The Denome’s Advocate: Hillary Clinton can shut up now
W
ithout having read her new book, I can already assure you that Hillary Clinton is wrong about why she lost last year’s presidential election.
2016 was a historically bad year for candidates of both major parties. Clinton and Donald Trump were among the most unpopular presidential nominees ever. It’s pretty obvious why Trump, with his brash attitude and inability to understand that not everybody is a rich, old white guy, was consistently under water in his approval numbers.
Clinton is a little more difficult to diagnose, however. She was the popular First Lady of Arkansas for some time, before graduating to become an equally adored First Lady of America. She spent eight years in the Senate, including a reelection, four years as Secretary of State under President Obama and nearly was the Democratic nominee for president in 2008. Actually winning the top job was the logical next step.
And then, she proceeded to lose. Some projections from both HuffPost and the New York Times had her winning north of 350 electoral votes in November. So it’s fair that Clinton does indeed ask “What Happened?”
I have an answer. Republicans have been preparing for this since Clinton’s husband was president. They spent years on a smear campaign that worked perfectly. The blame falls squarely on the Democratic establishment, and Clinton herself by extension, for not realizing just how much said smear campaign would damage the former Secretary of State.
And just as former President Barrack Obama stepped aside when his time was up, Clinton needs to move along now too. Not just from elections, but from politics in general.
Clinton’s campaign was a perfect testament to everything wrong with neoliberalism, as well as exposed the gaping flaws of being a moderate in today’s political climate. Every move she made seemed predictable and weak; she took very few steps that actually surprised people and generally failed to excite an electorate that was obviously open to leftist policies.
Even though she won the popular vote by three million votes, Clinton was not a winning candidate. Her campaign was, as moderate liberal rhetoric still is, entirely based off the fact that she was not a racist, misogynistic liar. And as much as what I just described sounds unelectable, Trump’s rhetoric won in the end because unfortunately, large swaths of America are still filled with racist, misogynistic people.
So, Secretary Clinton, even if you’re still confused about why you lost, I can tell you exactly what happened. You were the right candidate at the wrong time. A qualified, experienced veteran of the political world who just so happens to have a second X-chromosome. But instead of making that a non-factor, your campaign made the issue of misogyny a defining part of the fight against Trump. You only riled up the most backward parts of America more.
You almost certainly lost in part because of Russian interference. However, keep in mind you won the Democratic primary in no small part because of similar dirty tricks from the DNC. You can’t have it both ways.
You lost not because Bernie Sanders made you a weaker candidate, but because you didn’t become stronger in the face of him. Even as he pulled you to the left, a necessary step in a time when the Democratic establishment is borderline conservative, you refused to embrace things like universal health care, and offered only lukewarm support to other things, like rolling back the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That 12 percent of Bernie voters that voted for Trump didn’t vote for him because he appealed to them, but because you never even tried to win their favor.
And most importantly, you lost because it’s becoming clearer by the day that Americans are tired of establishment politics. You didn’t reject the status quo, even by being a woman; instead you embodied it. And that was the fatal blow to your campaign. Promising change while refusing to acknowledge that which was already going on around you.
So there you are, Secretary Clinton. No matter what you may believe, about a year after the election, this is exactly “what happened.”
Anon 1 • Sep 18, 2017 at 10:11 pm
I am gonna be nice to you unlike i usually am please don’t ever ever ever make serious claims like for example: “Trumps supporters are racist and misogynistic”paraphrased please provide real evidence and reasoning for your claim or it’s trash anywhere outside you little liberal bubble that is the bay area.
always live by this “Facts don’t care about your feelings”
Anon 1 • Sep 18, 2017 at 10:13 pm
Also sorry for the typos
FreeSpeech • Sep 18, 2017 at 9:54 pm
Hopefully I do not get censored or have my life ruined forever by this comment. I just ask that God be nice to me. Where to begin. You talk about a smear campaign, yet you offer no evidence of a prolonged smear campaign against Hillary ever since the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Simply just stating that their was a long and secret subliminal message is not only fallacious but goes against journalistic principals that many hold dearly. You also claim that she was the victim of people not voting for her because she was a woman, that is also another fallacy. To simply claim that it was sexism that caused her downfall is rather destructive. I will admit that there are many people who incorrectly believe that a woman is not fit to hold office (obviously such a statement is incorrect and blatantly sexist). However there are not enough of those people who are stuck in the past to change an election. Another point that you had left out was that Jill Stein and Carley Fiorina were also runners of an election and both relieved votes. If America was so blatantly sexist, why would people vote for either of the two. A large population of Democratically aligned women did not vote for Hillary, rather for Bernie. She did worse than Obama on the base she had most tried to reach (Why So Many Women Abandoned Hillary Clinton -Time )Another point of contention is that simply labeling the loss of sexism denies the point that the DNC put its nose where it shouldn’t have been. It had played sides when it revealed that Debbie Washerumen Schultz had favored Hillary over Bernie Sanders. Last I checked, such practices had ended in the Jacksonian era when party members could no longer choose their candidates. Bernie Sanders also provided a massive obstacle, Bernie resonated among st the younger generations because he had a legitimate message. Hillary’s on the other hand was based of off Bernie’s and was varied slightly. One only has to look at the first Democratic debate in which both argue on border control. It was just a contest to see who could out do another. When you remark that her opponent made offensive comments, I refer you to the comment where she remarks that the children who are caught in gangs are “super predators that need to be brought to heel”, she attacked Bernie Sanders for his religion and as a result many of her staffers were fired. She has also used and supported believers of anti-semetic rhetoric. She has supported people such as Max Blumenthal, as well as Suha Arafat. Both of which compare Israel to Nazi Germany and accuse Israel of using “gas chambers” to harm Palestinians. And I will admit that the Russians had an unauthorized hand in this election, however their actions alone were not enough to change the election. At the end of the day people cam out and voted, Hillary’s ground game in key states was weak. Telling coal workers in Virginia that she will put them out of work is not going to help. Finally a majority of Americans haven’t received the promises of Obama and the Democratic Party. People have lost acess to their doctors, their premiums have gone up, race relations haven’t gone up either. Middle America was left largely out of the equation and as a result they to have suffered. When key Democratic stronghold turn en masse to red, it’s a sign that Hillary was far from a perfect candidate. There is no such thing as a perfect candidate, but there are flawed and even more flawed candidates. At the end of the day, the DNC and Hillary proved to be incompatible with the American people. And in before that she won the popular vote, simply looking at numbers does not tell you anything. I refer you to the country map which more accurately reflects the attitude of the people. More Americans over America felt that Donald Trump was a better candidate. If that doesn’t send shcok waves through the Democratic party,then nothing will.
Anonymous • Sep 18, 2017 at 9:34 pm
Though all writers are entitled to the 1st Amendment, there is something called a high school newspaper, and debate.org. The two have objectives on two different tangents; one is to feed news about the high school, and the other is a site that encourages opinions on all current issues. This article blurs the purpose of both, and though it is beyond my power to outright ban this article, as a third-party reader I would like to remind you to know your place as the reporter of a newspaper.