Friday, June 2, 2017

Hillary Explains Why She Lost

Hillary Clinton refuses to go away. She refuses to show a minimum of self-respect and disappear from the public stage. But, that would take some good character and Hillary has lately been making a public display of her lack of same. If you were wondering why women, in particular, despised her, you can read her recent statements and understand. Surely, American women, even liberal American women, saw through the façade and understood what Hillary Clinton was made of.

Anyway, Peggy Noonan reports on what she calls the stories that Hillary Clinton tells herself, to explain how she racked up such a grandiose failure. Noonan summarizes the reasons that Hillary gave at a Re-code conference in San Francisco a few days ago.

I offer the meat of Noonan’s summary:

[Hillary] lost because America is a hopelessly reactionary country in which dark forces fight a constant “rearguard action” to “turn back the clock.” She lost because Republicans are both technologically advanced and underhanded. Democrats, for instance, use data and analytics to target and rouse voters—“better messaging.” Republicans, on the other hand, use “content farms” and make “an enormous investment in falsehoods, fake news, call it what you will.” Democrats “did not engage in false content.” She lost because of the Russians: “Who were they coordinating with, or colluding with?”

She lost because of “voter suppression” and “unaccountable money flowing in against me.” She lost because the Democratic National Committee didn’t help her. “I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party. I mean it was bankrupt. . . . Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.”

She lost because FBI Director James Comey told Congress the investigation regarding her email server had been reopened. “So for whatever reason . . . and I can’t look inside the guy’s mind, you know, he dumps that on me on Oct. 28, and I immediately start falling.”

She lost because she was “swimming against a historic tide. It’s very difficult historically to succeed a two-term president of your own party.” She lost because she was “the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win.” She lost because the news media ignored her policy positions.

And then there was sexism. “It sort of bleeds into misogyny. And let’s just be honest, you know, people who have . . . a set of expectations about who should be president and what a president looks like, you know, they’re going to be much more skeptical and critical of somebody who doesn’t look like and talk like and sound like everybody else who’s been president. Any you know, President Obama broke that racial barrier, but you know, he’s a very attractive, good-looking man.”

If America gave out awards and political offices on the basis of whining and complaining, Hillary would have won in a landslide. Hillary lost because she has no sense of shame, no self-respect and no dignity. 

4 comments:

Ares Olympus said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Hillary lost because people know she's rotten to the core.

Ares Olympus said...

It might be a good list, but it obviously doesn't belong in public.

The "need to explain" is a human weakness, to believe in patterns that may or may not be there.

I'm partial towards the masochistic rationalization: "Hillary needed to lose because America regularly needs 2 solid years of single party rule to show how bad they really are."

If America is required to choose between prudence or winning, America will always prefer winning. Prudence is about preparing for an unknowable future, winning is about feeling good about ourselves now, at any cost.

Or I think of this quote:
"There is nothing so blinding as success. ... Success has the vicious consequence that it seems to breed almost inevitably the conviction that it will necessarily continue. Success is a poor guide to wise policy. Failure at least often leads to reflection; success seldom does." - Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World

For the Democrats now "reflection" is possible, but it is easier to just wait for Republicans to fail, and feast on the spoils of losing.

That is Clinton and Obama can take in their $400k Wall Street speeches, and soon their taxes will be lowered, so why complain?

Sam L. said...

Hillary lost because a) so many of us do not trust her, and b) so many of the rest of us just don't like her.