In (partial) defense of Hillary Clinton

[yallerdawg]

I’m going to do something unpopular now. I’m going to defend Hillary Clinton.

Source: Vox, by Ezra Klein

*****

By the end of the campaign, the public had enough information to make basic judgments about who Clinton and Trump were. Trump’s flaws weren’t hidden by Clinton’s mistakes — if she was good at anything, it was goading Trump into error and overreaction. Voters knew what he was when they voted for him. They had seen him lash out at a Gold Star family and at Alicia Machado. They knew he suggested, repeatedly, that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination. They had heard him say Mexico was sending us rapists and criminals and call for a ban on Muslim travel. They had watched him babble incoherently about policy, say he could shoot someone in broad daylight without losing support, and brag, on tape, “when you're a star, they let you do it.”

And it’s worth remembering that before Clinton ran against Trump, 16 other Republicans ran against him — a group that observers thought to be the most talented field the GOP had seen in decades. And every one of them was routed. At some point, the record of talented politicians lying at Trump’s feet requires more explanation than “they all screwed up.”

Imagine a slightly alternate universe. Let’s take Nate Silver’s estimate that the Comey letter cost Clinton about 3 percentage points in the election. Imagine it never happened. Now Clinton wins the Electoral College, and lands a bigger popular vote victory than Barack Obama did against Mitt Romney.

In that world, are we talking about what an awful race President Clinton ran? We aren’t. But that is a world in which Trump — with all he revealed during the campaign about his lack of discipline, his casual cruelty, his disinterest in policy, his penchant for conspiracy theories — still won about 44 percent of the vote.

*****

Read it all at: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/1/15721854/defense-hillary-clinton-2106

[bresue]

1. Agreed!!!

Honestly, no presidential candidate has ever been up against the dynamics that occurred in this election cycle. We don't know how another candidate would have reacted to the negative tactics employed.

And she was not the only one who was attacked, but look at all the Rublican candidates in the primary. They were rousted out very early. And then you have the Democrats in the smaller elections that were attacked and lost.

Regardless of Clinton's reasons for losing, this is a new era of campaigning with new political tactics that will have to be studied thoroughly in order for the Dems to not fall down this rabbit hole again.

I compare it to WW2...Germans came with tanks against Poland's Calvary. Definitely a game changer.

[mcar]

2. Nice to see someone in the media defending her

[Nitram]

3. My POV entirely.