I too want to dunk on her
I'm a little frustrated with some of the responses here because they're either a generous analysis that assumes people didn't like her for reasons they didn't care really care about or that speculate in ways that are a little generous to the left.
Hillary has been a boogeywoman for the right since she was First Lady. Mostly it was an issue with Woman in Power, but also Woman Not Knowing Her Place. Republican First Ladies tend to be little more than alcoholic hood ornaments with opinions on reading or drugs, and the last strong First Lady the US had was Eleanor Roosevelt. So for illegitimate and misogynist reasons, the right loathes Hillary Clinton.
She's also one of the most unpopular politicians in the US, which was true in 2016 and is true now. 2016 was a race to the bottom, because both she and Trump were largely despised. The question was whose camp hated who more. And you might think that because Trump won that the answer is that America hates Hillary more, but that's not necessarily telling the whole story.
You probably know what the Electoral College is but if not, it's our stupid fucking antidemocratic mechanism to keep Republicans winning office in the 21st century. Hillary very much won the popular vote, but Trump won the majority vote in the right states and took their electors, all or nothing, so Hillary lost.
Trump was promoted by Hillary's campaign early on via Operation Pied Piper, which was where they promoted unpopular candidates in an attempt to fracture the RNC. Unfortunately, this proved to be a stupid strategy because after Obama largely failed to alleviate the crushing effects of the Great Recession of 2008, people wanted a change. The change candidate, especially running on an anti-corruption platform, proved to be very effective messaging for the Tea Party right.
Now here's the part I see the left skip over a lot, to their peril.
Hillary fucked up 2016 based on an attempt to run a metrics-based campaign. Her manager, Robby Mook, is a technology fetishist and he seemed to earnestly believe you could win the presidency on the back of software. So the Clinton campaign had this program called Ada (for Ada Lovelace, and a massive misappropriation of her fucking name) that took national and state level polls that told Hillary where to go next. As a person who works in tech with data science, you never do this based on a principle called GIGO--garbage in, garbage out. One thing polling sucked at was the Midwest. States that Hillary would need to win to carry her over the Electoral College line but that she ended up losing. Because the algorithm told her things were fine, and she could safely ignore those states, but again, garbage in, garbage out. Bad polls means bad data which means bad decisioning if you don't analyze the data itself.
Purportedly, even Bill Clinton tried to suggest they campaign more in the Midwest (Hillary famously didn't step foot in Wisconsin) but was overruled by the dorks worshipping at the false god of data science.
Hillary ended up losing by tiny margins in states she needed to win, and that fault is directly on the technocrats who relied too heavily on statistics. Which is very fitting, I think, since liberals seem to adulate dorks like the Freakonomics assholes and Malcolm Gladwell and Stephen Pinker, all men who misinterpret data and trust bad faith statistics.
So that's how Hillary blew it. The left has had its own fanciful spin that I think is a too generous interpretation of why she lost, as her platform was very neoliberal and ghastly, but she had a decent enough nationwide turnout. In fact, if you had an algorithm telling you that you were going to win in 2016 but you failed to compensate properly for picking up states via the Electoral College due to some of those states having bad polling, you might have thought you were going to win up until the very bitter end.
Damn, didnt know about the data stuff, but its day one engineering to know: "Garbage in, Garbage out", big time political operatives messing that up is embarrassing. Also think you make a good point about the majority of Americans actually preferring her for President.
The big reason you didn't hear about Ada is that there were a bunch of media articles about it cued up to talk about the FUTURE OF ELECTIONEERING and when she pissed 2016 down her pants and Robby Mook was inexplicably not driven out of town by pitchfork wielding villagers, they quietly killed the pieces off.
I’m not here to defend Hillary (lmao), but for the sake of it I’ll throw out something that actually WASN’T the fault of her or her campaign: the right wing had spent pretty much three decades absolutely assassinating her character in the media. Not that she didn’t do plenty of that herself, but on top of her genuine evilness, there was a constant stream of propaganda against her for decades. There was probably a floor of 30-40% of Americans that would NEVER have voted for Clinton, no matter what she did in 2016.
It's good to lead off with this if you're having this conversation with a lib. It's true, saying it gives you some credibility, it shows you're not a chud, and it also helps insulate against any sort of accusation of sexism.
You can't discuss this with a lib, because any criticism shuts down their faulty brain no matter what you do.
Most people here started off as libs (mandatory "most still are").
Yeah, but I think the right angle is to show all the shitshow that both parties agreed to create. Let them come to the conclusion "Hilldog is a ghoul" by themselves
Hillary is fascinating in the sense that the right loathes her in an way she doesn't deserve and the libs love her in a way she def didnt earn. A mythological figure in American politic.
She didn't visit the rust belt because she took the working class for granted, and subsequently lost it all. This is probably the biggest blunder
Its not that she didn't "visit" its that they didn't bother campaigning. Opened few field offices outside urban centers, turned away volunteers, ignored warnings from operatives about union workers...
I actually think this both gives her way too much credit, and totally launders the American right wing & media (lol same thing). It was always going to be Trump, those people love him.
I just don't get how "she created Donald Trump" gets a pass when we were always heading towards this. Its not like without Hillary Clinton Jeb Bush would've taken the nomination, that was always going to be Trump because thats what the Republican base likes.
On top of what everyone else said, once the party nominees were picked, her whole campaign was just "Trump is such a bad guy, vote for me so you're not stuck with him!" which 1) is a far less compelling argument than talking about policies that would help voters and 2) played into Trumps argument that "the mainstream media and establishment politicians are attacking me because I'm a real threat to the system you hate so much!"
She was the Secratary of State and perpetrated war crimes.
Here's a comprehensive list of US war crimes https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md
It was absolutely a contributing factor.
Also I just felt like posting that link and I think it should be its own post so I'll do that too.
I've got three links that are so hilariously awful. Other people have discussed her campaigning as neoliberal centrist, but I wanna talk about her image.
It's all superficial theatre, but Trump was selling her as an out of touch elite and she decided to lean into it.
oh my fucking god what kind of person would fucking cheer to that
You say she leaned into it, I don't disagree - I just think that she really is so out of touch that she (and her staff) thought it could make her cute and likeable. This comes from a place that she genuinely does not understand just how far out of touch she is.
She probably thinks her young volunteer staff is the "lower class", when actually these are successful white kids with advanced degrees from ivy league schools and trust funds that allow them to take unpaid positions. Or they're Ghislaine's nephew.
Leaning in and focusing on superficial politics is what politics is to her. She believes that people don't care about policy that materially affects them - because she is completely surrounded by those who benefit or at worst are unaffected by any government policies that dems or reps could implement.
The deplorables bit was really emblematic of her not being able to commit to anything. She called Trump supporters deplorables, then backtracked on it. Meaning she got all of the heat for saying it, but none of the likability for attacking him because she backtracked on it.
And then I could feel the nudging of Bill’s erection, it was probably going to happen, then it was definitely going to happen, he was entering me, and I gasped—I gasped both because it felt so incredibly good and because I couldn’t believe I was naked with this man. And then he really was inside me, it was happening, and we would eternally from this moment on be two people who’d had sex with each other. Even as he thrust into me, as I arched up against him and gripped his buttocks, there were a few seconds in which our eyes met and we looked at each other, both of us unblinking. Neither of us was smiling; smiling would have been trivial, or beside the point. To be with him in this way was an almost intolerable ecstasy. It was the most precious thing I had ever experienced.
Cool, if anyone needs me I'll be in the bathroom vomiting until the end of time itself.
The way she handled the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal) is a microcosm of everything wrong with her campaign.
Before the primary she was recorded calling it the "gold standard" of trade deals. Bernie Sanders came out against the deal. Hillary refused to take a position on it for months. Only after the race started to get close, she came out meekly against the deal.
This was a lose-lose-lose for her campaign.
- How the fuck do you refuse to take a position on a major trade deal that you helped negotiate. There was a perception that she was entitled and this played right into it. It was an issue many union people cared about (particularly in the rust belt); refusing to state a position was bound to piss them off.
- With how she handled this there was no way people that cared would ever believe that she was actually against the deal.
- Republicans were painting Hillary as untrustworthy. This was a blatant, cravenly political move that played right into that characterization. She was lying, everyone knew it, and everyone knew why.
Be Hillary Clinton
That's all you need to know. The south LOATHES her. Everyone else hates her flip-flopping war-hawk bullshit.
