WhatFinger


Denial, excuses, and deflection...

Politico reveals: Arrogance and incompetence - not Russians - doomed Hillary's campaign



As the boss wrote this morning, Democrats are mired in denial about the 2016 election. Since nothing is ever Hillary Clinton's fault (she's always the victim, don't you know) they need someone or something to blame for her spectacular implosion. They've tried to pin it on racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, voter fraud, and the FBI, all to no avail. Nothing seems to stick. So now they seem to have settled on "Russian hackers." The theory is that Russia hacked the DNC, revealed information about Hillary Clinton, and that swayed the public's opinion. To put that argument another way, "Democrats believe their candidate would have won if only voters had been given less information about her." It would seem to me that, if you're arguing the leaks hurt Hillary because they were factual, you're not disproving the case that she was a horrible candidate, you're making it.
Never mind that we still don't have any actual evidence that this is what happened. It's the story they're trying to sell. ...But they have a problem. According to the Politico, Hillary's campaign was doomed by arrogance, incompetence, and an epically wrong-headed strategy.
Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope. They started prepping meals and organizing hotel rooms. SEIU — which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to — dialled Clinton’s top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.

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Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day. “They believed they were more experienced, which they were. They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t,” said Donnie Fowler, who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee during the final months of the campaign. “They believed they had better information, which they didn’t.”
In short, Clinton was warned of her impending loss, but the campaign's "top minds" were so overconfident that they ignored the warnings while they uncorked the champagne. That might be forgivable if the collapse all occurred in the final days of the campaign, but that's not what happened. Hillary and her campaign staff ignored alarm bells for months.
Politico spoke to a dozen officials working on or with Clinton’s Michigan campaign, and more than a dozen scattered among other battleground states, her Brooklyn headquarters and in Washington who describe an ongoing fight about campaign tactics, an inability to get top leadership to change course. ...“I’ve never seen a campaign like this,” said Virgie Rollins, a Democratic National Committee member and longtime political hand in Michigan who described months of failed attempts to get attention to the collapse she was watching unfold in slow-motion among women and African-American millennials.

Rollins, the chair emeritus of the Michigan Democratic Women’s Caucus, said requests into Brooklyn for surrogates to come talk to her group were never answered. When they held their events anyway, she said, they also got no response to requests for a little money to help cover costs. Rollins doesn’t need a recount to understand why Clinton lost the state.
If you're a political jukie who's been following the campaign since back before the primaries, none of this is particularly surprising. Hillary Clinton was a candidate with an obvious ceiling. After decades spent in the public eye, her numbers were baked-in. Since she offered absolutely nothing "new" to change the existing perception, she was always a deeply flawed candidate. Couple that with arrogance and a political glass jaw, and you have a recipe for disaster. As I wrote on multiple occasions, "The more voters hear from Hillary Clinton, the less likely she is to win." The voters heard a lot from Hillary.


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