Nothing Went Wrong
In retrospect, finding flaws with the Clinton campaign seems the natural thing to do. How else could a man who was just a state senator four years ago have defeated one of the most competent, intelligent, well-connected, well-respected members of the Senate? The New York Times ran a series of op-ed pieces Sunday asking, "What Went Wrong?" Some said money. Some said sexism. Some said she took the low road in her campaign tactics. Some said her Iraq vote. Some said she was too establishment. But among the 13 political coroners who wrote post-mortems for the Clinton campaign, the one who put his finger on the hemorrhage that cost her the election was the one who knew where to look -- Bob Kerry -- because he had run against Hillary Clinton's charismatic husband in the 1992 primaries.
Nothing went wrong. Hillary Clinton was emotionally outgunned, just as Bill Clinton outgunned his rivals in 1992.
The pundits and pollsters had it backwards. People didn't vote for Obama because they preferred his message of change to Hillary's message of experience. They preferred his message of change because in their gut they preferred Obama. When all the other candidates scrambled to be the agents of change after Iowa, it didn't matter where they put their spare change because they weren't Obama.
As the first woman to have a serious shot at the presidency in our nation's history, who would have reversed virtually every decision George W. Bush made over the last eight years, Hillary Clinton could legitimately argue, as she tried to do after Iowa, that she offered the best of both worlds: change and experience. What she, her pollsters, and the chattering class mistakenly believed, however, was that Obama had somehow found the right one-word magical amulet, and that they just had to own a piece of the amulet. But that view neglects the fact that virtually every challenger in the last century -- including Bill Clinton ("change vs. more of the same") -- had used the mantra of change, and some won with it while others hadn't. John Edwards frequently spoke of "change -- big change," but he didn't win the nomination in 2008.
What is perhaps most remarkable in all the post-mortems to the Clinton campaign is how little we have heard what is both the most obvious to the naked eye and the best supported by data: It's the emotion, stupid. The reason Hillary Clinton opened a large early lead against her Democratic rivals and seemed invincible was not that she is phenomenally competent and intelligent, which she is. Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, and Bill Richardson are also phenomenally competent and intelligent. What launched her campaign were the emotional associations people had formed between eight years of the Clintons in the White House and eight years of peace and prosperity. I never heard her campaign complain loudly when journalists used the term "the Clintons," despite the firm conviction of many talking heads that Bill Clinton was a tremendous liability to his wife's campaign. They understood that she needed not just her rock-solid understanding of "the issues" but the power of association.
In fact, what led her to come roaring back -- too little, too late, it turned out --i n the last three months of the primaries was a failing economy that reminded blue collar and rural voters just how much their lives had improved during the Clinton years (reinforcing the emotional associations that had originally made her candidacy seem inevitable) and her relentless attacks on Obama. Those attacks drove her already high negatives up (a risk she had no choice but to take) but also drove his positives down and his negatives up (i.e., changing voters' gut-level feelings about him), and raising many Democrats' worries (fueled by the Jeremiah Wright story and his comments in "liberal San Francisco") about his capacity to lead, his capacity to win, and his capacity to defend himself against the attacks conservative groups will no doubt throw at him in what will likely be the dirtiest general election campaign in modern American history.
The survey data from the last forty years of presidential elections are crystal clear: "The issues" are a distant fourth as predictors of voting behavior. The best predictors are people's feelings toward the parties and their principles (which are obviously of less relevance in primary than general elections because the competitors draw on the same wellsprings of partisan sentiment). The next best predictors, and the ones of most relevance in the primaries, are the feelings the candidates elicit from voters. Next in line are voters' feelings toward the candidates' personal attributes. Among those personal attributes, the lowest on the list of predictors of voting is competence.
At base, Americans want to know three things about candidates: Do they share my values, do they care about people like me, and do I feel in my gut I can trust them to pursue those values and interests faithfully?
Hillary Clinton ran on issues and competence, focusing, like every Democrat who has failed to win the presidency in the last 40 years, on the factors least predictive of electoral success. She spent too little time creating a compelling, consistent personal narrative that could weave together her own life history with the state of a nation yearning for a different kind of leadership, and too little time attending to the negative stories told and retold about her during nearly two decades of savage Republican branding. She could have told the story of how she grew up in a traditional American -- and Republican -- home in Illinois; lived through the changes of the 1960s and learned the lessons we all learned as a nation, that we cannot be true to our national ideals while showing intolerance or prejudice toward anyone, whether women, African-Americans, or the conservative hate group de jure; but that she never forgot the traditional American values she learned at home that have been appropriated by Republicans but do not belong to them, such as hard work, personal responsibility, patriotism, and a commitment to our nation's security. A master narrative that wove together those elements would have provided a compelling alternative to the story of Hillary as triangulating, poll-driven opportunist that led many to distrust her.
Anyone who doubts that the same emotional dynamics that have, empirically, been central to the success or failure of presidential candidates over the last 40 years were central to Obama's defeat of the seemingly invincible Senator from New York should simply go back to the tapes of the Democratic primary debates and the Gallup polls from last summer through mid fall, when Obama was running a much more traditional, issues-oriented Democratic campaign -- as Hillary continued to rise in the polls, eventually breaking 50% among likely Democratic voters in October of 2007. But that all changed with his electrifying, game-changing performance at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa. There, he stopped campaigning like Adlai Stevenson and started campaigning like Barack Obama, and the rest was history. After that point, there was nothing Hillary Clinton could do but to go negative, which took him down a notch but reinforced her already high negatives.
It's not that issues don't matter -- her Iraq vote, her Iran vote (which came around the same time as Obama's transformation in Iowa, and played into the narrative that she had learned nothing from her Iraq vote) -- or that her campaign didn't make mistakes, most notably its failure ever to settle on a compelling, genuine, consistent narrative about who she is and what she stands for (a strong commander in chief and a stateswoman with gravitas, then a woman who wasn't afraid to shed a tear in New Hampshire, and finally Rosie the Riveter when a tough populism seemed to be the order of the day).
But people don't vote by considering every issue singly and then consciously weighing the constellation of policies each candidate supports to see which candidate maximizes their self-interest. They summarize their attitudes toward a candidate via a gut-level feeling (e.g., "I find him incredibly inspiring," or "I just don't trust her"). That feeling (or, more accurately, that complex set of feelings) aggregates not only their judgments about the extent to which the candidate will likely look out for people like them and honor their values but also their sense of whether the candidate is genuine; whether the candidates seems defensive or unwilling to admit mistakes (as Hillary did in her responses on Iraq, which did more to associate her with George W. Bush, and hence to sabotage her change message, than anything else she ever said or did); or whether the candidate, attacks on the candidate, events of the day, or media coverage stir largely unconscious but sometimes conscious ambivalence or negative feelings toward the candidate's race, gender, or other factors most voters consciously eschew as influences on their votes.
So what when wrong? Hillary Clinton had the misfortune of running against a candidate too much like her husband in his extraordinary capacity to inspire.
As Bob Kerrey, tongue-in-cheek, summarized her biggest mistake in his op-ed in the New York Times, "She and President Clinton should have moved back to her home state after they left the White House. By doing so, she would have been elected the junior senator from Illinois in 2004, thereby reducing the chances that Mr. Obama would have been in a position to run against her."
Drew Westen, Ph.D., is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University and founder of Westen Strategies, LLC. He is the author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, recently released in paperback with a postscript on the 2008 primaries.
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I must be another one of those oddballs that weighed votes, platforms and political affiliations. I would have liked to vote for a woman but not a Clinton. I disagreed with much of what Bill Clinton did as president in concert with Newt Gingerich - NAFTA, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that deregulated the finance/banking industry, deregulation of corporations that brought us Enron, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that allowed media to merge and is the reason only 6 families control all of the media outlets these days.. I've always called Bill Clinton 'the best Republican president we ever had'. He helped Republicans kick one of the pillars of FDR's New Deal out of the way - corporate accountability.
Hillary began her campaign with counting her experience in the White House with her husband Bill as an important part of her resume but some of the consequences of Bill's presidency have come back to haunt us all, especially the middle-class.....underemployment, loss of manufacturing jobs, influx of Mexican immigrants hurt by NAFTA, the mortgage crises.
I think part of the reason some people didn't like Hillary was because she ran as if this was an extension of her husband's term instead of telling us what she'd do differently.
OIh..sorry..I didn't finish reading your blather. I was too busy day dreaming about the peace , progress, & prosperity we had when Clinton was in office. But, I guess that doesn't count. Oh, I know, let's just think of any negatives we can, right or wrong., & just spew it.
Yes, you're right, we were much better off under Clinton's term than we are now, and we would have continued that way had Al Gore been sworn in on Jan 20, 2001. However, the points that clevelandchick brings up are also a factor that we are dealing with. If bushco(tm) had to do all of that stuff on his own, we would be better off now than we are, and therefore Bill Clinton laid the groundwork that a corrupt administration could use against us. Had there not been a corrupt admin, then we would still be on the right path!
Bill Clinton had much more knowledge of economics and domestic policy, not to mention foreign affairs than Obama does. I'm not saying that he had experience with these issues, just knowledge. Both Bill and Hillary are book geeks, they study and analyse all of these issues because
they find it fascinating and interesting. Obama doesn't have that same level of interest or knowledge.
Bill Clinton in 1992 was indeed young and new, but he was also full of knowledge and taught that knowledge to the public. Not only did he say many time that the Repubs trickle down economics don't work, but WHY they don't work. He taught so much to the democrats during his 92 campaign. Barack Obama doesn't teach anything. He just says we need change, and something new. Obama doesn't even compare to Bill Clinton.
Comparing Barak Obama to Bill Clinton is like comparing Sanjaya to Mick Jagger. One is the flavor of the moment in a rigged vote who has the media fawning all over him. The other is a man who is a giant among politicians, probably the greatest of my lifetime.
Yes, Bill Clinton had the knowledge and experience to sign the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act deregulating the banking/finance industry and destroying one of the pillars of FDR's New Deal (ie corporate accountability). The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act was one of Clinton's brilliant collaborations with Newt Gingerich and the GOP's 'Contract ON America' and is directly responsible for the mortgage crises we are facing.
Then Bill Clinton pushed and passed NAFTA which gave corporations tax breaks for moving their operations overseas which effectively destroyed the manufacturing sector in the United States, the agricultural industry of Mexico putting 2 millioni Mexican farmers out of business thereby driving them across our border and depressing the wages of American workers.
I'm glad Barack Obama doesn't even compare to Bill Clinton. I'll take Obama's knowledge of economics over Bill Clinton's any day.
Okay, let's look at the campaigns. Clinton said WHY raygunomics don't work, and so does Obama. Clinton taught the democrats how to act, and Obama is now bringing them back to the center from the right where they've been ever since 1992.
To claim that Barrack Obama is worthless is just as useless as claiming in 1933 that Hitler was insane! NOBODY believes you who isn't already on the losing side, or a Republican!
And for what it's worth, Bill Clinton did many things right, but he also did MANY things WRONG! Many of his economic policies helped those of us in the middle class, but they also laid the groundwork for the bushco(tm) administration, as they would have been unable to both lay the groundwork AND corrupt us so far in only eight years, even with 9/11 to help them!
The entire press corp was pulling for Obama, they defeated her. End of story.
Would you call questioning his patriotism over a piece of metal crap made in China fashioned to look like a flag pin 'pulling for Obama'? Would you call trying to tie him to a member of the Weather Underground 'pulling for Obama'? Would you call slipping up every five minutes and calling him Osama instead of Obama or highlighting his middle-name Hussein 'pulling for Obama'?
Here's some evidence that Hillary Clinton wasn't the only candidate that Chris Matthews had a problem hiding his prejudice with:
http://thecurvature.com/2008/06/06/chris-matthews-racism-watch/
Give me a break, both candidates got equally bad treatment by the media. To say otherwise is to be completely disingenuous.
Now, by pulling for Obama, you mean doing everything that they could to get rid of him, short of actually calling for him to step down, right???
The mainstream media was pulling for Clinton by coming out with every crap story that she (or her supporters, including Bill) came up with in an attempt to bring him down. At the same time they were also bringing out every crap story that MCBUSH was coming up with! By contrast, with a few minor exceptions, such as the speech on race (which lasted a FAR shorter time than the stories about Rev Wright!) they were either completely ignoring McBush, and fawning all over Hillary!!
What if Hillary had voted against war authorization? Then she would have spent the following years opposing the war instead of justifying a vote. She had the chance to be a leader back when the nation most needed a leader.
I hope Barack Obama doesn't lose his charisma and ability to inspire as Bill Clinton did during this campaign.
The article is absolutely right. Bill has charisma. Obama has charisma. Hillary never did, but she campaigned as if she did, following Bill's strategy to the letter by pretending from the outset that she was the one and only chosen candidate. The media fell for it by proclaiming her "inevitable", but the people didn't. Beginning as early as Iowa, it was clear which candidate had the charisma. The white women of Iowa were way ahead of the media. Obama's huge crowds in every state included more women than Hillary's.
But Hillary kept on campaigning right up to her concession speech as the "women's candidate" while Obama tried to appeal to ALL Americans. The "18-million glass ceiling" story is Clinton moonshine. Her voters were the blue-collar males of the big states, not because she was a woman but because she was WHITE.
I must be the oddball.
I pored through past issues, stated policy intentions, voting records (in the Senate), past speeches, and the like to narrow down the candidates whose issues I thought were the best for our nation before I even looked at them in their campaigning capacity and checked their backstories.
But I also think that Clinton DID do a great deal wrong--just that her mistakes weren't necessarily during the campaign process. Obviously we all have different viewpoints on her history--certain high points and low points tend to stick out, but these also differ per individual and member of certain parties or social groups.
For me, the moment of the war vote just clinched that this woman had atrocious judgment and a fondness for inordinate power at the top, a refusal to admit her errors or repair them, and so little regard fo the good of our nation that she would agree to give illegal powers to the president even knowing that it would lead to war--and all without reading the Intelligence about Iraq, which is a key element of her job as a Senator making decisions purportedly for the best of her people but actually, as she would later admit, with only an eye for her political future and electability.
Yes, I liked Obama's campaign and stances enough to support him from early on. But Hillary had earned my distrust of her integrity and decision-making capacity long before that.
This argument that she voted for the Iraq war just kills me. After 9/11 this whole country was crying for war - we could taste the blood of the middle east. We wanted the middle east blown off the face of the earth. And we had leadership that was feeding that frenzy!! Who are we all kidding.
Obama can talk all he wants about what he would have done, but he wasn't there - so as far as I am concerned - he has no right to talk about Hillary's vote. If Chicago was calling for war - he would have voted for the war also.
I just can't believe that everyone is swallowing that line of crap!!
"If Chicago was calling for war - he would have voted for the war also. "
Obama gave his famous opposition speech in Oct 02 at a time when he was campaigning for the Senate. Obama put his political career on the line to oppose going to war in Iraq, and warned of “an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs, and undetermined consequences.” Obama has been a consistent, principled and vocal opponent of the war in Iraq. To oppose the war at a time when the entire country was in a fervor of patriotism, fed by what McClellan has called pro-war propaganda was a risky move.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/iraq/
* In 2003 and 2004, he spoke out against the war on the campaign trail;
* In 2005, he called for a phased withdrawal of our troops;
* In 2006, he called for a timetable to remove our troops, a political solution within Iraq, and aggressive diplomacy with all of Iraq’s neighbors;
* In January 2007, he introduced legislation in the Senate to remove all of our combat troops from Iraq by March 2008.
* In September 2007, he laid out a detailed plan for how he will end the war as president.
A very smart take on this.
A great point - "But people don't vote by considering every issue singly and then consciously weighing the constellation of policies each candidate supports to see which candidate maximizes their self-interest. They summarize their attitudes toward a candidate via a gut-level feeling (e.g., "I find him incredibly inspiring," or "I just don't trust her"). That feeling (or, more accurately, that complex set of feelings) aggregates not only their judgments about the extent to which the candidate will likely look out for people like them and honor their values but also their sense of whether the candidate is genuine; whether the candidates seems defensive or unwilling to admit mistakes (as Hillary did in her responses on Iraq, which did more to associate her with George W. Bush, and hence to sabotage her change message, than anything else she ever said or did); or whether the candidate, attacks on the candidate, events of the day, or media coverage stir largely unconscious but sometimes conscious ambivalence or negative feelings toward the candidate's race, gender, or other factors most voters consciously eschew as influences on their votes.
So what when wrong? Hillary Clinton had the misfortune of running against a candidate too much like her husband in his extraordinary capacity to inspire."
I believe that Obama speaks from the heart . . .
Dr. Westen, You are right. I read about FDRs primary battle and he won on his own message of hope and the fact that people really liked him. He inspired them and they felt trust in him.
this is the ingredient for a successful campaign and candidate.
Obama is a brilliant man who also revolutionized campaigning and tapped into people's desire to be a part of something and feel they belong to an effort. This along with his inspiring rhetoric and message of change and hope really hit a core in people.
And it can be powerful
I was at his announcement in Springfield and it was a powerful experience for my husband and myself.
To say that Obama is very impressive is an understatement.
Then why the hell os Barack and Michelle Obama so arrogant in not celebrating the man that made Democrats relevant to the Presidency- the BEST 2 TERM DEM president in more than 40 years-Bill Clinton.
The gall with which Barack and especially Michelle Obama dismiss the achievements of the 90s under a Democratic President just makes my blood boil.
If the want to be like Dukakis, Kerry and Carter- fine my me- we will have McCain as our next President.
As a democrat I would put Bill in as a mediocre president who shoved his party into the chains of weakness under his rule.
To see the end of the Clintons is inspiring in itself
"As a democrat I would put Bill in as a mediocre president who shoved his party into the chains of weakness under his rule."
Fool. Bill Clinton gave us the best eight years in the nation's history. Obama isn't good enough to tie his shoes.
I'm a Democrat and I don't think his presidency was that great. He spent most of the time right smack in the middle of Repubs and Dems - which means giving the Repubs what they want while talking a good Dem game. I say WHATEVER @ Bill's 2 terms. The 2nd term was especially garbage with the majority of it being spent ON TRIAL and getting impeached for abusing his authority with an intern and lying to the American public about it.
Why should they celebrate the Clintons? Clinton's presidency was embroiled in scandal from beginning to end. Bill Clinton had the advantage of being President in the years leading up to Y2K. The U.S. spent more money on Y2K than any other country. This created a bullish job market and Wall Street reflected what they saw on Main Street.
He was the President that put NAFTA into play. We are just now feeling the negative affects of that deal.
I think Obama respects Clinton's Presidency, but I don't think he does nor should he celebrate it.
So, they won, and you want them to celebrate the loser's husband?????
And for what it's worth, Bill Clinton is the ONLY democratic president in the last 28 years (the multiple of 4 which covers almost all of my lifetime) so of COURSE he's the best......
Clinton brought us the deregulation of the banking/finance industry and trade deals that cost American's in jobs and wages and enslaves the citizens of third world countries with cheap labor.
Yes, he raised taxes on the wealthiest 1% so he could balance the budget and worked with Ireland for peace. But his other economic policies are also responsible for the mortgage crises, stagnant wages, underemployment Enron and other corporate malfeasance, and the influx of Mexican workers because NAFTA destroyed their agricultural industry.
Clinton's economic policies did as much damage to the middle-class as any Reagan or Bush policy has. Bill lucked out that he was president during the Dot Com bubble or he's at least lucky that as a Senator, Al Gore worked to get funding to bring the internet into the public/corporate arena.
I'm glad Obama has spoken out against the last 25 years of economic policy that has been bleeding the middle-class dry and is going to work to help the middle-class and fix that damage.
This isn't about your hero worship, this is about doing what's best for the country.
There is something that politicians who win realize is a factor: branding.
Branding is simply the gut feeling that people associate with a brand. Republicans have used this tactic for decades and explains why they used to win all the time.
Hillary was branded as being dishonest, which was reinforced by her sniper comments.
Obama clearly understands branding as his campaign rose to create Brand Obama for America.
Americans love a good brand and they will vote for Brand Obama (even sweeter with new fresh taste!) over Brand McCain (stale, salty, old and crusty) in droves.
In Hillary's defense, she wasn't just branded as dishonest--also mercurial, self-centered, and betraying, and she earned those descriptions. But that last one is only accirding to the little people, not the companies who own her. Err, pay her. She's been loyal to them.
I am not a Hillary hater, I just distrust any one who changes to fit the situation, Her and baggage Bill would not be in the best interest of change! She never thought that her back door politics would lose to a newcomer. She owes lots of political favors to her lobbyist supporters. Health care lobbyists, and drug lobbyists are not happy. They spent all that money and got nothing. History will remember these remaining months before the election as the losers fade away to nothingness and the winners a place in history. Change is coming, of this there is no doubt, nothing will be the same, There is no turning back . America will be tested in the next 6 months in more than one way, and from more than one direction, The next president will have 8 years to make up for, Economic disaster looms on the horizon, America will shine again, this time with a CFC bulb!
Yes, yes! "It is the emotion, stupid!" I love Obama because I feel like I CAN TRUST HIM. America is so big and so diverse, we need a guy who will do his best to work with all of us HONESTLY, as best he can. I would vote for Al Franken for the same reason. I COULD TRUST HIM to at least try to do what is right for everybody!
Clinton's have DISHONESTY written all over them. . . . for far too many years. I would never vote for Hilliary. I don't trust her as far as I could throw a Mack Truck!
She's a phony you could smell a mile away. Her lies and gaffes (corkscrew landing and sniper fire in Bosnia etc) sealed it.
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