I got caught up by some unexpected events this afternoon, so this will just be a casual observation. I notice that Hillary Clinton has never been more unpopular. I’m not sure what explains it as I would consider it normal for her numbers to improve as people get to see Donald Trump in action as our president.
The article attributes it to dings she’s taken from Donna Brazile, ongoing criticism from Bernie supporters and recent revelations that her campaign had a contract with Fusion GPS for the opposition research provided, in part, by the Steele Dossier. None of those explanations sound convincing to me. On the other hand, I have no alternative explanations for why she and Trump have almost identical approve/disapprove numbers.
You’d think she’d get some sympathy for the way the Russians went after her campaign, but it seems like people are just growing more angry with her for failing. Maybe they just didn’t like her book, or they’re just angry about the choices they had in the last election and are taking it out on each candidate equally.
It’s still strange to me. A 61% unfavorable number is awfully high for a person who lost the election with a popular vote majority and isn’t directly responsible for any of the nonsense we’re seeing in Washington DC right now.
Do you have any theories of your own?
early onset #metoo whitelash?
You write:
<blokquote>The article attributes it to dings she’s taken from Donna Brazile, ongoing criticism from Bernie supporters and recent revelations that her campaign had a contract with Fusion GPS for the opposition research provided, in part, by the Steele Dossier. None of those explanations sound convincing to me.
You mean that’s not enough?
OK…factor in:
1-The “deplorables” remark.
2-The Public/Private positions remark…in a public speech to high-level financial people, fer chrissake!!!
3-Her frosty demeanor generally.
4-She shoulda thrown Bill under the bus as soon as the #MeToo movement got rolling.
5-Suspicions that the Clinton Foundation is really mostly just another DC Swamp pay-for-play graft operation.
C’mon, Booman. She made a lot of enemies. Deservedly so.
61% disapproval!!!???
Sounds about right…
AG
I voted for Hillary in my primary, and in the general election. I assumed that as president, she’d at least accomplish preventing the visigoths from storming our society, as President Obama did. That she failed to campaign in rural areas, that she failed to have a message beyond “stronger together”, whatever that means, provided seeds for her defeat. Trump had a message….it was all lies, but it was a message, and parts of it had appeal to more than just deplorables.
Hillary ALWAYS appears to be hiding something, and she’s given that appearance for many years. The points about the foundation and the goldman sachs speeches are valid, but there’s more to it than that. She should have listened to Bernie’s demands that the goldman speeches be released. When Podesta’s emails started to be dripped out, she should have demanded that her side release every last one of them. And what’s this crap about deleting 30000 inconsequential emails. How dumb can somebody be?
Finally, when Comey said she’d been extremely careless, she should have come out swinging, demanding specifics. The world believes that she mucked around with dozens of classified documents. Did she challenge that? No….so it looked as if she’d really screwed up when, more than likely, she hadn’t.
I’m sure I’m not the only person who, though horrified that Trump won, is not unhappy that Hillary lost.
It wasn’t lies. He said “I hate the same people you hate. Vote for me, and I’ll get them. Get the Moslems. Get the Mexicans. Get the liberals. Get the uppity women. Get the coloreds.”
And he was right.
One that with all her public presentation coaching has not erased. Because, as with many people, her persona doesn’t naturally communicate honesty to those outside her circle of peers and fortunately for her, those in positions of authority. Therefore, they can’t see what others do. There have been occasions when I had no doubt that Hillary was speaking the truth (and not just her version of it but an objective truth) and was still struck by how visually and aurally she didn’t appear to be truthful.
Dishonesty for anyone saddled with such a persona gets magnified. Thus, on this criteria, it ended up a draw between Clinton and the floridly dishonest Trump.
Both Hillary and Bill have a habit of shifting into lawyer mode instead of giving a simple, honest answer.
That’s sincere. I don’t like it when people accuse Hillary of this deep dishonesty: what they really mean is ‘she doesn’t represent me or what I care about, and I feel she ought to be trying to do that, and she’s failing’.
Everything that I’ve seen indicates that she’s sincerely a Thatcher-like ‘iron lady’ with deeply conservative (even radical, if you look at it through a lens of 40s/50s liberalism) intentions. She is not dishonestly pretending to support you and then revealing it’s a lie. She never intended to support you at all, she thinks you need to move to California or New York and learn to code apps, or get hired by some fracking company and fly out to Germany to sell ’em that American technology.
There’s nothing dishonest about Hillary Clinton. There’s everything reprehensible about the broken system that she neatly and honorably fits into. You can’t just diligently fit into a system that’s itself horribly dishonest and corrupt, and then expect to be treated as moral and correct, even when (by the stated rules of that system) you are. And that’s why people hate Hillary Clinton.
They’ve grown to hate the system she embodies, and she’s not going to be ceasing to embody that system anytime soon.
Agree — but to perceive that one has interpret and interpolate much of what she says and how she says it. Thus, not presenting her authentic political positions or only presenting them intermittently (ie IWR vote, Syria, and “single payer is never, ever going to happen”) and flip-flopping (ie TPP and Iran – when her original position was the authentic one and she flopped because it was a non-starter with a large proposition of Democrats/liberals) is deeply dishonest.
If Rodham had presidential aspirations from the time she was a young adult (and I have no reason to think she did), her easiest path would have been as an IL Republican politician who had worked her way up to governor or senator. She wouldn’t have been alone as a moderate, feminist Republican woman of that time. Like a Christie Todd Whitman only getting into electoral politics at a younger age in a somewhat more favorable to Republicans state. (She’s also not a blah as Whitman.) Easy for me to envision that as a Republican she would have had an excellent chance to become the first woman president.
That too. That ‘lawyer mode’ is generally read as a deflection from honesty. Not all lawyer politicians slip into that mode. But it doesn’t explain why it hurts Hillary much more than Bill. The difference is an innate open persona (Bill) versus and innate secretive persona (Hillary). Hillary gets caught when she tells wild whoppers (ie the ‘corkscrew landing and snipers’) whereas others that tell whoppers don’t.
Umm…in case you hadn’t noticed, “Both Hillary and Bill” are lawyers. Just sayin’…
How astute of you to remind me.
Not all attorneys go into “lawyer mode” when asked a question. In case you hadn’t noticed 🙂
Lawyers that have been subject to a 30 year smear campaign might just be prone to going into “lawyer mode”. Don’t you think?
I’m fucking sick of the “they didn’t suck my cock fast or hard enough” bullshit like this.
You’re rude and crude, adding nothing to the discussion.
Which is exactly what this discussion about Hillary and Bill bashing is: nothing.
“3-Her frosty demeanor generally.”
- This is bullshit ‘authenticity,’ fetishism, and probably sexist as well.
“4-She shoulda thrown Bill under the bus as soon as the #MeToo movement got rolling.”
- She’s married to him for Chrissakes. Let her be a human being.
“5-Suspicions that the Clinton Foundation is really mostly just another DC Swamp pay-for-play graft operation.”
- This suspicion is a direct result of the neverending wall of propaganda she has had to scale for her entire adult life, basically.
The ‘deplorables,’ remark was possibly ill-advised, but accurate.
The public / private thing was just about reading the goddamn room.
You write:
I do not like her, travitt. I wouldn’t like her any better if she was a man. I do not like what she has done and said. I do not like her husband, either. Is that “sexist!!!???” P.S. From where do you get the “fetishism” line? Unbelievable. P.P.S. It seems that a lot of other people don’t like them either. Just the deplorables? Nope. Not by a long shot.
She should have thrown him under the bus the day that he publicly said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky.” Lawyerly, bullshit parsing. Of course…she probably had a part in writing the sentence. Maybe she should have thrown herself under the same bus as well.
No, it is simply a fact. She and her husband have done the “pay for play” thing on a huge scale and have been hugely successful at it. Have they broken any laws? Probably not. They are smart lawyers. The laws in question themselves break “laws.” The laws of decency. They are written by well-paid satraps of the rich. The U.S. is no longer a “democracy,” if it ever was. It’s a kleptocracy, and if you do not understand that one salient fact then you have been had. But don’t feel bad, travitt. You are far from alone. In fact, you belong to an overwhelming majority. The majority whose consent has been manufactured by the media.
Sigh…
AG
P.S. The majority of the citizens of this country willingly choose their own poison and then gleefully imbibe it on a daily basis. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC? Right poison, centrist poison, left poison. All lies, all the time. All of it. The news, the advertisements, the whole rotten enchilada.
Wake the fuck up.
AG
You’re telling me to wake the fuck up?
That’s adorable.
Believing that the Clintons are straight rather than crooked? Right rather than deeply wrong? Not the prime movers of the beginning of the so-called “neoliberal” movement that has brought this country almost to its knees in 25 years?
That’s not adorable, it’s deplorable.
When HRC made that public/private speech…”reading the room,” as you so facilely mentioned above, a room full of Goldman Sachs types the greed of whom is illimitable and corrupt on boundless levels…she was speaking to the real deplorables in this country. You are correct…she was reading the room, alright. Reading its true position…giving the old “Wink, wink, nudge, nudge” treatment to a bunch of elevated carny hustlers planning to take the rubes for yet another walk. Only the rubes wised up a little. Not enough, though…not yet. They had been so well hypnotized by the trance-producing media and (
mis)educational system of this country that they believed in the “ONLY TWO PARTIES” system and thus voted for the other hustler…someone even more corrupt than are the Clintons and their owners, if that’s possible.They’re learning, though.
The hard way.
Let’s hope it’s not too late.
Even for people like you.
AG
Any adorableness does not survive repetition.
Trust me on this.
The Clinton rules and CDS are a thing. Thirty plus years of non-stop pounding from both the left and the right have had their desired effect. It’s only a matter of time before a denizen or two of this here blog get on to say “she deserves every bit of the enmity directed toward her because she is an incompetent, corrupt, venal, sickly skank.”
The Clinton rules and CDS are a thing. Thirty plus years of non-stop pounding from both the left and the right have had their desired effect.
You do realize, before now, her favorables tended to increase as long as she wasn’t running for elected office right? Here is the original Gallup thing, as Boo linked to a Fox News post on the Gallup poll:
http://news.gallup.com/poll/224330/hillary-clinton-favorable-rating-new-low.aspx
Notice anything in that chart over time?
Yes. That Clinton rules and CDS are a thing, as you and ASG so quickly proved.
There is a good reason to dislike the Clinton family, especially Bill. Seems you can’t remember the 90’s at all.
Sure, there’s good reasons. You and ASG rarely mention any tho. And I remember the 90’s well. I know the country was a lot better off in 2000 than it was in 1992. But Clinton was only responsible for the bad stuff, right?
I was talking to a friend who didn’t like Hillary because of the “things she’d done”. But he couldn’t name a single specific, or even recall ever having heard one. Because, of course, he didn’t, because there isn’t anything.
It’s the extended media smear campaign that makes her unpopular.
One thing I hope Democratic polticians have learned comparing Trump and Clinton is that the only way to deal with accusations is fervent denial and claims of media bias. It got Trump off a whole host of misdeeds even as Clinton got dinged for a blizzard of stuff she didn’t do.
Yes. This. The right wing noise machine started with this stuff in the ’90’s, and the MSM never opposed any of it, and in fact bought into some of it. This is almost entirely the whole basis of the “baggage” she carries. There is no there there, but no one seems to care about facts or reality. Perception is everything.
I disagree. Yes, the right wing noise machine is a big part of it. But Hillary has not helped herself. She’s too close to powerful interests. She and Bill have cashed in too much on his presidency. Like Schumer and so many other Democrats, she’s a shill for AIPAC and the Israel-can-do-no-wrong gang.
I’m convinced 2016 was primarily about rejection of insincerity and of the status quo. Hillary is politically tone deaf and, thus, unlike Bill, unable to mask her insincerity. And having been around since 1992, she’s the very embodiment of the status quo.
Now don’t get me wrong. I voted for her in both the GE and the Washington state caucus. I knocked on doors for her, though not with much enthusiasm in my heart. I knew that Republicans are so toxic (and of course Trump in particular) that they cannot be allowed anywhere near the levers of power. I was, and remain, appalled by my friends who were too holy and pure to support our compromised candidate. Those Democrats behaved like children in my view, and we’re all paying the price.
I get that I’m not gonna win many friends with this post. Ah well.
This started in earnest with the New York Times. Without Jeff Gerth, this may well have just faded away quickly.
I think there’s a lot we can learn from Scott Adams about how things went pear shaped on the Democratic side. He’s often very adoring of Mr Trump and that’s quite off-putting, but some of his observations about what Mr Trump did ring true. For instance, Trump sucked all the air out of the Democratic campaign. Everything was all about Trump, all the time, from the time he was nominated until all the polls closed. It’s almost impossible to recall any of the details of Hillary’s platform (well, maybe the insiders here will remember) but what can you forget about the Trump campaign?
(IE I don’t think squeaking your denials out in the dark corner you’re stuck in, is gonna do it.)
I was just reading thru the rest of this topic and I see that Adams has more to teach us. There are a lot of rationalizations about what Hillary did wrong – I was even rolling a few thru my mind – but little of that is valuable. Adams claims that most decisions are made in the “3rd dimension” of feelings, not in the 2-D rational world. For instance, there’re several comments below about how Hillary always looks like she’s hiding something, seems entitled &c.
Holy cow! Mr Trump is always hiding something. Everybody knows he is – it’s just exactly what dead body is in his closet that’s the issue. And entitlement? What about that post-signing victory praise session yesterday?
We need a little deeper digging here.
Don’t forget, people literally vote for a candidate, not against one.
Voters had 3 real choices in 2016:
A lot of people take the third option. It’s not that the Democratic-leaning voters decided “Hillary is hiding something, so I’ll vote for Trump.” A lot of them decided not to vote at all. Republicans weren’t as picky.
The same thing happened in Alabama last week. The overwhelming majority of Republicans who voted, voted for Moore. A tiny percentage voted for a write-in candidate. Nearly half of them decided to skip the election entirely.
Trump was much more fluent in using hind parts of his (and not only his) brain.
I agree, but I don’t blame Trump or the media for that. Throughout the campaign, I had no idea why Hillary Clinton wanted to be president and I was looking for it. Despite 20 years of preparing to run for president, I don’t think she ever had a core vision to her campaign.
She was quick to criticize Sanders and the liberal wing of the Democratic party, calling their ideas “unrealistic” and “pie in the sky”. She was selling herself as a “realist” who could work with the Republicans to get things done. But what things? Her scolding of the naive left were the exact same critiques she had directed against Obama in 2008.
The Republican majority was never going to work with Clinton. The reflexive instinct to seek compromise with people who openly wanted to tear down everything the left had accomplished had nearly destroyed the Obama presidency and it would have been a disaster for her as well.
Indeed, this is so much better.
There are a lot of stupid Americans?
So everyone who’s unhappy with Hillary is stupid?
Americans really REALLY don’t like losers. Especially when they lose to an incompetent. Wasn’t her fault? Too goddam bad. She lost and we are all paying for it now.
Personally I always liked her (and I still do), and thought she would make a great president. But she ran a not-great campaign, when we needed her to run a great one. So a bunch of people on the left hate her for losing, and people on the right (and some on the left) always hated her. Sounds like 60% unfavorable is about right.
This, plus what Jordan Orlando said. And she’s exited the building, what’s left of her coalition has better things to do than defend her, and some of her team has turned (Brazile). She’s more useful to her enemies than her friends right now.
No, she hasn’t exited the building. She really hasn’t. Hillary has a staggering amount of money through carefully building her wealth without breaking any of the extremely lenient and corrupt rules about doing that. She is really, truly certain that this makes her better than everyone else. She is really, truly certain that America is already great (except for people who are just deplorable and morally bad, often because they’re conflicting with her in some way). She is really, truly certain that the economy is better than ever and that the world’s a better place due to the political agenda she’s been actively involved in for some time.
This is peculiarly horrible to a reformist or economic leftist who believes those (rightly termed neoliberal) policies and attitudes have led to our destruction.
It’s not that she’s a criminal, for she’s carefully not. It’s not that she’s disingenuous or intending wicked things. It’s that she’s welded to a view of the world that’s done incalculable damage, and that she’s peculiarly determined to continue such damage because she earnestly believes it’s actually good, and that she has all the power in the world to hijack the only available political party for reform and direct it toward her ideological ends.
And no, as she’s not dead, she is still running for President. Third time’s the charm, and she is still every bit as entitled as she has ever been, and still is certain that her political agenda will make everything automatically better even when it’s made things horribly worse.
We can console ourselves with knowing she’s unapologetically socially liberal, but there are contexts where she’s more damaging than a bomb-throwing right-winger because she’s operating from within the Democratic Party (hell, funding it) and expects to encounter no resistance.
Hmm. More Kool Aid?
(No wonder it got ag uprate!)
Pretending to read another’s mind.
But we all know you can’t!
Let’s see:
Wow. This mind-reading superpower of yours must have made you a gazillionaire by now. What with knowing (with absolute certitude, allowing you to confidently state it as fact!!!) what another human thinks, believes, plans, is certain of . . . etc., etc., etc. You must have parlayed that superpower into many fortunes by now, right?
And to think of the bets against long odds you must already have out on Clinton running in ’20. Oh, man, are you set to rake it in!
Yup. Trump is becoming so hugely unpopular, and in such an obvious way that the “How could you loose to that guy?” meme makes her look bad.
I don’t hate her for losing. I’ve never hated her, but I was really unhappy she chose to run. For starters. Running for the Senate in NY and getting Obama to name her Secretary of Senate were resume polishing for the presidential run. You don’t win a national election based on your resume.
Her primary campaign in 2008 was a sign of things to come.
The entitlement stance was like nails on the chalkboard. As well as the constant reminder that “It’s my time” or thinly disguised as it’s time for a woman. Didn’t go over well at all with the older women I know who supposedly should have been highly energized by such rhetoric.
I am angrier by the day that she ran such a poor campaign. She may have won by 3 million votes, but they were mostly in California. Her campaign should have done better at evaluating the electoral college lay of the land. That’s how you win a national presidential election. Her primary losses in both Wisconsin and Michigan should have sounded alarm bells demanding a campaign course correction asap, but they appear to have fallen on deaf ears.
I voted for her as did most of my friends and family, although no one was happy about it. We did it because none of us wanted to be responsible for helping Trump win the election.
We may never know how much the Russian interference depressed turnout for Clinton and/or increased turnout for Trump. But that isn’t what we’re discussing here. What Booman posted was why she’s currently so unpopular. And I have given some of my reasons.
My two cents:
Mostly that.
Plus, IMO, I feel she should have taken more responsibility for her ultra lack-luster campaign.
Say what you want, but Trump got offa his butt and flew around the country. Yes, he’s horrible, a white supremacist & liar, blah blah blah. But he got OUT there and talked to people.
Clinton? Not so much. She made some very grave errors in judgment, esp refusing, mostly, to campaign in MI, WI, Ohio and PA. Spent too much time on the celebrity circuit, and by her own admission – spent waaay too much time and money campaigning for Republican votes in the suburbs.
Really really stupid. I called it that she’d lose to Trump in August 2016 (my friends will confirm. they thought I was nuts).
According to the rumor mill, Bill was also aggravated that she refused to really get out there and campaign directly with people. She and that Robbie Mook relied way to much on statistics.
I think if HRC had said: boy! I made a mistake. I should have gotten out there more, plus I should have really worked with others locally to GOTV, this election would have gone differently. My bad. So sorry. I am NOW dedicated to help whoever runs next to do better.
Has she done that? NO. She keeps blaming Russia. People are tired of her excuses.
Next.
She didn’t in Wisconsin, Michigan, & Ohio like she should have but she did in Pennsylvania. Frankly she should have sent Bill to camp out in those rust belt states because whether many here want to admit or not he was the Democratic candidate in the last 30 years who best connected to voters in those states.
Bill was prominent on the campaign trail for Democratic candidates in the 2014 midterms. He also worked NH and WV in the 2016 primaries.
Don’t know why so many Democrats fail to recognize what Al Gore discovered in 2000. In tough or swing districts, Bill is a drag for the Democratic candidate.
I don’t think FOX could bring her negatives this high. Or even FOX and Trump together, which is pretty much the same thing.
There are a lot of negative feelings out there that have, IMHO, increased and not decreased since the election. With her book (and its finger pointing), along with its coast-to-coast promotion, she revived public review of each and every reason that might account for her loss. And now we know what we all have lost, which only intensifies and expands the negativity.
I’ll repeat the same point I always make: she’s an Emmanual Goldstein “hate figure,” and has been systematically made into one over two decades by means of a sophisticated, well-funded propaganda machine.
Respectfully, I’m surprised that BooMan is so startled by this. The same cutting-edge, multi-million-dollar, academically-grounded techniques that are used to make people “prefer” Coca-Cola or buy McDonalds or Victoria’s Secret merchandise, has been used to make Hillary look like a monster. As her entire life was building towards her apotheosis heading a national ticket, so the other side saw her coming and worked hard to prepare.
It’s really not complicated. Propaganda works. Look at Hitler (yes, that’s Hitler, H-I-T-L-E-R; Godwin can go to hell). Crowds were chanting “Lock her up.” If you can’t understand it, it’s because you don’t want to.
I think it’s quite simple:
I think this is a good observation.
As the magic wears off Mr Trump he (or his support team) need something, and Hillary-bashing is a known winner with his base.
What I wonder: would this work with ANYBODY else? Is there any other figure you can conjure up this kind of two-minute hate? If yes, then what is the propaganda trick that does it? If no, why Hillary?
(For me the answer is – Mr Trump!)
This can be done to anyone. Hillary is the only one who has faced a near continuous barrage of nonsense thrown at her for decades.
There are lots of different propaganda techniques but the most important is repetition. A lie repeated often enough is believed. Even outrageous, ridiculous ones.
I’ve never been a Hillary hater. In the 90s, my dad drank the cool aid, and would rant at the dinner table about how she murdered Vince Foster and whatever else was being spouted on talk radio. I love my dad, but I decided he’s nuts and so are all the other Hillary haters.
Still, she lost to Trump. Insofar as it’s her fault, that’s unforgivable.
Hillary is like Timex. She takes a beating and keeps on ticking. I admire her for all the hate she has taken these many, many years. I feel sorry for the haters because it is such a waste of energy.
I’d say more people are waking up understanding the role her turdway membership ushered in by her husband and practiced by dem presidents since played in giving us the big orange turd in the WH today.
That’s also likely why Bernie is the most popular person in the political game these days as well.
Stupidicus?
Nomen est omen.
That Trump is President. Therefore her approval numbers mirror his.
skulked away with her tail between her legs like female losers are expected to do. And yes gender has something to do with it because when McCain lost and was still all over the media (it seems he had a standing invite for most Sunday shows) he wasn’t lambasted to near the degree Clinton has been.
I don’t recall him being lambasted at all.
He was expected to lose; so, folks went easy on him. Although he was lambasted for choosing Palin.
Also, he showed up and spoke to his supporters when the vote tallies confirmed his loss. (And pushed Palin away from the mic before she launched into whatever it was that she wanted to say.) I very much dislike McCain (for his record in office), but he was one of the more gracious presidential losers.
Well, this should be good.
What part of “Because she’s a castrating bitch who personally kept us from finally expropriating the expropriators and consigning the late-capitalist mode of production to the dustbin of history” do you not get?
With Obama’s acquiescence or complicity she took over the Democratic Party to advance her candidacy. Here in Colorado she let it rot outside of the Front Range urban areas. All the higher ups in the state were campaigning for her 5-6 months ahead of our caucuses. It pissed people off. In the caucuses all or nearly all of the counties favored Bernie by 60% or more. If the election had been held a week later many believe she would have lost the state because she was dropping like a stone.
From what I know she did that in both Michigan and Wisconsin as well. Never visited or paid attention to the smaller cities and larger towns out away from the major urban centers.
With Obama’s acquiescence or complicity she took over the Democratic Party to advance her candidacy.
They’ve controlled the party since the early 90’s. Besides, Obama wasn’t really interested in the party structure per se. That’s why he let Kaine and then DWS run it.
OT but I really want to know why this happened. And why the charming Obama gets so little negative eval for frittering away what he had in Nov 2008. Well, I really want to know why it happened I couldn’t care less about negativity.
Because he really believed in his post-partisan speeches? Otherwise, I don’t know.
She did it in New Hampshire as well. I was there helping MoveOn do canvassing and on the eve of the election we were going to rural towns and places (in a swing state!) where they hadn’t seen any Democratic canvassing. She actively didn’t want anybody but whatever counted as ‘cities’.
It’s indicative of how she would have governed, and that is a problem. We badly needed someone who would have done better than Trump, who simply and brazenly lied that he cared about those little towns and rural places, then sold them out.
Hillary didn’t even trouble to lie.
The same reason people were down on Al Gore in December of 2001.
The same reason people were down on John Kerry in December of 2005.
She lost a squeaker.
I like Hillary. I still think she would have been a good president. I was very sympathetic to Bernie philosophically, but I encouraged other Bernie people to vote for Hillary, because I felt she could win. I am disappointed that she ran a truly terrible campaign, and in effect gave us the Russian stooge. I think this failure may be at the root of many liberal peoples anger toward Hillary.
I like Hillary, too. She would have been a solid, decent President. She was subjected to a gauntlet that no other candidate had to run, and she kept her dignity and her principles. She had multiple albatrosses around her neck, but she did not fall.
She isn’t perfect. Name a candidate who is, or any candidate who ever was. She has so much knowlege and experience, but that was trampled in a rush to blare her faults or weaknesses.
We didn’t deserve her and there are plenty of people who had to make sure we didn’t get her.
And look where we are now.
Yep – and most days I find myself asking, “Where are we going, and what’s with the handbasket?”
https://wonkette.com/627264/chris-cillizza-shits-on-hillary-some-more-because-what-else-is-he-going-
to-cover-taxes
Increasingly, when I hear his name, I just want to ask “Chris who?” How this guy is even relevant is increasingly beyond me. Not sure he’s provided much in the way of analysis in years.
. . . he showed with that great performance of his as Regina George in Mean Girls.
I troll that fat-faced motherfucker relentlessly on Twitter.
Every single tweet I see I respond with “you helped elect him”.
Hillary Clinton was not a reliable leader of the liberal tribe, and the election outcome confirmed that. People and progressive causes really suffer from empty responsibility of Russia and misogyny excuses.
And let’s not forget: Bill Clinton practically advanced the neoliberal course of Reagan:
Plus, he made student debt much harder to discharge.
What would be really celebrating if Hillary had won? Promotion of politically correct mediocrity as a consolation for progressives?
Social justice issues. Black lives matter. LGBT rights.
These are worth celebrating, but there would be many serious problems going unaddressed. Still, credit where credit is due: social justice stuff is important and doesn’t have to backslide. It could become a given… could have, if she’d won.
I think there are three different factors from maybe three different parts of the electorate: 1) the misogynists who hated her for who she was (this is mixed in with anti-Clintonism); 2) the reason you mentioned that people are angry that she “lost” and so inflicted Trump on us, and 3) the people, including virtually all of the GOP who hated her because she was the Democratic candidate. Tribalism.
Donald Trump was kind enough to warn us that if Hillary were elected we would be mired in criminal investigations… a constitutional crisis with many dimnensions…. But did we listen? Well, Hillary won by nearly 3 million votes, and now look at the mess we’re in. You bet I’m down on her.
We really dodged a bullet there.
I reckon there were quite a few people who were convinced by much that they watched and read to go against their personal feelings and vote for Clinton in the primaries. She’s a shoe-in. Bernie can’t win in the General. How many of these people would like to have their votes back?
The simple story is that she lost and on some level people will blame her for Trump.
Very simple.
George C. Scott summarized it best when he played Patton: “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser”.
I think you will see the same pattern if you look at the popularity of other losing nominees: Romney, McCain, Kerry, Gore, Dole… I would bet that ALL of them saw their popularity plunge in the year after they lost the election. Some could rebuild, others could not.
For progressives, I think there is now a consensus that Bill Clinton’s Presidency created short-term prosperity as the expense of a lot of long-term damage and seriously undermined progressive programs and ideas. So those who nonetheless support Hillary do so on the supposition that she is substantially different from her husband in the political substance. It’s possible, but I have never seen evidence of it, and hardly think it should be the default assumption. They are obviously a team – that’s part of what makes them so effective, they are quite a brain trust – and Hillary’s campaign should be viewed as Bill Clinton’s third term. Or Bill’s Presidency as Hillary’s first two terms if you prefer. Few progressives I know are going to vote for that.
People blame her for the fact that Donald Trump won the election. They don’t believe that anyone else could have lost against Trump. And remember, she won 48% of the vote, not a popular-vote majority.
Fair on not, she started out with high negatives and motivated Republicans to vote against her. She was clearly more conservative than the man she wanted to replace, so she lost the interest of many liberals. She was a hawkish candidate who had voted for the disastrous Iraq war and was likely to push a more aggressive foreign policy. She was closely tied to Wall Street and political insiders. In a year of outsider victories, her argument against Sanders was that he had unrealistic dreams and “wasn’t even a Democrat”.
It’s obvious that the Democratic party cleared the field in order for her to run, since they didn’t want a repeat of 2008. On the right, 16 Republicans ran, including 5 Senators and 9 Governors and some weird reality TV personality. On the Democratic side, her primary opponents were 2 former Republicans, a little known Governor and an Independent.
So she not only was she a terrible candidate, she hollowed out the ability of the party to nominate someone who could energize the base.
Propaganda works?
Why is this even a topic? She’s a private citizen, she’s not running for office, and she’s not president.
I have no idea why people are down on Mrs.Clinton, and moreover I could not care less.
Why did she write a self-serving book and go coast-to-coast to promote it? She’s deliberately put herself back in the public eye, and the public is responding.
Perhaps she doesn’t know how to become just a private citizen because she’s had little experience being just that. Most of her adult life either she or Bill held public office or one of them was campaigning for public office.
Primarily, I am down on Hillary because she went to great lengths to clear the field and secure the Democratic nomination and then ran a lackluster general election campaign, losing at a time when the stakes were the highest they’ve been for the country and the world in many years. If you’re going to lay the groundwork, you best follow through, we have no room for error these days.
But I am also annoyed with her because of the email fiasco (not much to it, but someone who’s been attacked for 30 years should know not to create dumb issues like that). And I do think that at some level she is a “pay to play” type of person. She and Bill made a ton of money after leaving the White House, and I can’t imagine that all of the people they’ve had dealings with are above-board. That’s not getting into the fact that, let’s face it, Bill is a skeevy guy and was not exactly super-progressive. Standing by him has consequences, both positive and negative.
I also find it annoying that she’s already done a book about the election and is out promoting it. I’m sure people will see it differently, but to me it comes across as trying to cash in and keep her name in the spotlight. And then Chelsea (who herself is no stranger to the high-priced consulting and hedge fund industries) does the “She Persisted” kids’ book, which is nice I guess but seems like a different flavor of the same thing.
Anyway, I voted for her in the primary and general, my daughter has a Hillary doll, and we were all crushed when she lost. Now I’d like her to just fade into the background and let others be the face of the party. The whole family seems inauthentic to me – similar to the Trumps but maybe less obvious/shameless in their self-promotion and entrepreneurialism.
Read the review of her book in The New Yorker. It’s quite fair, and the author interviewed and quotes her. What she says doesn’t help her at all. Lots of finger pointing.
I agree it came across as just another opportunity to make money off their name while making excuses for her loss. I wasn’t aware of the book by Chelsea but it strikes me as the same thing. Cash in anyway you can.
Nobody told Gore to fade into the background. Nobody told Kerry either. Why should she have to?
Simple really, most will not admit that the current mess is caused by the choices that the average American made. All had a part in the outcome of the last Presidential election. Yes including any and all Russian interference.
In short all of these people down on Hillary are using her as an escape goat, easier to blame it all on her then take personnel responsibility.
. . . your own site.
Like, now, f’rinstance.
Russian bots being polled?
As is well known, as the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton never came to Wisconsin to campaign. Guess where she was speaking this fall? In Milwaukee, to promote her book. Tickets were $85 and up. And you want to know why people are so down on Hillary?
She thought she had the election in her back pocket and was as smug as a Cheshire Cat about it, almost as smug as Trump, who pulled off being a ‘people’s champion’ with deplorable demagoguery.
I suspect people rate her low because she was so blinded by her own inevitability she under-estimated Trump’s appeal to people who traditionally hate NY democrats, which makes her simply a bad fighter.
Since fighting is a big part of the American psyche, her mistakes branded her as unreliable on the battlefield, therefore no Commander-in-chief material.
Her effort to be more gung-ho than the hardest boys with her Gaddafi comment backfired bigtime on her as deep down many wanted a woman in the WH because they hoped for more humanistic qualities from leadership like understanding and compassion, nobility of spirit and magnanimity in victory. That cackle cost her many, many votes.
Her threats of a no-fly zone in Syria were more geopolitically terrifying than any of Trump’s idiot braggadoccio even later with N.Korea when it comes to escalating risk of unthinkable levels of conflict with serious enemies.
Her takedown of Bernie was the last straw though.
When millions of supporters signed up to the Dems to support Bernie’s race, injecting more new blood into the Party than anything since the New Deal, she used all the black arts people justly ascribe to her. She cheated at a game people fondly sustained as institutionally democratic and fair, something expected from Republicans but not from both parties.
Neither candidate ever saw a war they didn’t like, but her rantings about Russia were/are as credible as her account of arriving under a hail of fire in E.Europe. So add compulsive, gratituous, warmongering liar to cheater.
She was a Goldwater Republican disguised as a Democrat and the Don was a Democrat disguised as a Republican.
No wonder their approval rating is equal.
No wonder Putin interfered with the election, he didn’t want WW3 and Trump was so easy to manipulate.
Expecting Trump’s ludicrous handling of the office of President to raise her numbers is testament to how distrusted she was. Sure some of that was the ‘right wing conspiracy’ but was no different to how she treated Bernie and even more importantly the droves of supporters he would have brought in to beat Trump.
And even after Kos and Booman came out for her and caused many to hold their noses and vote for her she still ran her catastrophically off-key campaign as if she was the anointed one, alienating the very people who had crossed their own red lines to vote for her as marginally less scary than Trump, when it was Trump talking -at the time- about reaching out in amity to Russia, (while dissing China and moslems and women and Mexicans and immigrants and losers to keep his alt-right redneck base happily frothing).
They knew he wouldn’t put Hillary in jail or build a wall paid by the Mexicans but they sure got their hater jollies cheering for him. They wanted fake, and they got what they wanted.
What most don’t seem to understand is the on the left we like to believe the pretty lies we are told, whereas on the right they don’t bother believing their side’s ugly ones.
America was no more ready for a female president that she was for a non-white one. Once POC folks had been let down by Obama (and old Bill Clinton before him) they just couldn’t get it up to believe in Dems much any more and Hillary mistakenly took them for granted.
Her attachment to winning cost her her place in Feminist history, and losing to Trump after betraying millions of Bernie’s voters -who hated voting for her out of fear- sealed the deal.
She is surprisingly lucky to have anyone who would still pull a lever for her.
Dynastic politics didn’t work out well for the 99% in Europe and wherever else it was operative.
America is hopefully over that miasma too. Now the Bushes have receded into history, the Clintons should take the hint, do the thinking electorate a favor and bow out too for the good of all. Her ambition is no excuse to break up a party that would possibly still have a hope of renewing itself were she to have made an exit. The longer she waits, the worse it gets fornthe Dems and the more delusionally prideful she looks.