Tod Kelly
Tod is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. He is also serves as Executive Producer and host of both the 7 Deadly Sins Show at Portland's historic Mission Theatre and 7DS: Pants On Fire! at the White Eagle Hotel & Saloon. He is a regular inactive for Marie Claire International and the Daily Beast, and is currently writing a book on the sudden rise of exorcisms in the United States. Follow him on Twitter.
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No, we just realize that she’s likely to be the nominee and we’re likely to have to hold our noses and vote for her.
Was this really unclear or did you just need another reason to sneer at the other side of the aisle?Report
Hmm. Sanders v. Trump feels like it could be an absolute wildcard election. I honestly don’t know how Sanders v. anyone else would turn out. I also kind of like the idea of an outer boroughs election. Someone from Queens and someone from Brooklyn, both with accents! So an Al Smith thing would not work against Bernie.
Bush, Kaisch and Rubio could portray themselves as a moderate fairly convincingly and possibly win. Rubio gets points for youth. Sander’s might also play into Walker’s strengths but I still think Walker’s weakness is that the factors that help him in Wisconsin are not present in the rest of the U.S. anymore.
Yet this is still early and there was also 2004 where it looked like Dean and Clark were going to take it from Party Man Kerry until they did not.Report
There is, of course, exactly zero chance that Trump gets the GOP nomination, and Bernie’s chances are only slightly better.
Even if Trump doesn’t lose any of his standing in the polls, he has a very low ceiling because of his massive negatives, and would lose handily in a heads-up primary against almost any of the others running for the GOP nomination. By the time the NH primary gets here, you can rest assured that several candidates will have dropped out, with all of their supporters going to candidates not named Trump. The only candidate who would likely add to Trump’s support by dropping out would be Cruz, whereas the last non-Trump candidate standing will be able to count on the support of just about everyone else’s voters (maybe with the exception of some of Rand Paul’s voters).
Bernie’s chances, believe it or not, are actually better than Trump’s, even though they’re still minuscule, if only because the Democratic primary is effectively a heads up battle with the vague possibility of Biden belatedly throwing his hat in the ring. Most likely, he winds up following a near-identical path to Bill Bradley in 2000 and gets swallowed up by HRC’s infrastructure after a good showing in NH, but if something really major happens to crush her base of support, then Bernie will have a reasonable shot against whatever replacement candidate the DNC is able to find. So maybe he has like a 2% chance to Donald’s 0% chance of getting a major party nomination.
Whether Donald runs as a third party candidate is another story altogether of course.Report
Most states either have sore-loser laws or simultaneous primary/general registration deadlines. Which means he has to choose which it is long before the primaries are decided.
It is also note worthy that getting in the ballot as third party is almost impossible in many states.
http://rangevoting.org/BallAccess.htmlReport
Nobernie? Nonders? Sorry, just practicing.Report
Clinton gets Berned?Report
I get it, Tod. You really don’t like Hillary Clinton, for reasons I’m still not sure about, because some general feelings of sleaziness (which hey, Mother Theresa would have had after 20 years of GOP claiming she’s Hell’s Harpy) and because the Clinton’s had the temerity not to stay only mildly wealthy after the Presidency (since as we all know, the Bushes got to be massively wealthy without any shadiness at all). And you’re convinced that Hillary is getting more unpopular among Democrats (which she isn’t).
But, ignoring that, let’s go to the actual reaction of statisticians and electoral prognosticators – ya’ know, the people who know stuff so you don’t have an emotional reaction.
http://twitter.com/SamWangPhD/status/631332644295413760
“God, you people are saps. First poll from this organization in six years, no track record, outlier data point. Geez”
http://twitter.com/DKElections/statu…27759059562496
“Franklin Pierce’s poll was conducted by R. Kelly Myers, who used to run UNH, one of the worst pollsters in the world”
Again, I stay with my original prediction – ignoring any bombshell that Hillary was secretly asking for money to fund a lesbian sexfest with Huma Abedin while personally shooting the boys in Benghazi that Bernie at best wins the New Hampshire narrowly and Vermont, and Sanders drops out, if not after Super Tuesday, then after either the March 15th primaries.
Hillary wins the general 51ish to 47ish with largely Obama’s political coalition, give or take a state.Report
Yes, this prediction is the CW and the smart bet and, in fact, pretty much what mine is and the GOP nominee doesn’t much matter for it.
That doesn’t mean we have to think it’s an optimal choice. I’ve always thought that both Clintons were overtly craven and veracity-deficient. I’ve always found that unappealing. I might still vote for HRC, notwithstanding this. My state definitely will throw its electoral votes to her unless I move to Kansas or something like that.Report
Better than sending your political opponents to jail.
Perfect is the enemy of good, after all.Report
My prediction for the general is along these lines. Which maybe is overly cautious to the point of admitting that we have no idea (apart from the identity of the victor, which is far from a 50/50 deal).
Or to put another way, we’re defaulting to what happened last time (even if we allow for a state or two flipping), and that rarely happens. Hillary winning by ’08 margins, or a nailbiter (even if we assume HRC wins it) are probably equally likely. And a Republican victory or HRC winning by a truly huge margin. We maybe just don’t want to go out on a limb.Report
Looking over the history is hard because of the frequency of third party candidates, but if we make some assumptions (Nader counts to Gore, Wallace counts to Truman, etc.), we’re looking at very similar popular vote results in just a couple of places over the last century.
The strongest “holding pattern” we’ve seen was Roosevelt-Truman with the results of 1940, 1944, and 1948 coming out very similarly.
Interestingly enough, 1980 vs 1984 came out similarly, if you line up Anderson’s votes to Reagan. Both Republicans, though of a different sort. If you counted Nader’s votes to Bush (by looking at Democratic vote share) you’d have a holding pattern, but we can’t really do that.
Going back the previous century, if you line up the Prohibition and/or Greenback with the Democratic Party, you get a hold…
The only one that isn’t a stretch is Roosevelt-Roosevelt-Truman. Which could be happening again. Arguably, at least, it took Ike to break that pattern and it might have continued a little further on. There’s certainly no Ike this time around! It’s hard to say how another establishment Republican would have done in 1952, though, given Truman’s unpopularity at the time.
It goes back a bit towards a comment I made the other day, taken more broadly. If either party wins over a net of 1 in 40 voters (HRC makes gains here, or the GOP does there) that blows the election wide open with a really close race that could go either way, or a devastating blowout.Report
Every prediction you have here sounds somewhere from “very reasonable” to “What Trumwill thinks is going to happen” except that I don’t see why Sanders drops out earlier than he has to. He doesn’t seem in it to win, and I don’t think he minds losing.Report
That’s my thought about Sanders as well. He’ll stick it out as long as possible to get his message out and maybe move Clinton toward the left.Report
Personally, I suspect that’s exactly what most of Sander’s supporters (those who aren’t delusional) are hoping to achieve.Report
Clinton too, probably. Sanders gives her some cover to move left, where she wants to.Report
Totally agree, @kim
Sanders is assisting Clinton, not threatening her, and certainly not evidence that there’s this giant schism within the Democratic Party.Report
It’s all Kabuki, sure… but it’s all in good fun, and Sanders is a nice guy about it.Report
The hairs-width of difference between most of the Republican candidates certainly reflects Kabuki theater, as well.
At least Clinton (and Sanders) have policies.Report
Nah, the republicans will go with whomever the head of the right chooses.
As always.
Deliciously simple.
It’s Snotty Walker by the way. (and that’s what his own team calls him, no kidding)Report
The Republicans have policies.
They’ll deport all the illegals and seal the border, and there will be no ill effects from the first nor will it cost anything much to do the second.
They’ll kill the Iran deal, and Iran will be throughly chastened and fall into line.
They’ll end the deficit by cutting taxes.
They’ll stop all sex that isn’t straight, marital, and procreative.Report
Well, those two posts lead to some interesting theories in my head, whether that was what you guys were implying or not.
But it would be a hell of a thing if Sanders being in the nomination was something Clinton wanted, and possibly even encouraged. An actual attempt to move the Overton window *left* for once, so that she can take left positions while sounding more center.Report
It’s not just that, @davidtc
Without ‘opposition,’ the Republican Pony Show sucks all the air out of the discussion. Without opposition, there’s a whole lot of policy and position that gets completely overwhelmed with GOP talking points and attacks; they’re setting the early debate and framing the conversation.Report
Of course that’s what she’s doing, but it’s so much more than that.
All the Democratic Voters want to be Asked for their vote, they don’t want her to Presume.
So she’ll dog’n’pony a full race, and we get to vet her (at least a little) before the actual horserace starts.Report
If Bernie has lost every primary aside from his home state and the state next to him by healthy amounts, then there’s no point to continue his campaign, because all of his non-fawning media coverage will be gone. Yeah, Reddit will still act like he’s the second coming, but Meet the Press isn’t giving him anymore interviews.
Ron Paul kept on getting crowds, but nobody cared once it was largely impossible that he was getting the nomination. If Clinton has won every state 60-40 or 70-30, then Sanders is a gadfly. His only hope is pulling off an upset in Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, or Ohio.Report
I suspect that Sanders went into it expecting to lose the primary in every state. Which is why I don’t think he’s going to look at those results and stop the campaign.Report
I don’t see why Sanders drops out earlier than he has to. He doesn’t seem in it to win, and I don’t think he minds losing.
Which is a big part of his allure, seems to me. He isn’t triangulating or pandering or field testing his “positions” before presenting them in public. He’s just saying what he believes.Report
@jesse-ewiak
You really don’t like Hillary Clinton, for reasons I’m still not sure about, because some general feelings of sleaziness (which hey, Mother Theresa would have had after 20 years of GOP claiming she’s Hell’s Harpy) and because the Clinton’s had the temerity not to stay only mildly wealthy after the Presidency (since as we all know, the Bushes got to be massively wealthy without any shadiness at all)
Yeah, I’m still baffled here too. Tod is a liberal who has internalized the right’s constant attacks on the Clintons, and believes things about Hillary that simply aren’t true. For example, he keeps talking about how Hillary attacked Bill Clinton’s accusers…which, as I’ve repeated pointed out, is not actually something that happened in the world we inhabit. And I’m pretty sure he knows this is true…but it’s not true *in his heart*, so it keeps showing back up.
Because of this unaccountable dislike of Clinton, he’s decided to take polling personally to prove everyone dislikes her as much as he does. (When in reality, they don’t. There is a *lot* of press about how people don’t like her…and yet she beats ‘Generic Republican’…and the ‘generic’ candidates are people basically piecing together the best possible candidates without any personal baggage.)
I would also like to see Sanders elected instead of Clinton, not because I’ve got some sort of weird hovering cloud of Clinton-dislike, but because he’s farther to the left than she is, and I honestly think the Republicans are so screwed this cycle that they’d lose against him too. (We’ll see what happens post-Trump) That said, I’d have no problem voting for her.
Hillary wins the general 51ish to 47ish with largely Obama’s political coalition, give or take a state.
I agrees with your projection of the Dem side, Sanders is in it to debate and force her left, and will be the last person ceding to her and that will be that. But I have no idea how you can figure out how the general is going to go without knowing who the Republican nom will be. And you can’t know that because TRUMPTRUMPTRUMPTRUMPReport
I can’t.. Sanders is fun but let’s be real. The electorate is polarized, Trump is going to go away, it will not likely be a distant election. It will be close. We would be so fished over if the GOP got the executive it wouldn’t be funny. I can’t indulge in fun uncle Sanders that way.Report
Even if Sanders gets elected, he would be powerless without a very Democratic and sympathetic Congress. More so than Obama or Clinton because he lacks the necessary ability and skills necessary to work around a hostile legislature.Report
That’s not true, actually. Sanders has passed more bills than any other congresscritter (I think, I know that useta be true) precisely by working with both sides of the aisle.Report
I’ll add that the presumptive knock on Sanders here – that he’s electoral toast because he won’t have powerful block within congress backing him – is part and parcel of our current political dysfunction.Report
I don’t think Sanders will be electoral toast because of Congress, just probably ineffective as a President if elected.Report
What? Being liberal means liking HRC? Necessarily? Seems to me that being liberal means grudgingly accepting HRC as an eventuality, because she isn’t actually much of a liberal, so much as a little to the left of any plausible Republican nominee, and besides it’s high time we had a woman at the top of the org chart, damnit, even if the woman in question is this one and if only as a symbol to the country and the world that women have at least a shot at things in this country (note I did not say a “fair” or “equal” shot at it, just a shot at all). None of which has a whole hell of a lot to do with HRC’s merits as a potential President herself.
And even if I were to agree that she is “liberal,” the way that, say, Bernie Sanders is liberal, that would nevertheless say nothing about her honesty or her integrity because those are functions of a person that operate along a different personality axis.
HRC does have some things going for her as a potential President. She’s acquired a damn impressive resume since 2000. She’s run before. She’s been in the White House and seen what it is to be President first-hand. She’s very, very smart. None of which makes her “liberal.”Report
What? Being liberal means liking HRC?
…I can’t even imagine how you got that from my post.
I have no problem with people saying she’s not far enough left. *I* say she’s not far enough left. In that post!
Hell, I don’t even have much of a problem with people on the left refusing to vote for her if she’s the nominee. I think that’s extremely misguided, but that’s their right.
My problem is entirely this ‘personal’ dislike of her, for non-policy reasons, which is almost always ‘The Republicans have thrown so much mud on her she’s obviously dirty’ complete bullshit. And it pisses me off.
And even if I were to agree that she is “liberal,” the way that, say, Bernie Sanders is liberal, that would nevertheless say nothing about her honesty or her integrity because those are functions of a person that operate along a different personality axis.
And *at least* half the people on the left who have problems with her ‘honesty’ or ‘integrity’ have internalized right-wing talking points.
Now, of course, it is possible to have actual examples where she’s fallen down on those things…*do you* have any such examples? (I can actually remember an example of her lying, but let’s see if anyone else can.) Or is it the same vague sense of dislike that Tod has, materializing somehow out of thin air? (Aka, the right-wing smear machine.)
Seriously, let’s have an example. Right now. One *non-policy* reason to dislike her. Something that *actually happened* and is *actually true*.Report
I pretty much agree with @davidtc here.
If you’ve got some real wrong, some real mud, put it out there. But there’s allegations that somethings not quite right (for the women possibly more investigated than any other walking about today,) without actual substance pretty mucks reeks of breathing whatever Ken Star was smoking and developing an addiction to it that obscures reality.Report
which half is Barack Obama in?
Report
…did…did you just introduce someone’s conjecture about counterfactual histories as some sort of *evidence*?
I mean, I checked *my* parallel universe viewer, and in the universe where Clinton was elected in 2008, she not only fulfilled most of her campaign promises, but cured cancer. Of course, in that universe, she specifically promised *not* to cure cancer, which is what got her elected in the first place. (That universe is weird and fairly evil.)Report
You got a future President of the United states being asked Is Clinton telling the truth, he says no, and but all the doubts of Clinton’s honesty and integrity are a right wing conspiracy and/or false consciousness.Report
Uh, no, we have a *candidate* being asked if *another candidate* is being entirely truthful about her plans in office, and him playing politics and saying no.
If he actually doubted her honesty, would you like to explain what he did *after* the election, when he then *immediately hired her to run the State Department*?Report
Oh, and now I’ve actually gone and *read* that interview.
Obama *did not say she was lying*, so the entire premise of this idiotic discussion is nonsense.
Obama quite clearly said she hadn’t *disclosed* her positions on social security, and was waffling a bit on Iraq and Iran.
That was it. That was how she wasn’t being ‘truthful’.
‘failing to take a clear position’ is not the same as ‘lying’.
It appear the only person accusing anyone lying here is…me, accusing you of lying about what Obama said via truncating his quote.Report
Because diplomats, at the core, are supposed to be professional liars, and the Obama administration has insourced most foreign policy to the White House anyway?
edit: really, you can tell yourself whatever you want to believe about Clinton, and ignore all the stuff that prevented her from getting the nomination the first time she went for it. I’m on board with the prognostication that she’ll win handily come Nov 2016, but ignoring her faults is what’s going to lead to her downfall in 2020.Report
The more the Republicans hate Hillary, the more likely that the Democrats will be willing to see her own personal victories over the Republicans as victories for the Left in general.Report
Her support for the Iraq war and opposition to single payer? Sure, ignored.Report
If someone who opposed the Iraq War got the US involved in at least two conflicts (anti-Ghaddafi in Libya and anti-ISIS in the mideast), how many should we expect from someone who supported it? Four or five?Report
Depends. She’s since changed her mind. And done some very good diplomatic work.
Who (other than Paul, who won’t win and is otherwise crazy) could plausibly avoid any wars she’d decide to enter?Report
Bernie Sanders would, at the least, be far more likely to avoid war. And I am very confident that he would never choose to pursue war for the purpose of extending US power.
Rand Paul is also probably/possibly less likely to get involved in wars than her (though his opposition to the Iran deal and her support for it has significantly altered my views on that front). Still – if he invades Iran, then he’s getting disinherited and wiped from the family tree, so there’s a disincentive.
I don’t dispute the “otherwise crazy” claim.Report
Yeah, I’m wondering if Kolohe even *remembers* the last election.
Nothing ‘kept’ Clinton from winning the Dem nomination, except the fact that Obama did better than her. She didn’t make some gaff, there weren’t some lies that showed up, she wasn’t caught in bed with a dead hooker.Report
Obama and Edwards both opposed Single Payer too. If anything, HRC was to Obama’s left on health care reform in their fight about the individual mandate, but once elected Obama signed into law a bill that took Clinton’s position on the subject.Report
When Obama signed the PPACA, his choice was the same as the House’s: take the Senate bill as is, or get nothing. The Republicans had their 41st vote in the Senate by then, and had already said they would filibuster the bill if it were changed in conference committee. So the House concurred with the Senate changes, and Obama signed.Report
She did not dodge bullets from snipers on a trip to Bosnia, as she once claimed. Her claim to have negotiated open borders for humanitarian relief on that trip is also pretty doubtful.
She is not the graddaughter of four immigrants, as she once claimed: she is the granddaughter of one immigrant and three natural-born Americans. She also didn’t criticize the war in Iraq (after initially supporting it) before Obama did, as she once claimed.
I never believed that when she and Bill left the White House after Bill’s Presidency, they were “dead broke,” as she once claimed. Indeed, while they had some significant debts, they also had some significant assets that seem to have been ignored in the “dead broke” assessment, and they were hugely creditworthy with obviously impressive earnings potential. Oh, if only I were “dead broke” the way the Clintons were “dead broke” in 2001!
Campaign stuff? Most of it. But we’re not talking about telling a voter that her baby is cute when in fact the kid is ugly. Exaggerations to make her look better than she was at the time she said those things? Sure, several of them. But this was not stuff Republicans tricked her into saying or twisted out of context; these are words that came out of her own mouth which just plain weren’t true. I bet she inhaled in college too. None of this goes back to the Whitewater thing, or the amazing success at stock trading thing, which may or may not be right wing attacks manufactured out of only tiny granules of evidence intentionally ill-understood, although the stock trading thing still seems weird to me.Report
Without googling (which would be cheating), as I recall it the stock trading thing was that she bought certain kinds of cattle futures on margin at a time when she did not have the net worth necessary (appropriate?) to be engaged in that kind of transaction. (It may even be the case that she could not have been able to pay the margin call had she bet the wrong way.)
The suspicion was that a friend bought both sides of the transaction (the put and the call) at the same time and assigned the winning transaction to her account.
This appears to me to be on the same level of corruption as the spouses of elected officials getting high-pay no-show jobs at industry-sponsored non-profits. It’s certainly gross. It’s probably not illegal. But given the amount of money that can be made from a few key votes it’s also probably impossible to stop.
My own take on HRC is that I don’t think I would particularly like her as a person; she is by now a consummate professional politician in the DiFi mold. I think that she tells tales the way a lot of us do, but hers are too self-aggrandizing for my taste. I also think that she is the only politician who stands a chance of being elected next year who wants to take the country even vaguely in the same direction. So I plan to vote for her without any regrets (well, maybe just a couple).Report
Yeah, I’m pretty simpatico with this overall sentiment. She’s hardly unique in that she aggrandizes herself and has taken advantage of perqs and legal if slimy-looking opportunities for enrichment.Report
Dodging bullets from snipers is the one I remembered, and that was, indeed, an actual ‘lie’, or, more likely, the exact sort of misremembered story that happens years later. (It would certainly be odd to deliberately lie about something she had *written about in her books*.)
The Kosovo refugee thing is true. It would be more accurate to say she negotiated that the borders *stay* open, but her statement is not, technically, incorrect. (And it’s worth pointing out that politifact rated it ‘barely true’…and then later changed the name of that rating to ‘mostly false’.)
Claiming to be ‘dead broke’ is not a lie either. Politifact points out they might have had more liabilities than assets, but I have to mention that even if they *did* have more assets doesn’t mean they weren’t ‘dead broke’. People can be dead broke and still *own things*. And she *didn’t* say they weren’t credit-worthy. This statement, I think, is telling because it shows she’s a bit of-out-touch as to what normal people think ‘dead broke’ means, and she probably shouldn’t have used that term…but it’s not a *lie*.
And as for her critizing the war in the Senate before Obama did…you know, there’s a different between a *lie* and being *wrong*, right? For it to have been a lie, someone has to show she *knew* Obama had criticized the war in a committee hearing *she wasn’t in*. She, uh, probably didn’t know about that. She doesn’t psychically know what was said in every hearing. (This is assuming what Obama said should actually be considered criticism of the war *at all*, which is not very clear. It seems more a criticism of not having a deadline, whereas she criticized the Bush administration for *starting the war*.)
Of course, that entire debate is rather silly, it’s Clinton trying to rewrite the ‘being against the war’ into ‘being against the war while in the Senate’ so as to exclude Obama’s opposition before joining the Senate. But trying to get people to talk about *that* instead of her vote for the war isn’t a lie in any sense.Report
Politifact itself is subject to a fair amount of criticism too.
The big point here being, you needn’t be an eager feeder at the right-wing trope trough to feel a little bit distrustful of HRC.Report
The big point here being, you needn’t be an eager feeder at the right-wing trope trough to feel a little bit distrustful of HRC.
Really? *That’s* what you got from our exchange?
I got a list of five lies, two of which are clearly just factual mistakes, one of which is tone-deaf but not even incorrect, and one of which is over-inflating accomplishments by implication while staying within the truth. With a grand total of one which can actually be called a lie, although it’s probably just the same sort of thing as happened to Brian Williams.
And thus, of course, her reputation for untruthfulness.
That makes perfect sense, and can’t *possibly* be bullshit from the right wing.Report
I’m less charitable than you on these, @davidtc ; but I think you may be less than charitable in assuming that my distrust of HRC arises from programming by the likes of Roger Ailes than by an assessment of her on her own merits.
Remember, I’m the guy that talks a lot about memory lensing and how people always tell stories about themselves favorably. HRC is like that, too, only she seems to do it a lot. Even in your apologia for her, she’s innocently and in good faith misremembering things in a way that flatters herself. It’s still shading the truth to the point that, as portrayed, ceases to reasonably resemble history. Do it often enough, and to enough of a degree, and people start withholding the benefit of the doubt.
We all do it, to varying degrees. Her degree of doing this, in a public way, is high.Report
HRC is like that, too, only she seems to do it a lot.
And by ‘a lot’, you mean ‘once’, *maybe* twice.
There’s no way you can make ‘flat broke’ into a lie instead of what it actually was, ‘tone deaf rich person who doesn’t understand what that really means’.
There’s no way you can make her not knowing what happened in some Senate Committee meeting she didn’t attend a ‘lie’, when that was obviously just being factually *incorrect*. (Perhaps it is worth pointing out that Politicfact doesn’t rate things as ‘lies’ for this reason…it rates them as *false*.)
The grandparents thing…isn’t even a story about her, so it’s weirdly baffling that you’ve made that into her remembering herself better in her mind. And there’s no real evidence she’s mis-remembering her family history vs. *never actually understanding it correctly*. I know some people know every detail of their family history, but, uh, some of us don’t, and all we have are vaguely remembered things we’ve hear over the years, because often no one sits down and *explains* the details everyone’s assumed to know. (I can’t even tell you the *name* of one of my grandmothers, offhand. First or last.)
There is no actual evidence the Kosovo thing is false. It’s only false if you think ‘negotiated open borders’ means ‘negotiated to open the borders’ and can’t mean ‘negotiated to keep the open borders’. But, hey, if you want to call that a lie, okay, let’s go with that. Now you’ve got *two* of them.
Her degree of doing this, in a public way, is high.
It’s no higher than any other politician.
Obama repeatedly said his mother fought with her health insurance companies her last months of life, when in reality she was fighting with her disability insurance company.
He also said the vast majority of the donations he got was from small donors, which is not true either.
Biden once rather inexplicably claimed he didn’t have a savings account, which isn’t even something that can be chalked up to time! (And this is *Biden*, a guy no one even bothers fact checking, yet even he’s got a stupid self-aggrandizing lie on politifact.)Report
And, you know, this is all somewhat pointless. I don’t know what you really think.
People can actually have a dislike of Hillary Clinton that is entirely organic. I won’t dispute that. Maybe something she once did actually did rub you the wrong way, without any outside influence at all.
But I’m just seeing a lot of dislike with no origin flopping around out there, desperate to find some reason to justify *why* it exists. People repeating bogus stories about her, people listing names of invented scandals, people claiming she did things she didn’t do (Like I said, Tod keeps claiming she attacked Bill’s accusers), people holding her to standards they don’t hold any other politician to.
Yes, any *specific* example of dislike might be real. I’ve had politicians that do things, relatively minor things, that made me say ‘Well, not ever voting for that guy’. Maybe that happened with you and Hillary Clinton, I have no idea.
But *statistically*, the amount of dislike is bullshit. Bullshit generated by several years of Fox News and, to quote her, the rest of the vast right-wing conspiracy that constantly attacked her and her husband while he was in office.Report
FWIW, I think that time she referred to a “vast right-wing conspiracy” is what @tod-kelly refers to by “attacking Bill’s critics.”
Also FWIW, I’ll do my best to consider the extent to which you might be right, that my lukewarm-to-cool reaction to her has been sculpted by the partisan media. I’m not ready to admit that about myself right now, but I am willing to admit that I am as vulnerable as anyone else to cognitive lensing. (See my post today about President Warren Harding’s family.) So it’s probably worth some reflection. especially given that HRC is the overwhelmingly likely next President so I’d be well-served to keep my opinions of her grounded in my own thought, rather than someone else’s.Report
FWIW, I think that time she referred to a “vast right-wing conspiracy” is what @tod-kelly refers to by “attacking Bill’s critics.”
Not exactly. Tod was talking about her attacking Bill’s *accusers*, which didn’t happen.
With the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy, she was specifically say that people involved in the allegations who have ‘popped up in other settings’ were part of this conspiracy.
And she was…right. Regardless of what we think about the accusations about Bill, and whether or not those women were being honest…there were people standing *next to* those women, being very supportive of those women’s stories…who had shown up pushing *every single* supposed scandal.
And, well, we’ve got some defectors who basically agree with her, like David Brooks. There was a concentrated effort to take the Clintons down, and a ‘conspiracy’ is as good a word as any. The fact that the conspiracy might have stumbled across actual victims is just mildly weird, but she didn’t call those women part of the conspiracy, just the people who somehow mysteriously kept popping up everywhere.
But, as she later said, it wasn’t a very artful statement.
Also FWIW, I’ll do my best to consider the extent to which you might be right, that my lukewarm-to-cool reaction to her has been sculpted by the partisan media.
I had to figure that in 2008, when Edwards (who I supported) dropped out before the primary here. I realized I couldn’t quite grasp why I didn’t like Clinton. (I ended up supporting Obama anyway, but it was because of actual policy things.)Report
Oh, and as for the family thing…as was pointed out, again, that’s misunderstood family history, of the sort that happens to anyone. Her grandparents talked about the immigrant experience, she assumed they actually were immigrants.
I think we have pretty clear evidence that’s what she believed, because if she had known the truth, she could have made the *equally* powerful claim that seven out of eight of her great-grandparents were working-class immigrants. (Unless the idea is she’s just lying for *fun*.) Or that her grandparents were *all* the children of immigrants.
Again, there is a fundamental different between ‘lying’ and ‘wrong’.
(And I hope everyone is equally angry at Warren for being wrong about *her* ancestors.)Report
(And I hope everyone is equally angry at Warren for being wrong about *her* ancestors.)
…do we not remember the various jokes going around at the time?Report
…funny, *that* didn’t seem to turn into people on the left deciding she was generally untruthful.Report
She’ll be painted as the Most Liberal Ever no matter who she is, if she runs on with “D” in front of her name.
Sanders gives her cover — “There’s a real liberal, look at what he proposed” and also room to move. She can get more liberal and still use Sanders as a measuring stick.
That’s the usefulness there — Rubio, for instance, might be insanely more conservative than many people think. But when their yardstick is calibrated on “Walker” or “Brownback” as the right end, he looks darn moderate. That means to the casual voter, he’s not “really conservative” until he veers off into Brownback land or Cruz land.
That gives him a lot of room to do stuff for the right without necessarily triggering the “OMG SUPER CRAZY CONSERVATIVE” response.
Sanders is entirely helpful to Clinton, and he’s been a politician for a long time — he knows the score himself. He can be far more liberal, knowing that it both gives her room to be more liberal herself (because she won’t reach Sander’s position as left end of the yardstick) and allows her to look more moderate. She’ll get debate practice, get her campaign organization a good practice run, without the stress of actually fighting for her life.
Because even if she loses NH (which I always thought was kinda likely. NH ain’t like the rest of America), Sander’s isn’t beating her in the primary unless she self-combusts.
Which he also knows.Report
“She’ll be painted as the Most Liberal Ever no matter who she is, if she runs on with “D” in front of her name.”
As will anyone else who does the same.
Until she isn’t President anymore, in which case she will be the moderate liberal that whoever is running should be more like, because they could totally work with her, but that was back before the Ds went so far left.
And so on, and so on…Report
None of which matters, because Sanders will be used — and frankly volunteered and knows the score — to be the left yardstick. He’s SUPPOSED to attack her from the left. In fact, he’d be pretty useless if he didn’t poll well enough to be noticed.Report
I remain very skeptical of the notion that HRC’s candidacy somehow benefits from Sanders’ insurgency. “Will not be hugely affected in the long run” is my estimation, and I simply cannot imagine that HRC’s actual preference were other than that Sanders would just sort of go away somehow.Report
While I’m sure she’s not thrilled with his surge, I’m also sure that she’d much rather have him there pulling her left than having to thread the needle of tacking left without him there exerting force in that direction.Report
zic – What evidence backs up your view that Hillary Clinton wants to be pulled in a leftwards direction?Report
What HRC wants above all else is to not make Gore’s mistake of taking the left wing of the party for granted. Agreement with the broad strokes of Sanders’ policy proposals – which need him in the race at least through the initial primaries/caucuses to get them air/internet time – will I think go along way of shoring up support on the wing.Report
There’s something to be said for not having a coronation. That said I’m not yet convinced that Sanders isn’t 90% media desperation not to have a coronation and 10% actual effect.Report
Much like she was ALSO the moderate liberal who we should have picked in 2008 (and again in 2012!) because she was so much more reasonable and easy to deal with than that Hussein bully.Report
Perfectly stated Burt. (Meaning: that’s exactly how I feel about it!!)Report
Tod,
In an earlier piece on Clinton, you said you thought both she and her husband were corrupt and noted the email/serber scandal as an example. While I agree that there is a real issue there, I see it less one of corruption and more one of hubris and the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me thinking. Problematic no doubt but not corrupt (not THAT incident, at least). As I see it, the move was selfish and irresponsible but I don’t think she had an ulterior motive. Do you feel otherwise?Report
Kazzy, I wouldn’t necessarily apply the word “corruption” (at least I the sense of being self-enriching above and beyond protecting her her political aspirations) because I’d assume she has the brains to keep anything that sort of corrupt harder to find than that.
Rather, I think it was a desire to keep her communications further off the grid for the protection of her political career. Which is understandable in a sense, though contrary to the spirit (and perhaps, or perhaps not, the letter) of the law.Report
@kazzy @will-truman This is one of those areas where I have a different standard than most people here. To me, not all corruption is illegal — in fact, I think a lot of the worst kinds of corruption are very purposefully legal in our system, and that they’ve been made legal in order to allow the corruption to continue.
As to what Hillary did with her emails, at best it’s the equivalent of what Scott Walker tried to do last month behind the scenes to make it legal for him to circumvent due process over his communications. Both are quite likely legal, but both are likely quite legal because and only because the system is set up to obfuscate things that should be transparent and but both scenarios put each of the candidates into a place where I have to hold my nose very, ver tightly to consider voting for them.Report
@tod-kelly
I agree it was wrong and calls into question her character. I just don’t know that it is corruption as @will-truman defined it. I think she should be investigated and possibly punished (depending on what the investigation finds).Report
@tod-kelly Oh sure trust the guy from Portland to have some snooty standard for corruption. Good old fashioned corruption isn’t’ good enough for him, he wants to see some unique artisnal corruption.
Okay, that wasn’t serious, but i do have a more serious question about where you are coming at on Hillary. A few days ago you said you believed H would , if the winds blew hard, go farther to the right on gay rights then Huckabee. If i have that wrong then i’m more than happy to find someone else to blame. But on the face of it, that is a WTF kind of statement. That would be a turn of WWF proportions and there is no evidence of her doing anything remotely like that. That seems to be taking cynicism about her to ridiculous extent.
I do agree with your point re: her server and how it was wrong but likely legal even though it shouldn’t be.Report
No, Hillary won’t go further to the right on gay rights than Huckabee as a matter of fact. If Tod actually said this, tho, (and let’s pretend for a moment that it wasn’t him but rather some asexual looking dude with a hat) the point is that Hillary is moveable where other people are fixed. THe political winds blow and Hillary will move – at least rhetorically – accordingly. THAT’S the impression lots of folks (including me, actually) have of her.
ANd part of the reason I feel this way is that I sense (rightly or wrongly at this point) an all-consuming single-purpose desire to be President/Commander in Chief just exploding outa her.Report
I’m not a major Hillary fan but even i feel the need to push back on this. Does she have a “all-consuming single-purpose desire to be President/Commander in Chief just exploding outa her.” I don’t know and i’m not sure why so many people are sure she does or at least is so much worse than others. Did she dream about being the first woman prez when she was a child? Maybe, i don’t know. But is that something worth criticizing .If you had an 9 year old niece and she said she wanted to be the first women prez would you say she has an all consuming single purpose blah blah blah.
Why is she worse at this then all the guys in the ring. Did Romney want to be prez? I’m pretty sure McCain really really wanted the big seat. Does walker or rubio want it…i’d bet they really want the job. I’m just not seeing this monomania in Hills that other people seem to see. Or whatever is there doesn’t seem to be any different then anybody else who runs for prez.Report
@greginak
I don’t know and i’m not sure why so many people are sure she does or at least is so much worse than others.
What’s going on is people have been told, over and over and over and over and over and over and over, that there is something wrong with Hillary, and they have internalized it, and they are *desperately* trying to figure out what that thing is. They *know* there must be a reason they dislike her, but her policies aren’t actually that bad, and unlike the right they aren’t allowed to be openly sexist or ageist or call her a lesbian or repeat disproved scandals…so there must be *something else*. Some sort of personal reason. *arms start flailing* Must….think…of…reason!
It’s happening repeatedly in this conversation. It’s actually pretty interesting to watch.
The ‘She wants to be president too much’ is a strange direction to go in…I’m pretty sure everyone who is running for president wants it pretty badly. (Minus Trump, who is clearly running for fun.) Not quite sure how that accusation is supposed to stick, but, hey, good try, guys!
And, I feel I should explicitly state this before someone accuses me of carrying her water: I would rather Sanders win the primary. He matches my politics more, and I think he could win it.
But if Sanders is like 80%, Hillary is maybe 60%. I don’t *disagree* with anything she wants to do. There is *more* I’d like to see done, but considering that almost none of this has a chance to get through Congress anyway, eh, whatever. I can easily live with her.
But, then again, I haven’t been programmed with some sort of irrational dislike of her.Report
Yeah that’s sort of how i see it. And H. is to centrist, corporate and hawkish of a D for my taste.Report
But, then again, I haven’t been programmed with some sort of irrational dislike of her.
Resistance is futile.Report
@greginak:
1. It’s not that we Portlanders dislike corruption per se, it’s just that we strongly insist on it being artisan corruption.
2. As to you bigger point, allow me an anecdote.
Long ago when I worked for a risk management company, we had a claims manager who was mother eff-ing brilliant at claims adjusting, but had other issues that made her hard to manage. Essentially, she was one of those people (there’s one in every office large enough) that got off sowing dissension in the ranks. Usually this was by spreading false rumors about employees to other employees. (True story: when I started on an exercise program and lost some extra pounds, she told people “in confidence” I’d told her that the reason I had lost wait was that I has AIDS.)
Around the end of her tenure, we hired a new loss prevention manager. He was wicked sharp, but young. She took him under his wing, and they’d go to lunch together, and when they did she’d share the dirt — real or made up — on everyone else in the office. After a he’d been there a while, there was a job opening that would have been a promotion, and he applied for it. He leaned on her pretty heavily for advice, especially since she was more politically attuned and he was still relatively new.
He didn’t get the job, and the reason he didn’t, it turned out, was that she had been dishing all kind of dirt — some real, some imagined — on him to the division head doing the hiring, totally undermining him.
We went out to lunch after he found this out, and he was gobsmacked. “I don’t understand it,” he kept saying. “She always trusted me enough to dish out dirt on everyone else. I can’t figure out what happened.”
And that’s pretty much all I have to say on that subject.Report
I’m glad you are in good health. That is nice anecdote that really really reminds of a good Columbo episode.Report
It’s almost like people are looking for an excuse to not like Clinton, Tod. Some more than others, acourse, but lots and lots of people don’t like Hillary. I mean, I agree with you about this stuff. I thought your first post on the topic – a sorta cautionary tale about (re)anointing a candidate who was very quickly clobbered by an unknown last time she ran – was right on target.Report
Adding: Saul gets credit as well for stressing how important a competitive Democratic primary is for the party, the candidates and the general election.Report
Was that primary in bizarro land? Because, um, I sorta recall a closely fought primary that wasn’t resolved NEARLY as quickly as, well, any other primary in the last several decades.Report
this.
And that it required a lot of newish voters engaging their parents/grandparents in reconsidering their voting options. I don’t think that’s going to happen this time around.Report
No, it won’t. Primarily because, as has been mentioned at this site repeatedly, the DNC and whoever else have effectively eliminated any competition against Hillary in the primary. Now, I’m not saying that there were oodles of potential Democratic stars waiting in the wings for a shot at the big time, but the field contesting her for the nom is pretty weak. I mean, I loves me some Bernie, but he doesn’t have a chance in global warming of winning the dang thing.Report
Baseless speculation.
Seriously, you’re implying conspiracy here or a stranglehold of elites when there are simpler explanations that don’t require a coordinated response that somehow…never leaked, in defiance of the physics by which Washington lived.
(One simpler explanation: Many potential candidates took one look at Hillary, who came close to beating Obama in the primary and has only burnished her political cred since then by adding “Tons of foreign policy experience and executive level experience” to and said “Yeah, I’m not gonna beat that”. It’s not as sexy as conspiracies of powerful men to strangle the base, but it’s got the benefit of being a heck of a lot more believable).Report
Morat,
All I’ll say about it is that at the beginning of the [06.5] primary I was a big Hillary fan. Very quickly – like, in only a handful of weeks – I switched to Obama.
An that’s the end of the story!
(Point being that lots of folks who were in the bag for Hillary two cycles ago dumped her real quick like. I don’t know the appropriate way to finish out what that means, except to note that – like Tod – lots of people are Hillary supporters in this limited sense: they’ll vote for and perhaps even advocate for her but only if she remains a less bad choice than the alternatives.)Report
That’s a great anecdote, but there’s actual voting records that show however you felt, the vote was pretty close to tied for a heck of a lot longer.Report
I want to slightly apologize for my outburst to @tod-kelly . While I still think the version of Hillary Clinton in his own mind bares little resembelance to the actual Hillary Clinton in existence, I’ve been arguing with holier than thou Bernie supporters on another forum, and I think some of my frustration transferred over on to you.
I still largely think the last 6 years an change wouldn’t have gone too much different w/ Hillary at the helm instead of Obama. They’re both moderate center-left neoliberals at their core.Report
While I still think the version of Hillary Clinton in his own mind bares little resembelance to the actual Hillary Clinton in existence
To the extent that Tod is a bellwether for Voting America, what matters is how likely it is that his version of Hillary Clinton will change before election day.
From here, it seems that his version of Hillary Clinton will win against a stupid, stupid Republican, a stupid Republican, and perhaps a merely dumb-to-average Republican… but not against a somewhat better than average Republican.
In Hillary’s favor is the fact that the Republican field is spectacularly poor… but many of the worst will fall away. If part of that process involves all of the worst falling away and the best ones getting better…
The version of Hillary Clinton in the heads of the bellwethers will have an uphill battle against the versions of the Republicans that they have in their heads.Report
If part of that process involves all of the worst falling away and the best ones getting better…
I’d like to think that honest republicans and conservatives will concede that both McCain and Romney ran turrible campaigns. Like, trible turrible. And against a very intelligent, well spoken, eloquent opponent they still managed respectable numbers in nationally. Seems to me that a lesser candidate than Obama (And let’s get real here, if Romney hadn’t been so fantastically inept he’da won that election, one which as close to a sure thing as you get in politics even if played against a really incumbent who also happens to be a great campaigner) and better GOP candidates than the clown brigade would have very likely (not certainly!) resulted in flipped outcomes.Report
Adding to that: Acourse, I don’t want to give the impression that it was merely the ineptitude of McCain and Romney as individuals that led to that result. Seems to me that the incoherence of the GOP and conservatives generally kindasorta creates that ineptitude in its candidates, at least at the national/Presidential-candidate level.Report
If Romney had decided to bide his time and wait until 2016, I don’t know that he’d lose.
Choose a name at random from the 17 Republican knuckleheads running now and I’ll bet you that I’d nod as I listened to someone explain how this person was destined to lose. (There are a couple of names that might have me purse my lips thoughtfully… but, for the rest, I’d agree that they don’t have a chance.)
Romney would be exceptionally difficult to beat this time around.
Even if he ran with Ryan again.Report
I agree with some conditions: he’d have to actually STOP pandering and STICK TO HIS GUNS about the policies he would have been (in the future!) advocating.
Another thing: don’t let the Establishment get in the way of your success. I think that was one of Obama’s strengths, actually: he saw a sliver of light between selling yourself to the Old Guard and Runnin Wild, and focused on that with a laser like intensity (of focus). All the Established Old Guard can do for you is prevent you from losing because you weren’t establishment enough. They won’t, and can not, get you to win except by anything other than a battle of attrition. Which is why politics fucking sucks, if you ask me. (And one reason I like Bernie: he said he’d run no negative ads against his opponent. BAM! He had me at “no”.)Report