If there is one thing I can’t stand, it is the Zombie reporting that makes up most political writing.
To wit: virtually any pre-election article discussed the great Clinton GOTV effort. I posted here last year that what I saw was the opposite. In fact volunteer enthusiasm in states that I knew about (CO, IA, FL and NH) was actually down significantly.
If you compare the exit poll data you find, in fact, that the number of people who reported being contacted by a campaign was down quite a bit from 2008 (the data on 2012 isn’t available).
John Parr of Boston College has written a paper about this. His tweet promoting it is below:
From my #APSA2017 paper: the incredible shrinking Democratic ground game, 2008-2016. (10AM Thursday, Hilton Franciscan C) pic.twitter.com/jsGMR6ppTt
— Joshua Darr (@joshuadarr) August 30, 2017
I will talk about Florida since I know the counties well. If you compare the graphic of 2016 to 2008 you find what is essentially a retreat from the redder parts of the state. The presence north and west of I-4, and the lack of resources focused on the Tampa ring counties is striking.
As I noted here after the election, Florida was lost in the Tampa ring counties. There was little GOTV effort in some of these counties (Polk, Hernando for example). But ceding large areas of the state also means you aren’t getting your vote out there. This may account to some extent for the exploding Trump margins in the rural areas (though it is of course difficult to disentangle cause and effect).
What are the dots? Local GOTV offices?
Yes.
I did hear of several complaints about the GOTV effort before the election – this for example – though there was an echo chamber in some D circles that tuned out such stuff. If I recall, complaints were about ceding red areas (which especially hurt down-ballot) and spending too much on tv.
I think expectations were more that the Trump GOTV effort was so bad, rather than that Hillary’s was so great. According to 538, she led Trump in number of field offices by 489-207 vs Obama’s 790-283 lead over Romney. So, I guess her campaign thought they could target exactly who would vote for her.
A good article – and an exception from my memory. You are right to say articles were written about the absence of the Trump group game and emphasized the disparity.
If we go back to team Clinton’s report on its first quarter — 6/30/2015 — they claimed to have set up a large number of field offices. In the next quarter, the quietly pulled back from that effort. Why bother when by then the GOP primary was shaping up to nominate one of the “pied pipers,” Trump, Cruz, or Dr. Ben? Hillary was “electable” and none of the pied pipers were and her team never stopped touting the presumed fact that she was Ms. Electable.” (iirc that electable argument persuaded some number of Democratic primary voters. Voters that preferred Sanders but he wasn’t electable.)
Team Clinton and the 95% of Democratic politicians and “liberal” elites (by virtue of being celebrities and/or very wealthy), most of whom jumped on the Clinton bandwagon before the primary cycle began, persisted in that belief as the results of poll after poll revealed that at best, it was only barely so against a cartoon opponent.
Clinton’s poll numbers peaked before she entered the race. By the end of 2015, she was faring better against Trump than Rubio and Cruz (and Carson). To be charitable, those three weren’t formidable candidates and by then their name recognition was no where near that of Clinton’s and Trump’s. By March 2016, the only pollster that had her handily beating Trump and by a larger margin than Sanders was Bloomberg (did they use Bloomie’s rolodex for that poll?)
May 2016 – NBC News:
HRC 48% and DT 45%
Sanders 53% and DT 41%
(Other pollsters were getting similar results) Note that May was before the DNC and Podesta files. HRC did have the FBI investigation of her emails hanging over her, but that was her own damn fault.
The credibility of all those Democratic politicians (the elites can slink into hidey-holes for at least a year) and a party that put all their chips (a billion dollars worth of chips) on a fiction was shattered on election day. Who will ever listen to them again on their pronouncements of electability? Might explain why they were so quick to jump on the Putin-Russia bandwagon because it gives them cover; they weren’t wrong, it was the Russkies that did it. (Not that any of them can explain exactly how Putin-Russia covertly did something to change the outcome.)
And they know it, which explains much of their behavior on twitter. Honestly though there plenty of predictions of landslides last summer. I was pretty clear here I thought the margin would be 8 -10 myself, though I was pretty quick to point out that the actual polling margins were pretty narrow.
I do not believe the Clinton people ever believed that they could lose. There is no other way to explain the states they targeted.
If you go back to late 2015 to mid 2015, one thing, and perhaps in the end maybe the only thing they did really well was keep other candidates out of the race. The O’Malley people thought they need 12 million for Iowa and New Hampshire which should have been a piece of cake for a former governor. He didn’t get close, and was never on the air in either Iowa or NH. The reason: the Clinton people got to his prior donors.
The Clinton people never thought Sanders was a threat until late in Iowa (again, the incompetence is staggering). But they kept the more conventional opponents out (Biden and Warren) and that was not a trivial accomplishment.
If you go back and look at 2015 trial heats against the then likely GOP nominees, Clinton was less than a 50-50 proposition.
I ran monte carlo simulations for Rubio, Bush and Walker against Clinton. By October Clinton’had a 19% chance of beating Rubio and and 26% change of beating Bush. The only time I computed the odds for Trump was on October 20th, and she was at 53% against him them.
What is interesting is the passive reaction by Democrats to a front runner who was NOT polling well against the then likely GOP nominees. Part of the reason for this passivity was the great belief Clinton forces had in negative advertising. Yes, they might be behind now, they would say, but when the clobbered Rubio with negative ads he would collapse.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IWl01Ik9A2EyaRAgrd0jFBUPMjZS7QCoUYZyhd7C4ns/edit#gid=2403825
89
Given the small margins, it is hard to argue any one factor didn’t turn the election. Having said that I don’t think the wikileaks flipped the election.
Comey? Different story. Even THAT I am sleptical of, but I can certainly see the argument.
The bigger picture is that it should never have been as close as it was. I think asking what individual factor turned the race is in the end far less interesting than why this wasn’t at least a 5 point race. Clinton’s 48.2% was close to a full 6 points behind Obama’s approval in the exit poll.
The electorate did not reject Obama, and even liked him. And yet we lost to Donald Trump.
Agree. A few quibbles or slight differences in your take.
Starting at the bottom because that factors into most of your other points.
What’s the basis for your declaration that “it should never have been as close as it was?” 1988 was the exception and not the rule in open seat presidential elections. The unpopularity of an incumbent POTUS/political party gives the opposition a leg up, but the popularity of an incumbent doesn’t appear to be operational except to preclude a landslide for the opposition.
Ike had to have been the most popular outgoing POTUS in recent times. (For stupid reasons, but that’s not rare in politics.) While the popular vote totals were extremely close, it wasn’t close in the EC. Even there, Nixon had to fight to carry what should have been a gimme state, CA, winning it by only 0.55%.
’60, ’68, ’76, ’00, and ’16 were all close elections in the popular vote. (I’m including ’76 b/c Ford was totally unelected.) The anomaly is ’88, and Reagan at that point wasn’t anywhere near as popular as Ike in ’60. IMO the difference was that GHWB generically looked presidential and Dukakis didn’t and Dukakis’ weaknesses as a candidate were on display and GHWB’s weren’t.
Except for ’88, that 3rd WH term has eluded both parties since 1952 (if one counts ’44 and ’48 as two terms for Truman). (Truman’s unpopularity by ’52 was a factor for the DP nominee, but Stevenson wasn’t a strong candidate.) Thus, and absent a monumental screw-up/unpopularity by/of the incumbent, the starting point in analyzing an upcoming open seat presidential election should always begin with an assumption of 50:50. Then observe and weight the following variables before and over the course of the campaign:
HHH scored lost points with #1, but #2 and #3 boosted him back to near that 50:50.
Gore was sort of the insider selection, but insider indifference to him was also high. He lost a point on #2 and very late in the campaign made up for that on #3.
HRC lost points on all three and it was only the ridiculousness of the GOP nominee (and none of the other contenders were all that much better) that made her competitive.
Of course they didn’t. They totally believed their own twenty-four year old hype; that Hillary is an awesome candidate in her own right and the first female president that women have been longing for. Neither was ever true with a majority of the electorate. This is a woman that crumbled against a black man a mere eight years earlier and that was with the support of a large faction of Democratic primary voters that opted for McCain/Palin in the general election, a voting demographic that her team assumed would be with her in 2016. They were in non-swing states but not in the states that mattered most.
Follows from your last point; with a win in the bag, they were going for a solid EC win. Technically only in the bag as long as she carried either NV or NH, two states that her team did work and almost came up short in NH (I had NV as dicier; so this did surprise me). She and her team only focused efforts on two other states, FL and NC, and one wildcard, AZ. Late in the campaign when she began working PA, at least some on her team weren’t so confident. Her half-assed, late stage efforts in OH were curious.
wrt to shutting out potential other primary challengers, that goes back to the pre-election cycle selection. Perhaps back to ’08 — it was Hillary’s turn in ’16 if she wanted it. (My fantasy is that this was a deal that Obama cut and never disclosed this to Biden. May have been one reason he chose Biden because he would surely be too old in ’16 to consider running. Overlooking the fact that Biden’s presidential aspirations are even older than Hillary’s.)
MOM was assigned the role of the designated loser. His 2012 DNC convention speech gave him that job. Ticks all the right boxes on paper, but in the flesh, it’s not there. The Baltimore protests erased some of those right box ticks. And Sanders ended up as the one to fill the vacuum. How Clinton’s team must have laughed among themselves in the summer of ’15 that nothing stood in the way of her nomination.
<blockqutoe>The Clinton people never thought Sanders was a threat until late in Iowa
Agree. However, beginning in September there was concern among her team about NH. First they dumped more money than planned into ad buys. When that didn’t do the trick, they rolled out big name surrogates. That hurt her in NH and some of that NH effort may have impacted IA voters.
I’d be careful in describing Clinton’s campaign team as staggeringly incompetent. Given the product they were selling, they may have been highly competent. Successfully cheating to win a nomination requires competence. Those who were able to discern that during the primary season were labeled as loony-tunes. Having that exposed may be the general election x factor. Everything else aside, Trump didn’t cheat his way to the nomination.
One reason why the 2016 election is difficult to analyze is that there is no precedent, and therefore expected outcome, for both nominees having high net unfavorables. For all his campaigning, Trump was never able to reduce his unfavorables. Same with Clinton, but she had the added risk that when seen in certain locales, her unfavorables can increase. (Probably not a conscious reason for her skipping WI and MI at least among those formulating and making the decisions on where to campaign and spend money.)
With respect to Biden I believe Obama knew he wanted to run. I had dinner the night before the Inauguration with Shaheen who had spent lunch with Biden. There was no doubt in her mind on that night in 2013 that Biden was running.
I also believe though that Obama had told Biden in 2016 he would be neutral between he and Clinton.
You are right to point out that winning the third term has been historically difficult. But the reasons for that varied from election to election. Some of this is captured in models that use economic data to predict the result. Those models are interesting, but they fail miserably with 1968 and 2000. 1968 was about an unpopular war and Civil Rights – and a collapsing Democratic brand that could barely muster 40% of the vote.
I will get to 2000 in a second.
Robby Mook in Philadelphia said the election would be fought in 3 states: PA, NC and FL. I do think the Clinton people knew PA was in play, and they did campaign there in the fall.
What is astonishing in 2016 is the number of states that were close in comparison to 2012. And how completely absent the Clinton campaign was in many of them:
Clinton won Colorado by 3, Minnesota by 2, Maine by 2, and lost Michigan and Wisconsin. She only won Virginia by 5.
Now she did have a ground game in CO, but she went dark for over a month there. She was dark in most of the other states until the very end, though NH advertising is seen in Southern Maine.
As you note, they always saw NV and NH as being in play, and they were never off the air (and NH is expensive since ads must be bought on Boston TV).
But their targeting just didn’t make any sense.
Conversely she spent significant resource in states that were not close (Iowa and Ohio).
Why do I think we should have won by 10?
About the only reasonable answer I have for that is Donald Trump. And I still think I am right about that. Donald Trump was a terrible candidate.
So why did we fail to win by 10?
I think the loss in 2000 and in 2016 come down to a single sentence: “I did not have sex with that woman”.
If there was no Monica Lewinsky, there is no Bush presidency. If there was no Monica Lewinsky, there may not have been an Obama presidency.
I know all of the arguments: that it wasn’t Hillary that cheated. That other presidents have cheated while they were in office. I agree with all of them.
But with one sentence Bill forever tarnished the Clinton brand in a way I think Democrats (including me) were in denial about.
Because the Clinton campaign didn’t fully understand the extent to which their brand was tarnished, they fought the wrong battle. They believed the way to victory was to attack Trump on personal grounds. But given their own brand’s issues, there were limits in how effective this could be.
I also think the Lewinsky experience clouded how the Clinton advisors thought about politics. They viewed it as very personal. The arguments they made for Hillary were about her personal qualities. I was at the Convention I was struck by how that dominated the messaging. Her plans for the future where less at the forefront. Free university was a single line in her acceptance speech. The progressive ideas in the platform (and they were there) were largely unmentioned that night, and were completely absent from her advertising.
What they needed was to focus on the positive parts of the Clinton brand, which certainly existed. That would have led them to run a very different race.
Obviously this is rank speculation on my part.
The fun part about elections is that it’s never precisely known before or after what variables were the most important. And you’ve raised a lot of them.
Of course by 2013 Biden had his eye on ’16. Obama was riding high enough then and Biden had received high marks from the public from 2009=2013. And it would be foolish to reject that Biden took the VP slot because it could possibly have given him one more shot at the job he’s long aspired to holding. Plus most VPs and VP nominees and VP nominees do later seek the top job, absent health or age issue and/or significant public disapproval.
That wasn’t my point and IMO one reason Obama chose Joe was that by ’16 he would have been even older than Bob Dole (73) and John McCain (72) when they secured their nominations and both were easily defeated. Obama made a deal in ’08 before choosing his VP. Is it plausible that Clinton would have passed on an opportunity to become the first woman VP? Doubt that choosing her as his running mate would have been controversial with the electorate. He had to nix that because he had no intention of having the VP (and spouse) running his WH, but he did need her on-board for the ’08 general election and the Clintons aren’t known for giving something for nothing, and Obama isn’t known for being a tough negotiator.
While this deal won’t be revealed anytime soon or possibly ever, subsequent actions reveal the outline. Obama didn’t get his guy, Kerry, for State, but did get his guy for DNC chair (provisionally through his first term), Clinton would have the option to choose the next DNC chair, Dean was to be sent packing, and Obama’s VP either wouldn’t run in ’16 or Obama wouldn’t support a run by his VP if Clinton chose to run.
It was fortuitous that Webb decided not to seek reelection in 2012 and announced his decision early, 4/5/11. Kaine resigned as DNC Chair and began his campaign for that senate seat the same day. That short-circuited public criticism of his performance through the disastrous midterms. (DWS took over on May 4th.)
A bit late in the game wasn’t that? Doesn’t that suggest that in the prior seven years that Obama hadn’t encouraged Biden’s aspiration? Also, we don’t know how Obama hoped Biden would receive that message and what Biden took from it.
If as you say that by 2013 Biden had decided to run, why did he do nothing publicly in 2013-2014 to advance himself? His 2014 poll numbers were decent but not great. Was he waiting for Obama to pass the baton to him? How else can one explain that Biden was totally perplexed by the lack of support from Obama for him to run in ’16? Or that when Biden was giving serious consideration to a late entry that Obama told him it wasn’t in the cards?
Is there only one alternative history if there were no Lewinsky and impeachment? The set-up 2007 to early 2009 would have been very different. It would have been Hillary and not Gore for a more direct Clinton term and partisan Democrats would have been on board with that. Could have been the proxy re-run of 1992, but GWB wouldn’t have had the ammo (restore honor and dignity to the WH) that he did have. More likely to me is that the GOP would have gone with the media darling, McCain. Who would have won that match-up?
If there had been no Lewinsky, what are the odds that there would have been a Senator Clinton? Perhaps instead Gore would have been gifted that senate seat.
On to your other points:
Why astonishing? The out-party electorate is energized in open seat presidential elections. And some of the swings can be huge. For example: 1996 NH – Clinton’s margin +9.95% and 2000 Gore’s margin -1.96%.
+5 in VA for HRC was good; Obama only carried it in 2012 by 3.9%. And the first time in decades that it wasn’t red was in 2008. Gore lost CO by 8.36%. Those two states, along with OR (+0.44% and NM +0.61%), have become bluer over the past four election cycles. (NM backslid in ’04 but only to -.79%) (As HRC’s NV margin was +2.59% and CO margin +4.91%, I did make the right on as to which one to fret over.) Gore’s WI margin was a mere 0.22% and at the local and statewide level has become redder. Why wasn’t this on our radar screen?
When did Mook state that the 2016 battles would be in FL, PA, and NC? If early on, her fight for PA was either incompetent or invisible. If late, after Labor day, was he signaling that they knew they only had to win one out of those three? Perhaps what looked like squandering resources in AZ and OH was an effort to reduce red tide leakage from those two states to NV and PA. But why IA?
Totally disagree that the 2016 election had anything to do with Lewinsky. (2000 absolutely b/c that figured prominently in GWB’s campaign.) By 2008, just enough of the DP base had become informed as to all the policy crap that Bill Clinton had shoveled and that when combined with the AA base shift to Obama, they could say no to Hillary. That informed DP electoral base was larger in 2016. Trump tapped into those subsequently latent ’92 Perot voters. (Bernie was doing the same but more effectively because he’s not an obnoxious, no-nothing clown.)
Consider:
People really prefer to vote “for” than “against.” But if “against” for any candidate is entrenched, particularly if it’s long-standing, they’ll show up and cast a vote against that person. What has the DP learned from this?
Badly worded sentence on my part. I believe Obama told Biden that before Biden accepted the VP job in 2008. I believe neutrality was negotiated by Clinton and Obama surrogates in the lead-up to Denver in 2008.
Last week of July in 2016 at the Convention. And yes, they were saying that if they won any of the three thew would win the election.
Number of seats within 5
13 if you count GA (which was 5.12)
How many people EVER said Maine or Minnesota was in play?
Re: Lewinsky, I think it informed everything the Clinton people did. It would take too long to explain why.
This will be the least politically correct thing I will ever write. I will probably regret it. But I think some women held Bill’s affair against Hillary and blamed her in part for it. In this there is no doubt misogyny played a role in 2016. It is a profoundly fucked up line of thought.
But I think it played a role.
Don’t find it plausible that the issue of ’16 came up in Obama’s conversations with Biden while Biden was only a possible VP candidate. Few potential VP nominees are in a position to negotiate anything (some like GHWB and Edwards didn’t even hold a job at the time of their VP candidacies). Gore is an exception and was smart enough to enter the conversation with a list of demands. Clinton agreed to them but at least in spirit didn’t live up to them. Don’t know that he even asked for any assurances about ’00.
wrt Mook’s statement, it was only true if she also carried MI, NV, NH, and WI. NC without NH would only have gotten her to a tie and NC without NV, she loses. With PA, NV or NH would have put her over the top. With FL, NV and NH didn’t matter.
Why are you using 2008 and 2012 as your reference points for the 2016 election? 2012 was a reelection of a president that hadn’t been a disaster or made to appear like a disaster. 2008 was an open seat at the end of eight years of a disaster.
While the popular vote totals in 2004 gave GWB a majority, 1) there were no third party candidates and 2) GWB only ended up with 286 electoral votes. Gore: 266, Kerry: 251, Hillary: 227.
A most conservative take is that there was no wave for Gore or Hillary to ride in on. Obama rode a huge wave. Money — or the lack of it — was a major problem for Gore. (GWB/Rove did do what was then the unthinkable by declining matching funds for the primary. That gave him a significant advantage in two ways: 1) no cap on spending in any one state and 2) spending could continue right up to the RNC convention and the formal nomination. Gore’s campaign was essentially dark after securing the required number of delegates until formally nominated.) Hillary had a billion bucks.
Using your measure from 2000, margin less than 1%: five states, and margin less than 5%: eight states. That’s thirteen (fourteen if Maine at 5.11% is included and fifteen if MI at 5.13 is included). Take that up to less than 6% and it was fourteen in 2000 and seventeen in 2000.
It’s not a metric that in and of itself tells a story.
wrt ME and MN in 2016 nobody said they were in play because they weren’t. Although, in my EC calculations I did have ME-DC-2 in Trump’s column as iirc many others did as well. Until 1932, MN was a GOP stronghold. Since then only Ike and Nixon (’72) have carried the state, but it’s been close four times before 2016: JFK +1.4%, WM +0.2%, Gore +2%, Kerry +3%. So, 2016 wasn’t an anomaly.
heh — and they accuse the rightwing of never letting go of this.
Did that blind them to Hillary’s shortcomings as a candidate? Her support for Bill’s bad public policies and those in her own right as a Senator and SoS?
Objectively, the only person that paid a huge price for Lewinsky was Gore. Okay, it did put the kibosh on Hillary running for POTUS in 2000, but it helped her to win that Senate seat (the sympathy vote). Did they expect to milk that all the way to the WH? Sheesh — it was stale by the early naughts. Such a pity that Lewinsky made it impossible for her to go after Trump for his affair and two divorces, but as he’d shrugged that off in the primaries by those that didn’t have a Lewinsky issue.
Misogyny isn’t restricted to men. It’s weaker among Democratic, liberal, and moderate Republican women (not all of whom are misogynistic) than it is among rightwing Republican and conservative women. The second group blames the woman for everything that goes wrong in a family, but they also respect women that stand by their no-good cheating man than they do those that divorce the bum (unless one of their own is married to the bum in which case they offer to bump him off). The misogynist lean among the first group takes the form of proportional blame when a husband cheats, but it hardly ever exceeds 50:50 and generally they don’t assign much blame to the wife. Lewinsky or not, conservative women would never vote for any Democrat and outside of that group, doubt that anyone decided not to vote for Hillary because of Lewinsky or that she’s a woman.
“[H]er skipping WI and MI” — Clinton didn’t skip Michigan. She appeared in the state three times for the general election. I live in Michigan and followed the election closely, posting about it on my personal blog. I wrote about her first general election visit in August 2016 in Hillary Clinton rebuts Trump in Warren, Michigan. It was the day after Trump being greeted by protestors in Detroit. She made her second appearance in October at Wayne State University. She made her third visit in November, which I commented on at my personal blog in Surrogates galore in Michigan as campaign heats up. In addition, Bill Clinton marched in the Detroit Labor Day Parade and Tim Kaine campaigned in Ann Arbor. She probably should have made more campaign stops in Michigan, but she did not skip the state!
My comment was figurative not literal. She and her campaign were more visible to those not in MI during the MI primary than the general election. Three appearances in a key state over a period of over three months is figuratively skipping the state.
She was not on the air in Michigan until this last week. She dramatically underestimated in Get out the vote operations, with disastrous effects on African American turnout in Detroit and Wayne County.
By the way, she spend 3 of her last 8 DAYS in Florida.
More — from February 24, 2016, With Donald Trump Looming, Should Dems Take a Huge Electability Gamble by Nominating Clinton?
Not “electability” as promoted by political parties, candidates, and the MSM which is never much more than “this we know,” but the facts as of late February 2016 which was at the front-end of the actual voting cycle.
Perhaps, and contrary to all appearances, Trump isn’t at the absolute bottom of the political barrel. Assuming that the barrel isn’t bottomless, Clinton needed a lower than Trump GOP nominee to win. The simpler solution for the DP would be to nominate a person that people want to vote FOR, but they’d rather lose than do that.
An excerpt and tweet that gets right to the heart of why HRC developed high unfavorables.
It’s as if she expects to get credit for some of the great things that New Deal Democrats accomplished many decades ago. But Bernie Sanders who is out of the New Deal Democratic mold because he not only supports those accomplishments but advocates for their preservation and expansion and to accomplish what the New Dealers attempted to but were unable to get done isn’t a “Democrat.”
Interesting that she highlights Social Security as she attempted to ride in on “Mr. Grand Bargain’s” coattails. What she left out of that list was the New Dealers’ regulatory accomplishments in the areas of finance and labor. Banking and stock/bond investing were acceptably safe and secure before the “New Democrats” came along and helped the GOP destroy those regulations, with the biggie slashing and burning of those regulations taking place during the Clinton administration and with his full support and echoed by Hillary. Labor is nothing other than a money pot and institutional endorsement source to her. Bernie worked the rank-and-file members of organized labor and Hillary twisted the arms of those institutional sycophantic top dogs who ignored their members when making an endorsement in their name.
With a better record on women’s reproductive autonomy than Clinton, Planned Parenthood nevertheless stabbed Sanders in the back and endorsed Clinton. While I would disagree, a PPP position of too close to call and therefore, endorsing both would have been acceptable. Another instance of Clinton working the refs. That one was a twofer because Ms. Richards is married to the head of SEIU. That factoid helps clarify a small matter:
More:
The contrast with the British labor movement is striking. In the recent contest to choose the next leader of the UK Labour Party, the country’s largest unions opted to endorse the socialist Jeremy Corbyn — when he was still in fourth place, and despite shrill Blairite cries that he was unelectable. While Corbyn ended up trouncing his opponents, much (though not all) of US labor has displayed no such willingness to back its own left insurgent candidate.
…
Trump is a first-rate liar, but like Nixon and Reagan, he was out there hugging blue collar workers. Clinton called them “deplorables.”
That’s a tough and dishonest one from the woman in private with Wall St honchos (the people with the bucks) said:
Clinton’s authentic private positions over the decades are opaque. A reasonable guess is that she and the money were always in alignment; so, the money was only paid to keep her on-board and publicly, in speech, and not official acts, keep that secret as needed to dupe the rubes.
Was it “Haim Saban type” money or political expediency to woo votes from the NY Orthodox Jewish community in 2000 that led her to reject the Palestinian cause after kissing Suha Arafat? Or maybe the kiss was what was disingenuous. No LBGT money was involved in her about face on same-sex marriage?
No authentic opponent of the Vietnam War, as the Clintons claim to have been, would later pal around with Kissinger or vote for GWB’s invasion of Iraq. There’s not enough of a dividing line between money and power to categorically assert that Clinton changed a position based on money. Maybe mo-pow would be more inclusive and more descriptive of the claim Sanders made. The reality that Clinton can’t face is that her denials don’t sell well.
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