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Hillary Clinton: How Much Dumber Will This Get?
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Politics
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Wow! What is all the hate. I agree that Hillery was not exactly personable but she was quite competent. Trump on the other hand, great at media and crowds but really pretty much incompetent otherwise. As far as I can tell the only thing he has done for working people is channel hate and rage which is authentic. If there are are concrete things feel free to list them.
Thanks. I wonder though. The DNC has chosen a woman twice now. Sad if true but it is probably lot harder for a woman to win the general election. Hillary could not do it, and Kamala could not do it against frankly very flawed candidate.
I suspect that basically a women has to be a lot better candidate say 10% or something better because she is going to loose a certain number of voters that would otherwise vote the ticket. These are not even all men that will not vote for a woman.
I understand why a certain genre of white male might vote for Trump for example but it mystifies me how a woman or a person of color would.
I talked with a Trump voter. They thought inflation was high. I said no, it is under 3% which is normal. They thought it was like 6%. They even looked it up and agreed. Then I asked them if they were better of now then 4 years go. They said yes. After all that I am sure they still voted for Trump.
As far as numeric price, everyone should know that prices are sticky. They rarely drop but inflation can be controlled to the 2 to 3 percent range and they were by the summer of 2024.
I agree with this about hearing people. Dems for some reason are not good at making people feel seen and heard. The other is making a personal and emotional connection which is roughly similar.
There's not a lot of mystery behind the Dems' problems. They're in the oligarchs' pockets just as much as the GOP, just different oligarchs. This is why we're seeing the sort of turnout at Sanders/AOC rallies that dwarfed campaign events in 2024 (and in prior cycles) pointing out where things have gone off the rails.
More than 99% of us know the government doesn't work for us. This has been laid bare, and while some saw it far earlier, it's now in everyone's face. The flaccid response to Trump's authoritarian moves it not winning them any voters, but I suppose the "we're less bad" playbook is the only one their handlers will allow (see: bullshit getting Sanders out of the way in 2016).
I think this is a gross oversimplification of the issues, but that's a big part of the problem. Currently, the problems facing both the DNC and the country are very complex and one very large and diverse side has to present ultimate complex solutions to complex problems to an electorate that collectively can barely tie its shoes, and the other just handwaves over this complexity, others a whole punch of folks, and says they'll "fix" it by pushing the bad mean "others" out.
Government actually DID work for a huge swathe of people in subtle, often taken for granted ways. It had vast room for improvement, but nevertheless was better than the alternative of simply not existing. The VA is a good example of this. But when you try to explain that to folks, they just glaze over. Another example is I've had discussions with multiple people now who were convinced that Harris just "never even had any policy" despite this being objectively untrue and very easily refuted.
This is all to say, no, "people" don't know or see shit. The average voters is wildly uninformed, uninformable, and cannot engage in anything beyond magical thinking. Long term solution is to make politics at the individual level more engaging with their day to day and increase general competence and access to true information. No idea what the short term solution is--as the saying goes, you can't use reason to convince someone out of a stupid fucking opinion.
Of course it's an oversimplification. I'm posting a comment on Beehaw, not penning an essay for Foreign Affairs.
But to paraphrase Carville, "It's the messaging, stupid."
There's been no coherent message that meets voters where they are. The boots-on-the-ground effects of both the BIL and IRA weren't effectively leveraged, especially in red areas seeing jobs and benefits from federal infrastructure grants. This is incompetence.
There are piece of shit Democrat voters who won't vote for any women.
But the 2 women candidates that the DNC has put their weight behind were massively unpopular compared to many other well-known Democrats who are women.
So it becomes hard to actually suss out which is the bigger factor in their losses.
On one side you have people like my dad, whose conclusion is that we're all still too sexist... so we need to just stop running women, so that we don't lose.
And on the other side you have people like me, who think that kind of cynical politicking is exactly what lost us 2016 and 2024, and a popular, inspiring, progressive, female candidate is exactly what we need to counter the fashies.
I actually do feel bad for the very real sexism that Hillary has obviously encountered in her career. Everything else aside, that is (by definition) never deserved or justified. But she is very legitimately a huge warhawk, a close personal friend and advocate for at least one major war criminal, thoroughly corrupt, a huge pusher of cutthroat capitalism for workers, anti-M4A, and just an all-around condescending asshole when being candid (everyone forgets her being caught joking about young people being basement-dwelling losers at a private fundraiser).