What Happened by Hillary Clinton

ddouglas
ddouglas
Aug 25, 2017 · 6 min read

Pre-publication Review … of the Reviews

NOTES:

  1. As of Aug. 21, 2017, I have NOT read the book (it hasn’t been published yet).
  2. As of Aug. 21, 2017, I have NOT read the reviews (which haven’t been written yet).
  3. I voted for Hillary in 2008 and 2016 and would vote for her in 2020 if she ran.*

So, why am I writing this? Call it an effort in self-preservation, a form of vaccination. Because we are about to be thrown yet again into the cesspit of Hillary hatred that infused the 2016 campaign.

I know Hillary felt she had to write this book, but I wish she hadn’t. During her public career, she has been the subject of more abuse by the members of the media (Left, Right and Center, male and female) than any other politician — including Nixon, Carter, Bush43, even (in a certain way) Trump. By writing this book, she is opening herself up to another round because nothing, absolutely nothing that she has written will be enough for the media to forgive her for being a very, very smart woman who dared to be politically ambitious and who lost to Donald Trump.

What can you expect from the reviews, even those from so-called “friendly” reviewers? An endless series of complaints along the following lines:

  1. “She promised not to pull punches but, as she has done her entire political life, she maintains the impenetrable barrier of secrecy [read privacy] that has been the lifelong cause of her problems with the media.”
  2. “She claims that she has taken responsibility for the election loss, then goes on to whine about __________” [fill in the blank]
  3. “She still has not [to our satisfaction] explained why she used a private email server nor apologized for this gross error in judgment.” [despite having done so often] — see my explantion: https://medium.com/@dd9000/hillary-s-email-691a0f4375c0
  4. “Mrs. Clinton is not and has never been a likable person. She thought she was owed the nomination and assumed she would win. She should have campaigned more in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.” [because the BernieBros would then have voted for her rather than writing in Bernie’s name or voting for Jill Stein or Trump].
  5. “The best thing Mrs. Clinton could do to help heal the nation is shut up and disappear from public life forever”. [Josh Barro, David Sirota, Andrew Sullivan]

I’ve probably missed a few. Any of you who are good at making those Bingo Cards, please feel free to create your own and use them to rate the reviewers.

*A DEFENSE OF HILLARY

I admired Hillary before she ran in 2008. Admired her even more before the campaign in 2016. Fell in love with her during the campaign. What made me fall in love with her? The dignity with which she endured every bit of abuse, her strength in the face of of constant criticism by liberal icons like Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Charles Pierce, Chris Hayes, Heer Jeet, The Nation and The New Republic all of whom fell in love with the other angry old White man in the race and routinely dismissed and demeaned her. I fell in love with her as she repeatedly responded to questions about her “likability” and the email server — because no answer she gave was “the” answer the interviewer craved.

Yes, she had a couple of defenders (Peter Daou, Melissa McEwan) but the rest of our so-called liberal pundits and reporters have voiced each of those criticisms I listed above. They found Trump amusing. They hated Hillary.

Conservatives, as they usually do, set the tone with the “coronation” story (picked up by every single pundit in the country) because the woman who got more votes than Obama in 2008 (losing, however, the delegate race) and was his Secretary of State had no right to be considered the frontrunner. She was unfairly “taking the air out of the race”. Jeb Bush, of course, deserved to be the GOP frontrunner.

I won’t get into the Bernie libel about her stealing the nomination (a lie every bit as big as the lies Trump tells), but will point out that she beat him roundly in both votes and delegates, that he would’ve been dead in the water without the undemocratic caucuses. (In the two States that held binding caucuses but unbinding primaries, he won the former but lost the latter overwhelmingly.)

  1. She was the first woman to head a national ticket. All the pundits who worried about closet racism with respect to Obama’s polls ignored the effect of misogyny, no doubt because most of them (women as well as men because sexism is both race & gender-neutral) harbored their own prejudices about how women in politics should behave. (Ezra Klein wrote two condescending, mansplaining articles on the subject of Hillary’s “female style” of campaigning.)
  2. She “should have campaigned more in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin”. Name me one pundit or pollster who thought that this previously Democratic firewall would fail. But she should have known. How many pollsters thought she was vulnerable? Nate Silver is the only one I can think of who put her chances at less than 90%, but she should have known better. [I can’t find it now, but I saw an analysis of those three states comparing her campaign strategy in each of them. In each it was different, but each had more than enough voters who went to Bernie or Stein or Trump to make the difference].
  3. No other Democratic candidate (except Bill) was faced with an extended effort by the GOP to use all of the Government powers at its disposal (the endless Benghazi hearings and the FBI) to prevent her from getting the Democratic nomination or, if she got it, from winning the election (by using threats of impeachment from Day One).
  4. This was the first national election after the gutting of the VRA. Over a dozen states led by the GOP implemented voting restrictions designed specifically to reduce voting by minorities and students. Crosscheck, with an error rate of 99% according to recent reporting done by Ari Berman, resulted in hundreds of thousands of potential voters not being able to vote.
  5. Russia.
  6. This is the second time in 5 elections in one 16-year period that the winner of the popular vote lost the Electoral College. The previous times: 1824, 1876, 1888. Shouldn’t we be talking about this? A lot? Perhaps it was right to treat 2000 as an anomaly. But I can’t help wondering and worrying. If Democrats had refused to forget it, had reminded Bush43 repeatedly that he had lost the popular vote, if professionals had studied what happened and discussed how to prevent a repetition, could we have prevented what happened last year? Worse, if we don’t look for a solution, could we see the same thing happen in 2020? And will pundits again blame the Democratic candidate rather than the system?
  7. Still, she got more votes than any other candidate in history with the exception of Obama. 3 million more votes than Trump.

Everybody, even, I suspect, Trump’s own team, expected Hillary to win. She was the overwhelming favorite among newspapers, the military, the non-Fox media and pollsters. None of the political elite expected Trump to win. True, he had defeated 17 Republicans (a group that included serious Senators and Governors as well as the usual vanity candidates). But those wins were written off: too large a field, peculiarity of the Republican base, etc. Have we heard any demands for an apology from Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Ron Paul, or Rick Perry? No, of course not.

Nobody thought a nation that had elected Obama twice could elect a Trump. So sexism, the reporting that ignored Hillary’s political positions and focused solely on her email and, in the final months, the Clinton Foundation (!) [Partisanship, Propaganda and Disinformation — https://cyber.harvard.edu/node/99981], voter suppression, James Comey, Russian interference: none of these mattered, none of these (let alone the combination) should have been enough for Trump to win. So it had to be Hillary’s fault. She was a lousy candidate. She should not have run or should have stepped aside for the other old White guy.

Trump was not a stealth candidate. He didn’t campaign as one kind of politician and turn into another on January 20, 2017. The 63 million who voted for him knew he was ignorant, knew he was sexist, knew he was immoral and unethical, knew he was a crooked businessman, knew he was a bigot, knew he was a nativist. And they voted for him (or for a third-party candidate which is the same as voting for him). I don’t care what excuses they had. They knew who he was and they voted for him. That is totally on them. Not on Hillary.

)

ddouglas

Written by

Californian by choice. Proud bleeding-heart liberal feminist. Fascinated by everything I don’t understand.

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