Excuse me. But … seriously?

Beverly Mann | November 11, 2016 4:11 pm

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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.)

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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