Hillary Clinton was Al Gored.
→ By the media, who lead the march at every step in lockstep for her opponent.
→ By a Democratic Party leadership, who seemingly didn’t know who its voters were and who were blindsided by a central message akin to one of our own — “Make America Great (Again)” — and were never able to counter that simple and central theme.
→ By a Democratic Party that left a void big enough for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson to occupy, step on her campaign from left, right and center, validate the “lesser of two evils/we need reform” meme and syphon voters away. Another big assist from the media on this one.
We brought a butter knife to a gunfight.
When they go low, we go high? Sure that’s great for the candidate, but her surrogates need to go low when they go low and take out the competition at the knees, whether policy or personality. Most Democrats seem to get weak in the knees at the thought or either.
The media with an assist from Republicans defined who Hillary Clinton was even before her formal announcement. She was never able to recover.
The media gave her opponent billions in free air time and every benefit of the false equivalency-laden doubt, but dragged the campaign for the Democratic nomination on for months after it had been locked up on March 15. Even though she won, Clinton lost the primary narrative and 3rd party candidates benefited. She never gained her own narrative and thus we played the election on their turf.
You either define who you are or you will be defined. We did not define who Democrats are in 2016 and who Hillary Clinton is. Even with a strong Democratic President in office, Republicans had obstructed him and stepped on his accomplishments for so long, they owned the narrative on his presidency too.
Please note that in Pew polls, Hillary Clinton had approval ratings that never fell below 61% during her entire service as Secretary of State. That previously held goodwill and approval was never allowed to be tapped or redeveloped. She is a great public servant born with a service orientation. That story was not told often and nearly loud enough and by enough people.
What happened with the voter ID operation in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other “Blue Wall” States? Did the campaign just not have good ‘1’s and ‘2’s? That is the only way I can see the campaign not knowing what was happening in for example Wisconsin, when the entire western part of the state went for Obama and flipped to Clinton’s opponent.
What a “Blue Wall” strategy has now become is an extension of a 50.1% strategy to win elections. That strategy is not the way to build a party or expand your message outside your base. It is the recipe for disaster that the party has been using and losing with.
Hillary was a highly qualified candidate — on paper. Her true self was never allowed to shine through the media and Republican driven caricature. We and she did not fully litigate her qualifications in the public arena. We settled out of court. The media got one helluva settlement. Republicans got the Presidency.
We got Gored.
By the media, who were the de facto spokespeople for the Trump campaign.
And by the Democratic Party, who once again ran a 50.1% campaign and lost.
But just like then as now, it probably didn’t really matter, that. Both would have been important, great Presidents. But both were candidates who ran lousy, safe and boring campaigns. Both campaigned with a stoic, staid public persona. Hillary was a boring candidate who very likely would have been a great President, and probably exceptional in deed. And she would have been an historic president.