Halloween Jack posted:

I'll never understand why they don't understand that people don't like being told that they're morally obligated to adore some public figure. People hate that poo poo.

I can only guess that it's because most of the people pushing this poo poo are insiders in a system where thinking the way you're told to think leads to immediate material rewards.

ClassActionFursuit posted:

With regards to this podcast and Michael it 100% is "My team is always right". At the beginning he lists all of the policy positions that Hillary had that he disagreed with and came up with more than you'd think and concluded "but this is the candidate we have". You might be surprised that a ctrl-f Bernie would return no results on a transcript of this episode.

Clark Nova posted:

lol how long until they do an episode on State and Revolution?

Yeowch!!! My Balls!!! posted:

the argument Hillary is not as bad as people say you can maybe get away with if you're slippery enough (the trick is to lean on the NYT being absolute dogshit): the argument she is good is loving lol

easy to tell where it came from, though. for a certain kind of person she was the totem of the bold new liberal future. breaking all the glass ceilings. proving all the prejudices of the past were defeated, and that anyone with enough talent could rise to the top. yeah sure she ran Steve Bannon's campaign against Obama but that's just politics! hard faced realism! and when she lost to Trump that entire beautiful vision of the future died and it did not die pretty.

insofar as modern liberals have a political project its trying to bring the year 1998 back through science or magic and part of that is pretending all the awful poo poo Hillary did was justified actually.

Halloween Jack posted:

What has Hillary actually done that her worshipers can point to? As a politician, she married a president, was handed a Senate seat, and became Secretary of State by holding Obama hostage. What did she actually do besides sell weapons to dictators and gently caress up Libya and Honduras?

Halloween Jack posted:

What has Hillary actually done that her worshipers can point to? As a politician, she married a president, was handed a Senate seat, and became Secretary of State by holding Obama hostage. What did she actually do besides sell weapons to dictators and gently caress up Libya and Honduras?

Halloween Jack posted:

What has Hillary actually done that her worshipers can point to? As a politician, she married a president, was handed a Senate seat, and became Secretary of State by holding Obama hostage. What did she actually do besides sell weapons to dictators and gently caress up Libya and Honduras?

Halloween Jack posted:

What has Hillary actually done that her worshipers can point to? As a politician, she married a president, was handed a Senate seat, and became Secretary of State by holding Obama hostage. What did she actually do besides sell weapons to dictators and gently caress up Libya and Honduras?

Bastard Tetris posted:

I will never be able to dislodge the mental image of Bari Weiss just being Stav with hair

quote:

A campaign of relationships, not speeches

There is a narrative that has emerged in the Democratic primary, and it goes something like this: Hillary Clinton locked up the Democratic establishment long before the primary began in earnest. She's the wife of an ex-president. She was endorsed by virtually every elected official in the party and pretty much every major interest group. Her dominance of the inside game was unprecedented for a non-incumbent candidate. And she used this elite firewall to choke off Sanders's revolution.

When Sanders's supporters argue that the election was rigged against their candidate, this is what they are talking about. Sanders, they feel, did what you normally have to do to win an election: He generated more enthusiasm, brought in more voters, raised more money, gave better speeches, and polled higher in head-to-head matchups against the Republican candidate. It was only Clinton's pact with the Democratic establishment that stopped his rise.

In this telling, the way Clinton won the primary is the reason her victory feels hollow: It was nearly preordained, and the seriousness of the challenge Sanders posed just shows what a flawed candidate she really is.

But another way to look at the primary is that Clinton employed a less masculine strategy to win. She won the Democratic primary by spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and winning over allies. Today, 208 members of Congress have endorsed Clinton; only eight have endorsed Sanders.

This work is a grind — it's not big speeches, it doesn't come with wide applause, and it requires an emotional toughness most human beings can't summon.

But Clinton is arguably better at that than anyone in American politics today. In 2000, she won a Senate seat that meant serving amidst Republicans who had destroyed her health care bill and sought to impeach her husband. And she kept her head down, found common ground, and won them over.

"We have become, actually, good friends," said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who served as one of the Republican prosecutors during impeachment. "And that was a surprise to both of us." (It is perhaps not coincidental that Graham is one of the few elected Republicans now calling on his fellow Republicans to retract their endorsements of Donald Trump.)

And Clinton isn't just better — she's relentless. After losing to Barack Obama, she rebuilt those relationships, campaigning hard for him in the general, serving as his secretary of state, reaching out to longtime allies who had crushed her campaign by endorsing him over her. (This, by the way, is why I don't think you can dismiss Clinton's victory as reflections of her husband's success: She's won her own elections and secured a major appointment in a subsequent administration.)

Now Obama says that Clinton "had a tougher job throughout that primary than I did. She had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels." It's been clear since early in the primary that he is firmly in her corner, and his endorsement is believed to be imminent.

In this telling, in order to do something as hard as becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major political party, she had to do something extraordinarily difficult: She had to build a coalition, supported by a web of relationships, that dwarfed in both breadth and depth anything a non-incumbent had created before. It was a plan that played to her strengths, as opposed to her (entirely male) challengers' strengths. And she did it.

Hillary Clinton is a generationally talented politician — albeit across a different set of dimensions than men tend to be talented politicians.

When she lost in 2008, Clinton said that after her campaign, it would no longer be remarkable to see women win presidential primaries and nearly win their party's nomination. But no women did it in 2012, and she was the only woman to do it in 2016. It is still not easy, and it is still not unremarkable, for a woman to succeed in presidential politics. Clinton's victory is a remarkable achievement, and it shouldn't be dismissed.

quote:

The thin Democratic field

The post-election recriminations begin with the Democratic primary. Bernie Sanders’s supporters are reasonably furious their candidate lost to Clinton, given Clinton’s ultimate loss to Trump. They point to the fact that Sanders led Trump by more than Clinton in head-to-head polling during the primary.

But even if you’re skeptical that Sanders would’ve survived the general election with those numbers intact — and I am — this was a very strange, narrow field. The only two longtime Democrats in it were Clinton and Martin O’Malley. The entire rest of the field consisted of Sanders, who had to register as a Democrat to run; Lincoln Chafee, who was a Republican during his time in Congress; and Jim Webb, who had been a Republican for most of his career.

Why didn’t Elizabeth Warren run? Why didn’t Joe Biden run? And those were just the top-tier possibilities. How about Colorado’s Michael Bennet? Or Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar? Or Massachusetts’s Deval Patrick? Or Colorado’s John Hickenlooper? Or Ohio’s Sherrod Brown?

As best as I can tell, the clearing of the field was partly natural (people forget this now, but Clinton began with sky-high poll numbers) and partly purposeful (Biden was discouraged from running by Democratic elites). One way or another, it was a mistake: Clinton needed to be tested from more sides, with more arguments, by more kinds of candidates.

Bastard Tetris posted:

I will never be able to dislodge the mental image of Bari Weiss just being Stav with hair

Halloween Jack posted:

What has Hillary actually done that her worshipers can point to? As a politician, she married a president, was handed a Senate seat, and became Secretary of State by holding Obama hostage. What did she actually do besides sell weapons to dictators and gently caress up Libya and Honduras?

Halloween Jack posted:

What has Hillary actually done that her worshipers can point to? As a politician, she married a president, was handed a Senate seat, and became Secretary of State by holding Obama hostage. What did she actually do besides sell weapons to dictators and gently caress up Libya and Honduras?

ClassActionFursuit posted:

This is an accurate reading and throughout the episode Michael does touch on all of these points. However when it's all being told as a narrative in the span of an hour, it's hard to reconcile the path of "She is the consummate realist politician" to "She couldn't manage the media, couldn't connect with voters, is probably the most hated politician of her era, and didn't understand politics to the extent that her campaign could be torpedoed by an October surprise."

It's difficult to argue that a competent realist could be so wrong about so many things and still be qualified for the job but that's what Michael does without ever examining the incoherence of the premise.

KomradeX posted:

And how fundamentally different is the email server she had different from Trump having documents in his bathroom?

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

well you see many many people have had separate email servers while fewer people have physically stored classified documents in the bathroom of their golf club palace

KirbyKhan posted:

KomradeX posted:

And how fundamentally different is the email server she had different from Trump having documents in his bathroom?

Bastard Tetris posted:

I will never be able to dislodge the mental image of Bari Weiss just being Stav with hair

crepeface posted:

https://twitter.com/annakhachiyan/status/1026652884363091973?t=pDTpnxDqytRnW0gI1VmdDQ&s=19

crepeface posted:

https://twitter.com/annakhachiyan/status/1026652884363091973?t=pDTpnxDqytRnW0gI1VmdDQ&s=19

Frosted Flake posted:

Christman's self-pitying "I'm a little piggy that loves treats oink oink oink" routine is coming from a place of sadness and guilt, I realize that, but goddamn do I find it frustrating.

ClassActionFursuit posted:

If you mean Hillary supporters in real life? I've literally never met a human being in real life with any positive feelings for Hillary so I have no idea what arguments they lay out.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

I had a gay guy tell me I was a misogynist for thinking that there were reasons why Clinton lost which weren't "She's a woman". That was his entire argument: "she's a woman and a democrat" and if that didn't convince you, he'd call you names and then hide behind being a persecuted gay man in his late 40s the moment anyone pushed back.

One of the most insufferable people I've ever met.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

I had a gay guy tell me I was a misogynist for thinking that there were reasons why Clinton lost which weren't "She's a woman". That was his entire argument: "she's a woman and a democrat" and if that didn't convince you, he'd call you names and then hide behind being a persecuted gay man in his late 40s the moment anyone pushed back.

One of the most insufferable people I've ever met.

Toph Bei Fong posted:

I had a gay guy tell me I was a misogynist for thinking that there were reasons why Clinton lost which weren't "She's a woman". That was his entire argument: "she's a woman and a democrat" and if that didn't convince you, he'd call you names and then hide behind being a persecuted gay man in his late 40s the moment anyone pushed back.

One of the most insufferable people I've ever met.

Wolfsheim posted:

How did cumtown never do an obama/phil getting his dick sunked bit