I have struggled for a while to express to other liberal-minded people the problems I had with Hillary Clinton. I know it often gets conflated with issues of gender politics. It was never, even for a second, that for me (and I don’t think it was a for a number of people). As more time passes and more news emerges, we slowly start to see that Hillary was a bad candidate. It wasn’t because of her gender. It wasn’t because of her qualifications. She made bad campaign choices and there was too much “maybe it’s dirt, maybe it isn’t,” in her background. She was a bad idea before it got worse, and as she campaigned, it got worse fast.
Remember, Hillary Clinton once joked to a crowd that if Ghandi had come to St. Louis he’d have been running a gas station. She’s a smart woman, but she makes tone deaf decisions, like deciding to not fall on the sword for Benghazi and instead sacrificing Rice’s career to the Sunday shows the week after the event only to have to answer for it throughout her campaign. And even then, she wouldn’t address it with the sort of force that would bury it, to stand and say mistakes were made on her watch but that it was being made into a scandal where it was just a misunderstanding.
But when you combine what is coming out now about her (see the Wash Post today) with the way Debbie Wasserman-Schultz behaved toward Bernie Sanders, it’s not that hard to see why the Democrats lost to the Trump Machine. Live together, die alone.
Again, it’s not about gender. I’ll run through the fires of hell to support Elizabeth Warren if we elevate her. But I think some members of the party went a little crazy conflating people pointing out that Hillary was a bad candidate and Wasserman-Schultz was an uneven chair with women’s issues.
A male Democratic President (Sanders, Martin O’Malley, even) would be a thousand times better for women’s issues than even the most liberal minded of the Republicans who ran (which I guess would have been Rand Paul). Trump might lead to the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, not to mention expanding the pay gap and destroying women’s healthcare. He might also grab a woman or two by their genitals, if we are to take him at his word.
That result wasn’t worth the “stand with Hillary” rhetoric. Most of us saw that she was going to have a hard time winning. She’s not a local sports team where we, as a sign of pride, stand and cheer even though we know we’re going to lose.
And against Trump, a Democrat shouldn’t have felt like they were losing, even a little bit. He wasn’t a hard opponent to out-distance, but when you lose large portions of your base to apathy, he becomes a juggernaut. And that’s what Hillary’s campaign did; she lost a number of people. Not to the other side. That’s not what liberals do. She lost them to sitting at home. And we saw it coming, but not enough of us did anything about it. Instead of trying to fix the problem, Hillary supporters attacked Sanders backers, seeking victories in small arguments over a win in an election. And Bernie supporters weren’t innocent, but the weight of mending the fence goes to the side that wins the nomination more than the side that felt like it was being picked on. We all messed up.
We have to do better. The fate of the country is at risk if Democrats keep doing this in-fighting and meritocracy crap. We need to take a long look at ourselves and ask if we want to win or if we want to be the snarky high-roaders who do extremely questionable things behind closed doors then act as if we’re above doing the same type of shady things on the street level to overcome the efforts of the GoP.
If we don’t do any better, we deserve what we got. And what we got absolutely sucks.