US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6244

A common complaint against Hillary Clinton throughout her campaign was that she came off to voters as cold and highly scripted. WikiLeaks emails released from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta revealed her campaign staff debated back and forth about what to have her say, often without any input from Clinton herself. The campaign’s response to the disconnect Clinton had with voters was to rely on data driven from a computer algorithm named Ada rather than hold more press conferences to personally address voters’ concerns, or hold more town halls and appearances in working class communities.

“Ada is a complex computer algorithm that the campaign was prepared to publicly unveil after the election as its invisible guiding hand,” reported The Washington Post. “Named for a female 19th-century mathematician—Ada, Countess of Lovelace—the algorithm was said to play a role in virtually every strategic decision Clinton aides made, including where and when to deploy the candidate and her battalion of surrogates and where to air television ads—as well as when it was safe to stay dark.”

In short, a campaign whose candidate suffered from complaints about appearing too robotic put all bets on a robot. And Clinton partisans wonder why she lost.

Clinton didn’t make any appearances in Wisconsin and didn’t show up in Michigan until very late in the election. Sen. Bernie Sanders defeated Clinton in both states during the Democratic primaries, despite the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Party working on behalf of her candidacy.

President Barack Obama recently explained Clinton lost because she failed to show up at a lot of places throughout the country.

“One of the issues the Democrats have to be clear on is, given population distribution across the country, we have to compete everywhere. We have to show up everywhere. We have to work at a grass-roots level, something that’s been a running thread in my career,” Obama told reporters on November 14, preceding a trip he is taking to Greece, Germany and Peru. “You know, I won Iowa not because the demographics dictated that I would win Iowa. It was because I spent 87 days going to every small town and fair and fish fry and VFW hall, and there were some counties where I might have lost, but maybe I lost by 20 points instead of 50 points.”

Obama added, “There are some counties maybe I won that people didn’t expect because people had a chance to see you and listen to you and get a sense of who you stood for and who you were fighting for.” But instead, the Clinton campaign falsely assumed it could ride on the coattails of Obama’s approval ratings and previous success in grassroots campaigning, without having to do any of the work themselves.

Clinton and her loyal supporters have yet to hold themselves accountable for her loss. It wasn’t Russia, WikiLeaks, FBI Director James Comey, Facebook, third parties, Sanders, sexism or the media’s fault. It was Clinton and the DNC‘s for being grossly out of touch with voters.

Their strategy was focused on wealthy donors and elites. The Clinton campaign responded to Donald Trump‘s wealth by touting billionaires Mark Cuban, Warren Buffett, Meg Whitman and Michael Bloomberg as surrogates. They reveled in fundraising nearly twice as much as Trump, with over $200 million from Super PACs.

During a time in which both political parties were experiencing a rise in resentment toward big money and the elitist status quo, Clinton embraced the elitism that the family has taken solace in since Bill left the White House. Hillary assumed all that corporate money would grease her campaign wheels, allowing her to coast into the White House. This tactic backfired miserably, though it was obvious to anyone not depending solely on a computer algorithm that this was self-destructive from the start.

On November 16 2016 23:29 zlefin wrote:
Legal -> a decent article, but there's still the common error of not allowing for multiple layers of fault to be applied depending on the level of analysis; which is either foolish or disingenuous, and is clearly used in the standard biased fashion in this case.

In the waning days of the presidential campaign, Bill and Hillary Clinton had a knock-down, drag-out fight about her effort to blame FBI Director James Comey for her slump in the polls and looming danger of defeat.

"I was with Bill in Little Rock when he had this shouting match with Hillary on the phone and she accused Comey for reviving the investigation into her use of a private email server and reversing her campaign's momentum," said one of Bill Clinton's closest advisers.

"Bill didn't buy the excuse that Comey would cost Hillary the election," said the source. "As far as he was concerned, all the blame belonged to [campaign manager Robby] Mook, [campaign chairman John] Podesta and Hillary because they displayed a tone-deaf attitude about the feeble economy and its impact on millions and millions of working-class voters.

"Bill was so red in the face during his conversation with Hillary that I worried he was going to have a heart attack. He got so angry that he threw his phone off the roof of his penthouse apartment and toward the Arkansas River."

During the campaign, Bill Clinton felt that he was ignored by Hillary's top advisers when he urged them to make the economy the centerpiece of her campaign. He repeatedly urged them to connect with the people who had been left behind by the revolutions in technology and globalization.

"Bill said that constantly attacking Trump for his defects made Hillary's staff and the media happy, but that it wasn't a message that resonated with voters, especially in the rust belt," the source explained. "Bill always campaigned as a guy who felt your pain, but Hillary came across as someone who was pissed off at her enemy [Trump], not someone who was reaching out and trying to make life better for the white working class."

According to the source, Bill was severely critical of Hillary's decision to reject an invitation to address a St. Patrick's Day event at the University of Notre Dame. Hillary's campaign advisers nixed the idea on the ground that white Catholics were not the audience she needed to reach.

"Bill also said that many African Americans were deeply disappointed with the results of eight years of Obama," the source continued. "Despite more and more government assistance, blacks weren't economically any better off, and black-on-black crime was destroying their communities. He said Hillary should have gone into the South Side of Chicago and condemned the out-of-control violence."

Though Bill conceded that FBI Director Comey's decision to revive Hillary's email scandal created a problem for her campaign, he believed the issue had little impact on the outcome because it had already been baked into the decisions of most voters.

"A big part of Bill's anger toward Hillary was that he was sidelined during the entire campaign by her advisers," said the source. "He can't be effective if he sees himself as just another hired hand. He wasn't listened to and that infuriated him. After all, he knows something about campaigns, and he told me in early October that Hillary and her advisers were blowing it.

"Hillary wouldn't listen. She told Bill that his ideas were old and that he was out of touch. In the end, there was nothing he could do about it because Hillary and her people weren't listening to anything he said."

On November 16 2016 23:49 ticklishmusic wrote:


It's not really surprising to see all the Monday morning quarterbacking. Everything is 20/20 in hindsight.

On November 16 2016 23:49 ticklishmusic wrote:
I generally have the impression that Legal is a smart guy, but he obviously has a strong dislike of Clinton and lets that severely impede his view of her. For goodness sakes, he's posting garbage from a Newsmax gossip columnist.

On November 16 2016 23:49 ticklishmusic wrote:


It's not really surprising to see all the Monday morning quarterbacking. Everything is 20/20 in hindsight.