Why Clinton Lost

Tweet

Only a few short years ago, it was taken as a given that Hillary Clinton would be, in 2008, the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. It was presumed to be inevitable; we were deluged with assertions that she was the frontrunner long before any true campaigning started, before any votes were cast, before we knew who the full set of campaigners might be, and before we were given any more than the shallowest of notions of what campaign strategies, themes or issues might be practiced once we got anywhere near actual state-by-state campaigning. This is standard practice, in elections. The frontrunner is presumed to be anyone with previous power or with name recognition. Not only is it a safe bet, but it is also something close to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more known the name, the more coverage that person receives. The more coverage they receive, the more well known they are. The more power they have, the more they can tweak the political levers around them to their own advantage; the more those levers are tweaked, the more everything else falls into place. There's nothing wrong with that process. One can imagine other possible processes -- fanciful worlds of pure meritocracy, where candy canes hang from trees and individuals are based solely on the quality of their ideas -- but in truth, if you want to judge who will be successful in an election, you'd be smart to chose from among those people who have already proven themselves successful in elections. If you want to judge who will be the most known, a year from now, pick the people who are most known now -- you won't be far off. If you want to judge who will best wield future power, look to those that hold current power. It is obvious. I was fully set to rail against the injustice of it all, in other words, and to launch into a mild but sharp-edged tirade about the process by which the media confers frontrunner status on someone months and years before any actual campaigning is done, but it seems difficult to get worked up over. In politics, economics, literature and biology and cooking and sports and lighting yourself on fire to see what happens, past results may not be a guarantee of future success -- but it is a damn good indicator. How, though, did Hillary Clinton go from presumptive frontrunner to a pummeled second choice? The most obvious answer: people started voting, instead of just talking about voting, and that right there is when things went off the rails. But could she have pulled it off? How close was she? Was it gaffes and botched strategy that landed her behind Obama, or was Obama simply an unstoppable force? Or were her presumptive chances simply that -- presumptive -- a fiction of media supporters who simply assumed the most well known figure was the inevitable one? The answer is probably all of the above, and then some. The final results were, like those of all the other recent major American elections, absurdly close: there seems no question that a positive tweak or unintentional gaffe here or there by either candidate could easily have changed the outcome. But I do not think there were any things that could truly be called game-changing gaffes, and -- interestingly -- I can identify no substantive tweaks, either. For such a close campaign, it was a plodding affair. From Super Tuesday to now, the ground simply did not change much. Yes, Clinton did better in some states, and Obama in others. But the reasons didn't change. The messages didn't change. The strategies didn't change. We saw two defining modes, in the Clinton campaign: Clinton ahead, in which case it maintained a facade of monolithic, do-nothing stasis, lest anything go wrong, and Clinton behind, in which case negative campaigning was called for, and plotted, and executed. If the Obama campaign had a Plan B, we never saw it -- thrust comfortably in the lead after the first handful of states, there was no need for it. But if the Clinton campaign had a Plan B, it was a hastily constructed affair, and an insultingly premised one at that. The Clinton campaign was premised from the start on the notion that Clinton would win, and nobody else could. When Clinton started to not win, the same premise was repeated, but with hostility -- Clinton would win, damn it, because the rest of you are unelectable. We heard that Clinton was vetted, but no matter how much the other campaigns were vetted, it was not enough. We heard that Clinton was liked by this demographic or that one, and it was asserted that those demographics were the important ones, and the ones won by others were less important. We heard that caucuses were not a sufficient measure of electability, despite their actually doing electing. We heard that entire states were also-rans. It was not a narrative, but a meta-narrative. She was electable because she was electable, and anything that disproved that theory was dismissed as an exception. It was the campaign equivalent of Intelligent Design. It was, in short, a terrible, mind-bendingly awful strategy. That is not to say that there was not substance discussed, in the debates -- but the campaign was not about that substance. That is not to say that there were not good points to be made in "electability" -- but her spokesmen made them shabbily. In the end, it was not an argument that could convince. But Clinton would never have been in such a position had she not fallen behind to begin with, and that is where I think the more damning mistakes of her campaign lie. If I could wrap all critique of the Clinton campaign up into a single sentence, it would be this: her campaign did not campaign. In this, I think her early anointing by the media did her campaign a disservice. She campaigned as the frontrunner from the outset, and as a Democratic frontrunner at that, and the age-old Democratic mandate for running campaigns has been one of excruciating timidity. The goal of most recent high-profile elections, the Kerry campaign included, the Gore campaign included, and several dozen other campaigns besides, has not been to win, but to simply avoid losing. Towards that end, no large issues are addressed with too much passion, and no stances are taken with too much vigor, and for the love of God nobody is made to feel the slightest bit uncomfortable. It is playing to the middle writ large, and in crayon, and with big block letters. The goal is to assemble the broadest coalition possible -- by saying nothing that could possibly offend anyone. The premise is to appeal to "independents", and "centrists", and most of all the "undecided", that group of people so uninterested in politics that they cannot fathom the difference between the parties, but who allegedly can be mobilized into action if only you do absolutely nothing that will get them the slightest bit worked up. It is a cynical, wretched excuse for leadership, but more to the point it provides absolutely no room for error: it is an all-defensive strategy. If your opponent is a block of wood, incapable of making any positive plays on their own, you may pull it off; but if your opponent scores any point, you are left unable to answer it. Kerry was swiftboated, but unable to respond to the swiftboating because the response, itself, would supposedly extend the story and/or make people uncomfortable. His staff was willing to cede the entire ground rather than try to take any of it back and, in the process, possibly either make an error or an enemy. Clinton, like all other Democrats advised by the select group of advisers so inexplicably prominent in the last twenty years of Democratic campaigns, began in defensive, all-things-to-all-people mode from long before the campaign ever truly got underway, and stayed there until it was too late. It showed in every early speech and appearance. Her pronouncements ranged from cautious to milquetoast. She spoke against the war -- but her rhetoric was muddy, and dull. She agreed Washington was the problem -- but would not distance herself from it. She had ample opportunity in the Senate to lead on any issue from Iraq to torture to corruption to administration propaganda to energy incompetence to you-name-it, and instead chose the easier path, receding into the background, lest any of those fights prove divisive. This was not Clinton campaigning, but a carefully plotted, painstakingly shallow image of Clinton. And it did not work, except when it was deviated from. When she showed a tear in New Hampshire, it was accidental, but it was so dramatic an unscripted moment that it worked strongly in her favor. When she attended the debates, by and large she did not just speak adequately, but passionately. We were left aching for unscripted moments, so commonplace were the scripted ones, with monolithic audiences and carefully plotted messaging.