.
I understand you like Liz W, but face the facts – she’s just another old angry white woman. She would have lost this election by a mile.
Yup. Warren would have lost to just another angry old man because she’s just another angry old woman. Definitely a fact to be faced.
I have to say, I’ve been raging for a year and a half against this claim of some liberal pundits, male and female, that sexism would hurt Clinton, and now since the election that one reason Clinton lost was sexism. But your comment does give me pause. And makes me sick.
What mattered is change. Warren is change. Big change. Clinton is not. End of story.
“Don’t let it bring you down – it’s only castles burning – Just find someone who’s turning – And you will come around…” -Neil Young
Bev if you’re going to cling to this idea that it was sexism that ended this clusterfu%k of a campaign in failure please explain its role in her losing a plurality of white women. She couldn’t get white women to vote for her Bev. They’re sexist? Really?
Excuse me, but … WHAT? My comment says that I have mocked the claim of sexism throughout, but that Krasting’s comment gave me pause. I made clear that I based that SOLELY on Krasting’s comment.
What I DID NOT say is that sexism played any role at all the actual election. Obviously, Krasting and his ilk weren’t gonna vote for a Dem even to save their lives.
Two separate issues, amateur socialist, Two separate issues.
Warren might be angry but she doesn’t display open contempt like Clinton. She might come across as an ivory tower type but she would never use the word “deplorable” .
She also hasn’t been running a gigantic mafia style slush fund . Or deleting emails to avoid the FOIA .
Nor, rather significantly, is she, suffice it to say, a front for Wall Street CEOs and top execs. Warren also is genuinely brilliant and creative and defies rather than mindlessly adopts elite conventional wisdom.
Warren is the anti-Clinton.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democrats-latino-turnout_us_5826579ee4b060adb56e8fbd
The huffpost stuff is just the first to hit, and obviously not the most reputable (though they’ve been a lot better this year than in the past, I’ve heard the same of Politico). The stories aren’t going to stop coming about how incompetent and generally just acting in bad faith the DNC was this cycle. Now that the election is over the NYT and WP, Slate, probably Vanity Fair are starting to fund their investigative reports and post mortems. It’s not going to be pretty.
Good.
The idea that the people that voted in 2016 are the same people that voted in 2012, or 2008, is beyond silly.
I have met an awful lot of strange people in my life. I have met a lot of incredibly stupid people in my life. I have never met anyone strange enough, or stupid enough, to vote for Obama in one election and then vote for Trump in another.
The birchers were enthused by Trump’s blatant racism, and they showed up. Meanwhile, the Dems were besieged by the national media with e mails that meant absolutely nothing; progressives who complained about neoliberals; the constant criticism of everything the campaign did(not that they did not make mistakes) like the myriad of posts by Bev(which basically amounted to “She’s not Bernie!”; and any chance of enthusiasm for the election was lost.
This was about turnout like every election. The racists were excited, the liberals were divided.
I can’t remember which blog it was, but there used to be one that routinely referenced something similar to “the crashes and screams from Topkapı Palace” back in the Bush days.
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/donald-trump-team-rivals-231277
By the way, Lewandowski in charge of the RNC would be a thing of breathtaking beauty.
Chief of Staff, I’m betting.
Wow I have never heard so much BS in all my life. All these comments reflect just how badly people mis judge and read the tea leaves of the election and what it was really all about. Talk about getting stuck in the leaves or box. As I said before this elections was nothing to do with red vs blue of black vs white or sexism or racism . These are all the tools of the oligarchs and especially those of George Soros’s new world order. Who owns change.org , HRC, Wall St., the MSNM and now the purple revolution? I’ll give you one guess. Soros. Who was Huma Aberdin Clintons top aid? Did you ever read the George Soros bio from 60 Minutes reporter Steve Croft? You could not see that Soros was using HRC as his mail carrier for his NWO political agenda of retaining extended political power and control for the oligarchs predatory globalism? Soros is also using the tools of SMAC (socialism, mobile, analytics, cloud ) to do his dirty work against unions and the selling out our true democracy, borders and sovereignty. I will pray for you and the many mis guided DNC followers gullibility who failed to see the light and truth of what was really happening…
I hesitate to respond to EMichael but this point requires a comment:
Funny. I know several people who voted for Obama twice and voted for Trump this time around. I am going to guess the mid west has a few million of them.
Sorry. Meant to say a few hundred thousand of them.
“I have never met anyone strange enough, or stupid enough, to vote for Obama in one election and then vote for Trump in another. ”
Probably why you turd way types lost so badly this time around. You failed to extricated from your myopic cocoon.
No doubt I am just an old prude, but I suspect the quality of discourse on this blog could be instantly improved just by rejecting comments that use language an educated person in the 1950’s would not use in front of his maiden aunt.
It’s not that I don’t know the words, or am shocked, shocked by their use.
It’s just that the use of them in a serious public forum is a good indicator of low intelligence.and that nothing worth your time is going to be said by them.
Not 100% of course, but a good place to start, and if it catches on, the quality of discourse will improve. Even arguably intelligent people who have fallen into bad habits will be forced to consider thinking long enough to be able to say what they have to say in another way.
“[One] reason Clinton lost was sexism.”
That’s very interesting. Trump got 60,265,858 votes (so far counted) to Romney’s 59,090,075 — a 1.99% gain.
Clinton got 60,839,922 votes to Obama’s 62,616,535 — a 2.84% loss.
Meanwhile, the population has increased about 3%.
Seems to me that, if Clinton lost because of sexism, it was Obama voters that were sexist.
Mike,
I you actually know those people I feel sorry for you. Cause they do not exist in any kind of numbers.
The old line, “I am not a racist, some of my best friends are ……”
Has been replaced by, “I am not a racist cause I voted for Trump, I voted for Obama………..”
EMichael
I can’t really tell what you meant in your last comment. I can say, based on other comments you have made, that your thought processes look to me to be exactly the same as that of the racists. It’s just that you are on the other side.
I can’t blame you for that. It’s part of human nature. “You have to be carefully taught” NOT to be a racist, or think like a racist while telling yourself you can’t be a racist because you are on the side of the victims. But if you can manage that much insight into your own hate-filled reactions, and explanations for everything, you might actually become part of beginning to do something to solve the racism problem.
Yes there are really really bad people who are racists. And some tolerably good people who can be drawn into racist behavior. But by calling everyone who disagrees with you a “racist,” and dismissing what may be their legitimate concerns, you drive the tolerably good people into the racist camp.
Warren
I am inclined to agree with you about this. There certainly is a good deal of racism and sexism out there, but as long as the Democrats can’t think of any other reason to explain their loss (not counting “the electoral college” or “ralph nader”) they are going to keep losing.
And losing to people whose evil is much deeper than mere racism and sexism.
Here’s a story I heard on “radio for intelligent people.”
A congressman from St Paul (Minn) was concerned about what he thought was racism in his home community where the “white people” were reacting badly to an influx of Ethiopian refugees.
So he called a town meeting and tried to explain to his constituents that Ethiopians were human beings and deserved to be treated as such. The people told him, “You’re not listening to us.” So he tried to listen. He said to the reporter, “I know these people. They are not racists.” But he didn’t seem to know what to do.
It seems the government has chosen St Paul as a place to resettle these Ethiopians, no doubt thinking that the people of St Paul are not racists..
But the government (that government stupidity that so many complain about) doesn’t seem to have realized that you can’t force a huge influx of people from a different culture on a community without creating a reaction that will look a lot like “racism” and indeed become “racism” if good things don’t start happening very soon,
For example, a number of Ethiopians were eating at a restaurant and talking to each other in their native language. The people at the next table started shouting at them: “Talk English goddamn it.” Then a lady at the white table, threw her glass of beer in the face of a lady at the black table. That not being enough to relieve her hate, she smashed the glass on the black lady’s face.
No doubt this was racism. No doubt the answer is not to call the white lady a racist and punish her… not for the assault, but for being a racist.
Me, I like to think we could have worked this out without electing Trump who means very bad things for us including racism, but apparently also including the whole Right program of fiscal insanity and crushing the working class under the heel of corporate predators.
I don’t think Warren or EMichael or going to be much help to us is turning this around.
Do you have a source for that story, Coberly?
What, exactly, would you want me to help you do?
warren i heard the story on NPR late at night.
what i would like you to help me do is turn around the ugliness that is going to emerge from the people Trump is encouraging to express their rage against people they think are the cause of their pain.
And to prevent the Paul Ryan right from enacting measures, or destroying past measures that will reduce this country to something like the Ancien Regime with the corporate elite in the place of the old aristocracy.
you should note that i have a great deal of sympathy for the people who think their pain is caused by “the government,” most of them are decent people. but history has shown that decent people can become “good germans” or worse before it’s over.
meanwhile there is a whole resevoir of people who are not decent who are looking for an excuse to hit people. i met one of them today on the bike path.
i even have a little sympathy for people who are afraid of “socialism” but not much. there isn’t a trace of socialism in this country. just a government that was trying to do its best to solve some pretty nasty problems, but for a long time has been taken over by the people who cause most of those nasty problem. people, i am sorry to say, who appear to have fooled you into believing that something like unrestricted “free enterprise” will make us all rich, or at least all the people we can’t pretend are lazy.
Cob,
There are a lot of people I disagree with, and I do not call them racists.
But the Southern Strategy was real. So was “states rights”. So was “welfare queens driving cadillacs”. And so are the statements of Trump.
The GOP has has always been racist. They took total control of the party this year, after starting that takeover in 08 with the John Birch alumni paying for the Tea Party.
But the American Dream still lives.
In what other country can a young boy whose father was in the KKK grow up to be President?
EM
with adjustments for geography and history i’d say, France, England, Germany, Russia, Japan, all of South and Central America and the Caribbean, all of Africa and Middle East. India, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, Norway, oh, and a few dozen others.
Racism is universal. It takes a real effort to tame it. My objection to you is that your effort is counterproductive, and is itself an example of racist type thinking. Moreover, the Democratic Party’s obsession with race and sex politics has become counter productive. We have… or maybe, now, had… reached a point where the answer to racism and sexism is “we are all in this together, black and white, male and female.. and worked on solving the problem of lost wages and lost homes.
EM, I know a racist when I see one. And they are ugly. I am not disagreeing with you about the evils of racism, and the presense of it among the Republicans, who have found a way to nurture it. I am disagreeing with you about the way to overcome it.
Cob,
You cannot work with racists to overcome problems, as their belief is that all problems are caused by those people, and will disappear as soon as we get rid of them. Or at the very least, we have to stop “catering” to those people first, and then solve the problems.
EM
i’m sorry, we have to work with “racists”, that’s all there are. but they are not by any means, yet, all pernicious racists. we don’t have to work with thugs and criminals. we have to convince those who have voted with them that their own interests will not be served by racist solutions. that much we can do if we don’t start out by calling them names and blaming them for everything that’s wrong for them as well as us.
one could argue, and i think i would, that the blame lies with the Democrats selling out to Wall Street and leaving the Republicans to foment latent racist sentiment as a distraction for both conservatives and liberals, some of whom are racists and all of whom are latent racists.
virulent racism is what you get when people think they are up against existential problems and find themselves being led by a demagogue who encourages them to focus their hate on the “other.”
that seems to be where we are now. we don’t help ourselves by making “racism” our only thought.