At the heart of this problem is that no one in the Democratic establishment took any of these problems seriously. Clinton's whole election strategy has been built around just attacking Trump as a lunatic who would drag the country back to the dark ages and pretty much drive the nail in the coffin of America as a respected world power. And while those arguments are true, it doesn't actually inspire any confidence in Clinton to be any better. "I'm less horrible than the other guy" isn't really a winning strategy, since it doesn't actually address or even recognize the issues people have with the Clinton campaign.
Because for as much as Clinton supporters love to complain about how the Clinton controversies are overblown in comparison to Trump's issues, there are legitimate reasons for people to be distrustful of her.
Take the email scandal, for example. Clinton was cleared of any criminal activity by both the State Department's Inspector General and the FBI. But what both of those reports revealed is that Clinton had acted with a complete disregard for record keeping protocols and, by keeping a private email server to store government communications, had put those systems at greater risk for intrusion. Both reports also explicitly stated that the defenses Clinton had been making in public regarding the issue- that Colin Powell had done the same thing, that State knew from the beginning what she was doing, that the State IT department had approved the server's use- were all, in no uncertain terms, completely false. And yet, in both cases, the Clinton campaign immediately issued press releases claiming the reports backed her stories up 100% and asked everyone to please move on.
This is, unequivocally, a lie. To pretend that voters shouldn't be leery of a candidate who so easily and effortlessly lies about official investigations into their behavior is myopic to the point of hypocrisy.
Dovetailing with the email scandal were questions surrounding whether or not donors to the Clinton Foundation were leveraging that money for special considerations when Clinton was Secretary of State. From FOIA document releases, we know now that there wasn't any pay-to-play or outright bribery going on, there still was the issue of donor countries to the Foundation getting there arms deals approved quicker than those who weren't. There was also the issue of private donors getting face time with Clinton to voice their concerns and hopes for policy outcomes. This was largely dismissed as another non-issue, since a meeting is hardly a promise of anything. But again, this misses why people are so uncomfortable with this business, because in a democracy, sometimes the most important factor in getting what you want is just the simple act of being heard by someone in power.
When people with money and access get to use those things to press their case, it tells the large majority of voters who don't have those things that their concerns are getting left out of their government's choices because there's never anyone in the room to speak for them. Yes, it isn't illegal, but it's a murky enough situation of who, exactly, does our government work for that telling people to just ignore it only convinces them that Clinton will continue that pattern and that a vote for her won't guarantee she actually gives a shit about their interests in return.
Whenever anybody brings up these points though, or brings up Hillary's long history of interventionism and her spotty record on environmental and civil rights issues, the first words out of everyone's mouths are usually "Well, Donald Trump (insert awful thing here.)" The problem with this strategy is that it doesn't actually argue the points about Clinton. In fact, that argumentative style implicitly concedes them. So if you are a Hillary supporter wondering why people won't get behind her, it's probably because the only argument you've been making is "Yes, you're right about how awful she is, but her awfulness doesn't stack up as high as Trump's, so that shouldn't matter." With such a compelling argument, how is anyone able to resist it?
So here's my advice for the closing weeks of the campaign: When you talk about Hillary Clinton, talk about what she's going to give people. Talk about how her policies will actually do some good for people. Make the campaign about how voting for Hillary is a vote for something to gain instead of a vote for not losing. (The nice thing about all that is it doesn't even need to be true, because if politics teaches us anything, it's that the truth of things is hardly a relevant point.)
Also, change that hashtag. #ShesWithYou at least tries to pretend that the campaign is about something more than her own vanity and ego. Basically, if Clinton keeps up this strategy of being the best of all horrible choices, it's going to continue to suck the energy out of her campaign and hamper her ability to motivate people who are skeptical of her to vote for her instead of voting 3rd party or skipping the election entirely.
I doubt anything significant is going to change, though. Clinton's horrible polling with young voters, independents, and pretty much everyone outside of the Democratic base that voted for her in the primary has existed since May; and both the party's and her response was "Eh, they'll come around. Let's go chase that Republican money." Any attempt to point out that this was a horrible plan and that if she wanted to win she had to heavily target those voters she was weak in or else risk losing them entirely was met with derision and dismissed as just sour grapes from the primary. And now well, we are where we are. The only sure thing I know now is that, come November, if Trump wins the election, Democrats will spend the next four trying to figure how, when they nominated a candidate hated by pretty much everyone, that it was everyone's else's fault but their own.
Dovetailing with the email scandal were questions surrounding whether or not donors to the Clinton Foundation were leveraging that money for special considerations when Clinton was Secretary of State. From FOIA document releases, we know now that there wasn't any pay-to-play or outright bribery going on, there still was the issue of donor countries to the Foundation getting there arms deals approved quicker than those who weren't. There was also the issue of private donors getting face time with Clinton to voice their concerns and hopes for policy outcomes. This was largely dismissed as another non-issue, since a meeting is hardly a promise of anything. But again, this misses why people are so uncomfortable with this business, because in a democracy, sometimes the most important factor in getting what you want is just the simple act of being heard by someone in power.
When people with money and access get to use those things to press their case, it tells the large majority of voters who don't have those things that their concerns are getting left out of their government's choices because there's never anyone in the room to speak for them. Yes, it isn't illegal, but it's a murky enough situation of who, exactly, does our government work for that telling people to just ignore it only convinces them that Clinton will continue that pattern and that a vote for her won't guarantee she actually gives a shit about their interests in return.
Whenever anybody brings up these points though, or brings up Hillary's long history of interventionism and her spotty record on environmental and civil rights issues, the first words out of everyone's mouths are usually "Well, Donald Trump (insert awful thing here.)" The problem with this strategy is that it doesn't actually argue the points about Clinton. In fact, that argumentative style implicitly concedes them. So if you are a Hillary supporter wondering why people won't get behind her, it's probably because the only argument you've been making is "Yes, you're right about how awful she is, but her awfulness doesn't stack up as high as Trump's, so that shouldn't matter." With such a compelling argument, how is anyone able to resist it?
So here's my advice for the closing weeks of the campaign: When you talk about Hillary Clinton, talk about what she's going to give people. Talk about how her policies will actually do some good for people. Make the campaign about how voting for Hillary is a vote for something to gain instead of a vote for not losing. (The nice thing about all that is it doesn't even need to be true, because if politics teaches us anything, it's that the truth of things is hardly a relevant point.)
Also, change that hashtag. #ShesWithYou at least tries to pretend that the campaign is about something more than her own vanity and ego. Basically, if Clinton keeps up this strategy of being the best of all horrible choices, it's going to continue to suck the energy out of her campaign and hamper her ability to motivate people who are skeptical of her to vote for her instead of voting 3rd party or skipping the election entirely.
I doubt anything significant is going to change, though. Clinton's horrible polling with young voters, independents, and pretty much everyone outside of the Democratic base that voted for her in the primary has existed since May; and both the party's and her response was "Eh, they'll come around. Let's go chase that Republican money." Any attempt to point out that this was a horrible plan and that if she wanted to win she had to heavily target those voters she was weak in or else risk losing them entirely was met with derision and dismissed as just sour grapes from the primary. And now well, we are where we are. The only sure thing I know now is that, come November, if Trump wins the election, Democrats will spend the next four trying to figure how, when they nominated a candidate hated by pretty much everyone, that it was everyone's else's fault but their own.
No comments:
Post a Comment