Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

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There's a dependency tree required to get to the point of "vote", and you have to pass thru "respect" first.

I disagree with, but respect, Sanders, Stein, Warren, Feingold (and some other lefties). Hillary equals revulsion, repulsion. I can't be talked from "respect" to "vote" with someone I can't even respect first.

The D party worked very hard on converting "respect" people to "vote" people. I think they achieved 100% success. The problem is most of the country can never respect her, and there was zero effort put into making her respectable (perhaps it was recognized as impossible?)

There's something fundamentally wrong internally with the D party when the ground seems to be crawling with respectable (possibly votable!) candidates but instead we get a movie caricature of Lex Luther combined with a slightly more chicken hawk bloodthirsty Joker from a sequel rejected in the 90s. There's something just horribly fundamentally wrong with how people gain political power inside the D party, resulting in the wrong leaders at the wrong times.

She'll be within one percentage point of Trump in the end in overall votes (and it looks like she'll beat him actually). All of these commentators seem to be making broad generalizations about the state of politics and how the strategy is obviously going to fail but the reality is that if the election was very slightly different in ways that neither campaign could really control it would've gone the other way. Maybe I'm wrong but all this just reminds me of all of the BS narratives that ESPN concocts to fill air time after football games.

Or just watch market commentators talk about stock price movements. Only after they happened, of course.

That's not quite fair. This election was an upset. I think it's quite reasonable to look for an explanation beyond random noise.

That seems very "ends justify the means". Aren't you concerned that pragmatically the Democratic party is objectively unable to effectively govern itself? Given a choice of respectable statesmen something necrotic is instead selecting failure-prone sociopaths instead? Do you have a theoretical model where competent leadership somehow would result in worse end results? Wouldn't competent leadership, for a change, result in a permanent Democratic majority which theoretically would be a good "ends"?

Most of her troubles were difficult to predict ahead of time, especially the email server and the leaks. Besides those she's actually a pretty good candidate for the party. The DNC pushed against Bernie the same way that the RNC pushed against Trump (and in previous election people like Ron Paul) and the difference was at the end of the day Bernie just didn't have the support. I'm not the biggest fan of the DNC but I'm not seeing how the leadership did anything this election different than any other election.

The popular vote is irrelevant for actually winning - what matters is how states at the margins vote. Look at Michigan. Look at Ohio. Look at Pennsylvania. For the Democrats, Hillary was an unmitigated disaster in all of those areas.

Also, keep in mind that most of the electorate votes against party lines, even if the party were to nominate Satan. She completely failed the margins.

I agree with you but a lot of the troubles that she had were difficult to see ahead of time, especially the email server and the leaks. It's easy to slap on a narrative after the fact but at the time Hillary really was the choice most likely to win the the election. I'm not saying that she didn't do an exceptionally poor job in certain areas but all she needed to do was one or two percent better and there would be the narrative of it being a landslide the other way.

Normally, I'd agree.

But to not put a polarizing, inexperienced politician like Trump away easily is what makes the commentators (and me) think there are larger trends at work.

She had all the cards.

I agree that there are trends at work but many of the criticisms of her were only apparent in the last few months so saying that the DNC and democrats in general should've known somehow that she wasn't a good candidate and that their picking of leadership was fundamentally flawed seems odd to me.

Maybe if she had divorced and denounced Bill before the campaign run... They were not exactly free of scandal when Bill was in office. Her secretary of state term was... memorable. The situation was only unpredictable to maybe the youngest Millennials.

She was pretty unfazed by most of those scandals in the end, though. I think part of the reason they liked her is because she has been through so many scandals and was still the political force that she was. In the end they were wrong but a year ago it wasn't that unreasonable.

The reason you don't respect her is not from her doing or the doing of the DNC. It is because there has been a plurality of the political community that has been working for literal decades to destroy her reputation. If you repeat a lie loud enough and long enough it becomes true. In reality she is in the normal range of candidate. I grant you she is closer to the bad side than the good (at least in most people's mind), but she is no more corrupt or politically calculating than your average member of Congress.

But that's not what people believe! The Democratic party could have accepted that the right wing press had done a character assassination, and nominated somebody else, but they didn't see how they could lose.

I can't really disagree with you, but it is a sad state of affairs that we are asking one of this country's political parties to bow to the propaganda of the other.

Only if they want to win elections

To win a battle, you need to choose the right tactics for the battlefield you are actually fighting on, not the ideal battlefield you think you are entitled to fight on.

Or, to adapt from Donald Rumsfeld, you go into an election with the electorate you have, not the electorate you wish you had.

I know it's sad and upsetting. But propaganda these days is extremely powerful and I don't know how to counter it. If I oppose this kind of propaganda, do I try to counter it with my own propaganda? What are the other choices?

The problem with that conspiracy theory is it doesn't explain why her. Its clearly not gender or we've be getting the two minutes hate on Warren and Stein. Its clearly not simply being high profile because even pres Obama doesn't catch as much heat as Hillary. It's as if there's something about the Clintons. Sometimes a criminal is just a criminal, simple as that.

There could have been a vast conspiracy to frame the Unibomber or Al Capone or John Dillinger or Nixon. No one can explain why them. Therefore I think it infinitely more likely they were just crooks.

>why her

Because she has been in politics for for 30 something years, been on the national stage for 20 something years, and has been "the next president" for roughly 10 years. This wasn't one hit job, this was decades of concentrated work that eventually broke the camel's back.

Bernie's been in politics for longer than that, and he doesn't have a long trail of scandals behind him.

That's because nobody gave a shit about Bernie until he tried to run for president. He was never a threat to anyone or a challenge to the status quo (like having a female president is).

"challenge to the status quo (like having a female president is)"

How is "I'll do exactly what the establishment tells me to do, just like the last couple figureheads, except in a $10K Chairman Mao pantsuit" a challenge to much of anyone?

The country has a not so comfy history with black folks, yet men and women have lived together for eternity, so why didn't Obama get it perhaps 100 or 10000 times worse? Surely you're not a racism denialist? Perhaps no one accused Obama of being a criminal because... he isn't? I mean I never voted for him but I can respect him, he's a wise constitutional scholar who probably deserves a supreme court appointment to an empty liberal seat when this is all over. I disagree with him on many issues but he's no crook and he's reasonably wise. He got teased, essentially, about a technicality of being born in a foreign country and being muslim which frankly don't matter and never turned out to be a problem and never went past offending people on twitter.

Palin was hated in the mainstream media, but it was just a generic Quayle style two minutes hate. How come no one provided any evidence of her crimes? Perhaps... there were none? Could there possibly be any hatred hotter than the DNC controlled MSM's hatred toward Palin, yet there's nothing but sophistry against her because she's clean? I wouldn't describe Palin as being a bright bulb or a beacon of wisdom yet I voted for her, she's not that bad.

Palin is the perfect comparison to Clinton because there was just as much smoke around her. For example Troopergate[1] is the exact kind of non-serious controversy that has hounded Clinton her entire career. Except no one really cares when Palin did this because she never was that close to actual power. Meanwhile if this happened to Clinton there would be endless discussion of it.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Public_Safety_Commissio...

Warren has little power and Stein even less. No one bothers to villify women until they get real power. Everyone was cordial to Hillary until she started pushing for health care reform in Congress as a First Lady. It's about people stepping outside of their perceived place.

> a lie

Hillary didn't need any help destroying her reputation.

As a matter of public record, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated in her FBI interview that she could not recall briefings at the State department pertaining to handling classified information, nor could she give an example of how information might be classified.

Now this is either a lie, or a self-admission that disqualifies a person to hold the position of commander-in-chief of the armed forces, privy to the most sensitive information in the government.

How can you fault a voter who observes these facts and casts their vote for someone else?

Except that all is normal politician CYA type doublespeak. That isn't a good trait and it is something Clinton is certainly guilty of doing, but it is something almost all politicians are guilty of doing. Like I said, Clinton isn't a great candidate without faults. However a large group of this country has worked tirelessly to make these common politician flaws appear as if they are completely abnormal and disqualifying for the presidency.

The Republicans dislike Obama just as much as Clinton, yet his presidency has been virtually scandal-free and he remains quite popular. Clinton's problem is that Democrats and Independents who aren't politically predisposed to dislike her have legitimate concerns about her trustworthyness.

>his presidency has been virtually scandal-free

I like your optimism, but do you remember what first brought our new president elect into the political sphere? It certainly wasn't to praise Obama for his clean and scandal free record.

People did not think she was genuine. They disliked her so much, that they picked a TV personality, said stupid stuff and off-color remarks. That says a lot about the level of disconnectedness between what she/her team/media thought of her and what a lot of people, even traditionally voting Democrats thought of her.

I guess nobody around her who had an inkling dared to raise their hand. Can't even imagine what they'd say "Ma'am, people don't believe what you are saying, can you be more genuine a bit?"...

>I guess nobody around her who had an inkling dared to raise their hand. Can't even imagine what they'd say "Ma'am, people don't believe what you are saying, can you be more genuine a bit?"...

Check out of some of the leaked emails. I'm not sure if they said it to her directly, but they regularly remarked on how insincere and artificial she came across as.

Ah, interesting. So people were warning her, she just didn't listen. It was probably like large ship at that point, it was full of steam (donations and promises), moving ahead and there was just no stopping or turning it around easily.

Actually, my impression is she tried to listen... she just didn't have it in her. There were many moments through the campaign where she tried to come across as organic and authentic, but even that seemed awkward and forced.

She just has almost no charisma or jovial presence, unlike Trump.

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