Hillary Clinton Showing Her True Colors?

[_EAllusion]

Whether that is right or wrong, it just is. You can acknowledge that NAFTA is not popular, and that your name is associated with it, and that poor whites believed they were screwed by it, or you can just blame them for being racist. Hillary tends to go for option B.

Clinton pandered like crazy to exactly what you are describing in the 2016 election cycle. I'd offer the exact opposite criticism that this is what makes (some) people think she is an inauthentic politician who will go whichever way the wind blows. I think she should've just stuck by her guns and remained staunchly free trade in the face of the unpopularity of the position. Clinton's worst moment in the debates was when she tried to dance around being free trade rather than just confronting Trump's false claims about it and just trying to say she's going to do the right thing even when it is unpopular. Clinton crushed Trump in the debates and her numbers took a big boost each time they happened, but that moment was emblematic of a weakness of hers.

The real problem I think is that this is was one of the few areas that the media was willing to cover on a policy front because the right is able to get its messages to penetrate what the media is willing to cover so much more effectively. This isn't the fault of the Democrats per se. It's systemic, but it's the Democrats' problem to solve. You can't just ignore reality. You have to try to power through it. There's no reason why free trade or protectionism should be a major focus of the election. Climate change is a much bigger deal and it got essentially no coverage despite the Clinton campaign repeatedly trying to inject it into the conversation. Making Republicans play on Democrat turf is the bigger nut to crack. Clinton's team didn't pull it off.

But also, it is true that Trump's use of xenophobia helps explains why Clinton bled some traditional Democrat voters who score high on measures of racial animus. Clinton pussy-footed around racism in Trump's camp and was generally crushed by the media in the few times she called it out. She had to walk back her intended to be private "deplorable" comments even though they were essentially correct. Her alt-right speech, which in retrospect was right on the money, took a ton of flack and it was backgrounded in the overall campaign.

Perhaps the government could have done something to alleviate that. Instead both parties chose not to.

The Democrats have long advocated for economic transition programs with varying degrees of success at accomplishing their aims. Clinton certainly did. She is fairly liberal.

[_Kishkumen]

Clinton pandered like crazy to exactly what you are describing in the 2016 election cycle.

So what is the conversation about, then, the 2016 election cycle or now? I was talking about now. Yeah, she may have pandered to people against NAFTA during the election, but that was a non-starter. How could she ever hope to be credible on that front? People already do not trust her, then she says stuff that nobody believes, and we end up electing a catastrophe of a "human being" instead. As I said, bad choice for a candidate. You don't run the NAFTA candidate in a time of populist upsurge. I know you think I have "other" motivations for saying this, but it is pretty bleeding obvious in my view.

The real problem I think is that this is was one of the few areas that the media was willing to cover on a policy front because the right is able to get its messages to penetrate what the media is willing to cover so much more effectively. This isn't the fault of the Democrats per se. It's systemic, but it's the Democrats' problem to solve.

The systemic problem to which you refer is the Democratic Party's failure to master the media to some degree, no? I mean, we have had pretty much the same media for a few years now. What changed so much?

But also, it is true that Trump's use of xenophobia helps explains why Clinton bled some traditional Democrat voters who score high on measures of racial animus. Clinton pussy-footed around racism in Trump's camp and was generally crushed by the media in the few times she called it out. She had to walk back her intended to be private "deplorable" comments even though they were essentially correct. Her alt-right speech, which in retrospect was right on the money, took a ton of flack and it was backgrounded in the overall campaign.

I recall when Romney was crushed for his comments. Was there a special bias against Clinton here or was she just caught making unfortunate comments in the same way Romney was?

I mean, comments can be correct but at the same time be political poison, no?

This is a consistent disconnect I see in this argument. It is the idea that because Clinton is right about "x" it is somehow anomalous that it should impact her negatively, as though the game of politics were ever somehow reality based in that way. It is a blindspot in Democratic politics. The insistence that the facts show you are right making it the people's fault for being "y" in not agreeing with you and voting the right way.

That's really a problem for Democrats. One of their own making, it seems to me.

The Democrats have long advocated for economic transition programs with varying degrees of success at accomplishing their aims. Clinton certainly did. She is fairly liberal.

Meh. I am not impressed with her liberalism. She is liberal for a hawkish, free-market, unreliably socially conscious Democrat post-Reagan.

[_EAllusion]

So what is the conversation about, then, the 2016 election cycle or now?

I guess, now? I thought you were referring to her campaign strategy in 2016. Yeah, she's not going on about NAFTA now. She's a free-trader at heart, so of course. It seems like you are anti-free trade agreement and are critical of her for not sharing that view. That's just a political difference. And the problem with pro-NAFTA messaging is widespread misunderstanding of its effects that are hard to disabuse. I suppose we need the modern equivalent of Gore vs. Perot. This does get wrapped up in xenophobia - opposition to NAFTA can easily become a proxy for skepticism of foreigners. I'm skeptical that free trade policy had a ton to do with the election outcome except as acting as a heuristic for other issues. One bit of evidence for that is how much fluidity there is in public opinion on the issue.

Clinton probably wins in a landslide if not for the EMAILS! scandals, so I'm disinclined to think anything else about her campaign was a trainwreck without access to counterfactuals.

You don't run the NAFTA candidate in a time of populist upsurge. I know you think I have "other" motivations for saying this, but it is pretty bleeding obvious in my view.

The reason that NAFTA became one of the few policy areas that the media gave any coverage to at all is because Clinton found herself running against Bernie Sanders then Donald Trump and the pundit class just decided that's what the election is about and created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Clinton can be blamed for losing control of the narrative to the extent she can control such a thing, but I prefer to look at that inside of the ecosystem of overall factors. If it wasn't protectionism, it would've been something else.

The systemic problem to which you refer is the Democratic Party's failure to master the media to some degree, no?

I think so. But it's also just because liberals have different tastes in media than conservatives do. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not sure I want to live in a universe where right-wing's crazy pull on the media is balanced perfectly by a left-wing equivalent. My long-term worry is that eventually liberal culture snaps to. Then we're really up a creek.

I mean, we have had pretty much the same media for a few years now. What changed so much?

It's just been gradually getting worse overtime as right-wing media narratives have a pull on the coverage choices of mainstream media. If you're asking what changed, it's just a little more entrenchment of right-wing media bubble through social media in addition to legacy sources. What happens is that the mainstream media has a bias towards appearing "balanced" and they achieve this by giving equal or serious hearing to whatever crazy nonsense is occurring in the right-wing bubble, but left-wingers don't really have the equivalent, so narratives get a disproportionate pull in that direction in terms of coverage choices. The result is policy territory that is favorable towards Trump got a lot more coverage than you'd otherwise expect. I've linked some academic research on this question before that goes about establishing this in a rigorous fashion if you are interested.

I recall when Romney was crushed for his comments. Was there a special bias against Clinton here or was she just caught making unfortunate comments in the same way Romney was?

What she said was true. She was crushed because it was uncomfortable to think and not something that's supposed to be said in polite company. Romney's equivalent "47%" comment has the drawback of being false. The reason I bring it up is that I don't think Clinton was campaigning on the idea that her opposition is partially motivated by bigotry nearly to the extent that you seemed to imply. She danced around that subject and was punished whenever subtext became text.

If I would want something more out of Clinton, it would be to drop her pandering persona and just stick by what she said. But that's asking for an ice cream cone to be hot.

Meh. I am not impressed with her liberalism. She is liberal for a hawkish, free-market, unreliably socially conscious Democrat post-Reagan.

Clinton is pretty similar to Elizabeth Warren. Aren't you a fan of hers?

[_Kishkumen]

Clinton is pretty similar to Elizabeth Warren. Aren't you a fan of hers?

Yeah. Like remember the time Warren was on the board of Walmart (http://thehill.com/policy/finance/224535-warren-puts-pressure-on-walmart)? Or when her husband was accused of sexual harassment and she was dismissive of the accusations? Or the time Warren's State Department encouraged Haitians not to raise their minimum wage to 61 cents an hour?

Dear God. It's like I haven't said a word. Or you keep avoiding the point, which is this--with a history like Clinton's it was going to be tough going getting elected in the populist environment of 2016. Punkt. So, whether I like Warren or not is neither here nor there (I do). The question is whether it was the wisest move to run Hillary in 2016. I maintain it wasn't. You keep insisting it was. I concede that nothing else was going to happen short of Hillary suddenly developing an amazing amount of wisdom and statesmanship and choosing not to. But, hey, that didn't happen (nor should we really have expected it), so here we are.

[_EAllusion]

Clinton is pretty similar to Elizabeth Warren. Aren't you a fan of hers?

Yeah. Like remember the time Warren was on the board of Walmart (http://thehill.com/policy/finance/224535-warren-puts-pressure-on-walmart)? Or when her husband was accused of sexual harassment and she was dismissive of the accusations? Or the time Warren's State Department encouraged Haitians not to raise their minimum wage to 61 cents an hour?

Dear God. It's like I haven't said a word. Or you keep avoiding the point, which is this--with a history like Clinton's it was going to be tough going getting elected in the populist environment of 2016. Punkt. So, whether I like Warren or not is neither here nor there (I do). The question is whether it was the wisest move to run Hillary in 2016. I maintain it wasn't. You keep insisting it was. I concede that nothing else was going to happen short of Hillary suddenly developing an amazing amount of wisdom and statesmanship and choosing not to. But, hey, that didn't happen (nor should we really have expected it), so here we are.

If Warren was running, there would have been a heavy debate over whether Warren is a flunky who used affirmative action by lying about her native American heritage to earn what she could not through merit. There would be bombshell discoveries that "prove" this.

Warren is definitely similar to Clinton in that both have a reputation of being dishonest hags and have to fight any story that seems consistent with that impression.

And if she lost, we could talk about how bad it was for the Democrats to run someone with those flaws. I mean, she's not even all that popular in her home state, which is one of the most liberal in the country.

I think this is post hoc and not a good way to think about candidate strengths and weaknesses. My point that you are responding to is more that Clinton's politics are similar in many respects and she too favored programs to cushion those displaced by changes in the labor market. You argued she didn't.

I haven’t argued she was a strong candidate. I suspect she was kinda weak, but am agnostic about stronger claims. I think election outcomes are mostly unrelated to candidate traits.

[_Kishkumen]

If Warren was running, there would have been a heavy debate over whether Warren is a flunky who used affirmative action by lying about her native American heritage to earn what she could not through merit. There would be bombshell discoveries that "prove" this.

Warren is definitely similar to Clinton in that both have a reputation of being dishonest hags and have to fight any story that seems consistent with that impression.

And if she lost, we could talk about how bad it was for the Democrats to run someone with those flaws. I mean, she's not even all that popular in her home state, which is one of the most liberal in the country.

I think this is post hoc and not a good way to think about candidate strengths and weaknesses. My point that you are responding to is more that Clinton's politics are similar in many respects and she too favored programs to cushion those displaced by changes in the labor market. You argued she didn't.

I haven’t argued she was a strong candidate. I suspect she was kinda weak, but am agnostic about stronger claims. I think election outcomes are mostly unrelated to candidate traits.

I didn’t argue that she didn’t. I argued that her reputation for not being a true friend to workers preceded her. It just did. It is odd to me that you believe the decades long witch hunt against Clinton was of negligible impact. Or that it made little difference that she had a credibility problem on issues people seemed to care about at the time. It is interesting to me how the underlying causes of poor whites’ anxiety, such as poverty and wage stagnation, are downplayed in favor of blaming crude racism, as though the two things were unrelated somehow.

Racism or xenophobia are just there. Privilege makes it easier to temper those things, but I don’t think anyone fully escapes them. Pour on some pressure, put people in despair, and see how they hold up. It is convenient for privileged people to point fingers at racist whites, just as it is convenient and easy for them to feel condescendingly magnanimous about their “color blindness,” but let’s take their privilege away and see how long they hold onto the same brand of self-righteousness. I am afraid the results would look ugly.

Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am. I just see too much racism among people who believe they are above it.

[_EAllusion]

I didn’t argue that she didn’t. I argued that her reputation for not being a true friend to workers preceded her. It just did. It is odd to me that you believe the decades long witch hunt against Clinton was of negligible impact. Or that it made little difference that she had a credibility problem on issues people seemed to care about at the time. It is interesting to me how the underlying causes of poor whites’ anxiety, such as poverty and wage stagnation, are downplayed in favor of blaming crude racism, as though the two things were unrelated somehow.

Racism or xenophobia are just there. Privilege makes it easier to temper those things, but I don’t think anyone fully escapes them. Pour on some pressure, put people in despair, and see how they hold up. It is convenient for privileged people to point fingers at racist whites, just as it is convenient and easy for them to feel condescendingly magnanimous about their “color blindness,” but let’s take their privilege away and see how long they hold onto the same brand of self-righteousness. I am afraid the results would look ugly.

Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am. I just see too much racism among people who believe they are above it.

I think you are mixing up why Clinton didn't win with why you personally don't like Clinton. Joe Biden is the current Democrat frontrunning for 2020. I can't think of a more nightmarish scenario in terms of my politics. The man is awful in all the specific ways that bother me, and I could put together a laundry list of complaints no problem. But I don't confuse that for my judgement about how strong of a candidate he is. I'm not really sure about that as this juncture.

That journalists like Chris Cillizza treat Clinton Scandal! stories like catnip and are also very influential on what people see and hear probably has a lot to do with her weakness as a candidate. If there's any reason why Clinton was a weak nominee, that's it. Clinton's stance on Haitian minimum wage? That probably had zero impact on the election outcome, directly or indirectly.

I think you may also miss her strengths as a candidate when just listing her weaknesses. She had strong points as a candidate as well. I'm not arguing that she was a potent candidate, though. I'm cautioning against assuming she was weak because you dislike certain things about her or as a post hoc declaration based on outcome. If it was just about her association with Bill Clinton-style neo-liberalism, it's worth noting that Bill Clinton continues to be quite popular. It's hard to know if that's even a drawback.

When it comes to xenophobia, I think the evidence is largely in favor of xenophobia being a much better explanation of the shift of voters to Trump than "economic anxiety." In fact, I think "economic anxiety" was used a fig leaf by far too many people to cover for what was raw racial animus.

I think you are retroactively projecting how campaigns successfully gamed media coverage onto what the election was about. There is absolutely no reason a priori that this last election had to be about the the policies it was and not other ones. That's a byproduct of what campaigns wanted to talk about, with Clinton successfully boxed in. But even that is probably a minor thing, because the election had virtually nothing to do with policy. It was an election about scandal vs. fitness for office.

[Guest]

I think you are mixing up why Clinton didn't win with why you personally don't like Clinton.

I think you're confusing your loyalty to Clinton with objectivity. I anticipate that you will deny that.

Furthermore, I have never disliked Hillary Clinton as a person. I admire Hillary Clinton. My concern about her strength as a candidate has everything to do with living through the insanity of Republican conspiracy mongering and bogus investigations. You obviously don't believe me, since you return time and time again to the suggestion that I don't like her, or that there is some other hidden reason why I was not confident she could win and thought she ought not run (regardless of her obvious ability, intelligence, and experience). I was very comfortable voting for Clinton and hoped she would win. But that is different from being confident that she would win in advance of her running for president.

Yeah, I liked Warren as a candidate a lot better. I find her a little better at mustering the kind of passion about the issues that I think resonated better in the years leading up to 2016. She comes across as very credible in her opposition to the abuses of the corporate and financial worlds. And, hey, in retrospect, you might as well lose with Warren as with Clinton. But, the bonus here is that Warren still has a future that she wouldn't have as the candidate who lost to Trump. Hillary's future has mostly to do with her core support and leadership position within the Democratic Party at this point.

If you are at all interested in the psychological reasons behind my not agreeing with the "grown ups" who tend to lecture me about Clinton, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that I am not an institutionally oriented person or a joiner. There are those people who are more comfortable swallowing the BS of a large organization like the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party, or the LDS Church, or the Skeptics' Movement, in order to forward an agenda they agree with in certain respects. That may be the wisdom and maturity that I lack. I am happy to cooperate with the better options (hence my refusal to vote Republican for some years now), but I get kind of sick to my stomach selling things I don't like or turning a blind eye to the foibles of my own team.

And I just could not make sense out of the desire to run a presidential candidate who had a dedicated, decades-old hate club devoted to dragging the candidate down. Trump's candidacy gave me some hope that the obliviousness of that obvious error would not prevent her from winning. I was wrong. But I never thought her candidacy was a great idea. I can totally see why many Democratic Party insiders to this day feel robbed and confused by what happened. I join them in their sorrow. And yet I think they had blinders on, and that they are collectively making dumb excuses for her loss. It was always going to be a risky thing to run Clinton. It didn't work out. I don't share the shock of her loss so much as the horror at Trump's victory.

Sorry I didn't respond to most of your post, but I don't feel like letting your suggestions about my motivations pass without addressing them at greater length.

[_EAllusion]

I think you are mixing up why Clinton didn't win with why you personally don't like Clinton.

I think you're confusing your loyalty to Clinton with objectivity.

I don't like Clinton, so that doesn't seem likely.

[_Kishkumen]

I don't like Clinton, so that doesn't seem likely.

I don't know that loyalty to Clinton and liking Clinton are the same thing.