On November 8, my spouse invited some female friends and relatives to witness what they were sure would be the election of the first female president of the United States. Now, my spouse had been a Sanders supporter, and recognized that Hillary Clinton had a lot of shortcomings, but still, the draw of “the first woman president” was very strong. I feel reasonably confident that there were millions of American women who shared that sentiment. I also feel reasonably confident that there were millions of Americans both male and female who sincerely felt that Hillary Clinton was a well-qualified candidate who would make a good president. I was one of those people.
I’ve read post-mortems here and elsewhere variously attacking the Clinton campaign as terrible; the institutional Democratic Party as corrupt and unwilling to admit mistakes; the Party, President Obama, and many Democratic voters as elitist. A few reactions to those post-mortems:
- For the most part, the writers have oozed contempt for folks like my spouse and her women friends excited about a woman president, or folks like me and others who felt OK about voting for Hillary Clinton. For those expressing such sentiments, let me ask whether you’d like to find common cause in fighting against the Trumpian nightmare and rebuilding the Democratic Party. If you don’t, then I truly don’t understand why you’d want to post commentary here. And please note that we don’t get to rerun the campaign with Bernie Sanders as the Democratic candidate, so while what-if speculation may get your juices flowing, it’s only useful if it points a way forward.
- The Clinton campaign screwed the pooch in many respects. Note, however, that Booman has written to point out how the campaign did meet its goals in urban areas but was swamped by an overwhelming Trump vote in exurban areas. You can decide to read this result as an unmitigated failure. You can also decide to read this result as a partial success combined with a catastrophic failure (say). Neither is acceptable but as the response depends upon the diagnosis, it’s important that the diagnosis not be skewed by either institutional inertia or an unrelenting hostility to and rejection of said institutional party.
- Supposedly the institutional Democratic Party is all into finger pointing, as opposed to the mature Republican Party of 2012 with its post-mortem calling for a more inclusive politics. Is it really necessary to point out that the GOP post-mortem was published months after the election? Or that the prescriptions of that post-mortem were discarded in the most spectacular fashion imaginable? I expect the Democratic Party is going to do its own introspection down the line.
- There are writers here who were rigorously and harshly critical of Clinton but were also writing–before the election–about what a bumbler Trump was, and about their vision for the Republican Party after Trump’s catastrophic defeat. Nobody who wrote in that vein now gets to act like a prophet whose admonitions were ignored.
As the first Republican president said, we must all hang together, or surely we will hang separately.
I’ll be interested to hear reactions of all sorts.
