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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All you have to do is go back and look at many of the speeches that were done by Obama and Clinton. With Obama it was all about "we." With Clinton, it was "I" and there lies the difference.
Excellent point!
What "we" was he ever a part of. What "we" ever did anything. Describe it to me in detail.
Believe it or not "Obama Girl" helped his campaign. Wait... before you start running off at the mouth. A lot of people had never heard of Sen O , when she came out with that video it really peaked a lot of folks curiosity. I'm not saying she was a major factor, but she did garner attention for the Senator.
This campaign is based in the 21st century, Obama's reflective of this new century, so are those who support him, and they know how to communicate in the way of the new century--the youtube reflect the new campaign technology --Obama sure did get recognition through the new way campaign.
Yeah I'd say it helps to have a hot girl on your side!
What's McCain going to respond with? "I'm a granny and I've got a crush on John McCain"
Obamagirl = hot? Hmmm....
There is no question that O'bama ran a terrific campaign and has moved mountains to get this far. He did everything as near to perfect as a human can get.
But "nothing wrong" in Hill's camp? I'm sorry, but no.
"She spent too little time creating a compelling, consistent personal narrative"?!? Uh, we already knew who she was, and many of us didn't like what we saw.
And I find it amazing that Dean was supposedly sunk because of a single war-whoop, but when HRC repeatedly cackled like the Wicked Witch when asked a tough question she repeatedly got a pass.
But she also spent the entire campaign changing her message. First it was all experience, all the time. Then it was 35 years of change. Then it was a mixture of 35 years of change, coupled with 35 years of experience. Then it was national security, and then it was..... You get my point.
And for what it's worth, Dean did not lose because of a war whoop. Dean lost because a couple weeks before the Iowa caucus he came out against the major media corporations, and they spent the rest of the time that they had making him out to be this psycho, which the war whoop enhanced to the point of inelectablity!
One thing really gets me here: the notion of Bill Clinton as an historically gifted presidential politician. If we put aside the notion that anyone who gets to the White House is, by definition, a gifted pol, I think it bears remembering that (admittedly like Obama), his ride to the presidency was fueled in large part by luck. In 92, he won a low forties percentage of the vote, and would certainly have not been elected if not for the presence of (mentally unstable) Ross Perot, who won 17%, and who clearly took more votes from GHWB than he did from WJC.
In '96, he was riding the wave of an almost unprecedented economic prosperity, and managed to win re-election. In my view, he was a much better president (balancing the budget) than a presidential campaigner. Obama wins, as indicated in the post, by inspiring confidence through fundamental decency and steadiness. Thank god for this. The Clinton psychodrama is the last thing we need going forward in these troubled times.
Proof that if you can't be smart, or have a rich daddy, be lucky.
True skill is succeeding and making it look so easy that people ascribe it to luck. Obama's lucky like a fox.
There are many ways in which we gather information about the world around us. Our known senses and the rational thought processes that decipher the information we get from them are only the tip of the iceberg. Much of our behavior is based on subconsciously gathered information.
Obama lights up all those sensors that we don't understand, but when we hear him, watch him, meet him, and read about his life and work, we come to know that he is potentially a great leader. People like that are rare, and we know it.
That's what Hillary was up against. She's a skilled politician, and she was up against a born leader.
Time will tell whether or not Obama lives up to his potential. I hope he does - we need a great leader in this country right now.
Interesting piece, thanks for posting.
What amazes me are these die-hard women supporters of Clinton is they rather vote for John McCain, a soldier who came back from Vietnam injured and found his wife also injured from a car accident and convinced her that is okay because is as much a mess physically as she is.
Then he went start his partying and running around unbeknowest to his wife, filed for a divorce and a month later married the pretty billionaire heiress Cindy. So bottom line is you women love STRONG, MACHO MAN.
Carol his ex-wife was well do model before her accident and also pretty. Seems to me this marrying pretty women with money is nothing new for McCain, a womanizer, and YET, because the Hilary supporters are so racist and hate Obama so, they would rather vote for John McCain. A guide who only got into politics through his well connected FATHER-IN-LAW.
See David Paul Appell's Profile
Very astute. For the same reason, Bush wiped the floor with Gore and Kerry. Now the real question is, who has more resonance in November, Obama or McSame? They both bring formidable chops to the table in that regard -- but will fear and latent (or not so latent) racism tip the balance? I'd love to hear more musings on that question..
It wasn't the pant suit... it was the slippers..
Pundits, pundits, pundits. How they go on. But no one I know supports Obama for his obvious and even welcome (see McCain) charisma. Obama speaks to where people are concerned, on leaving Iraq, on the outsourcing of jobs and the havoc that has wrought on working people, on diplomacy rather than force, on seeking points of agreement rather than division, and on and on. I haven't heard that kind of talk from any Democrat except perhaps John Edwards, whose smarmy voice rather than his stance on issues did him in. Too bad, because Edwards is also great on democratic issues.
However, charisma has surely had much to do with inspiring the young, who had once before risen up only to be cynically/
Hillary Clinton dug herself a hole and kept on digging with her 80's-style campaign and her reliance on corporate fat cats for support. Speaking here as a lifelong feminist. Clinton showed herself simply too unprincipled to support, so blatantly clear in her non-concession speech and from what we hear about her negotiations with the Obama camp; it wasn't about the many pressing issues now facing ordinary Americans, it was all about herself.. If I were capable of being embarrassed by someone else, it would have been her.
I really don't understand those Clinton supporters booing Obama like that and openly theatening to jump to frickin' McCain for spite. They do know the campaign is over more than personalities, don't they? There's a BIG disconnect here, women who yearned to see the first female president switching to a guy who was once overheard calling his wife a c*nt in public, and a man who's more than liable to put another Scalia onto the Supreme Court. Clinton loyalists, time to get your heads on straight!
Have you ever seen the Brian Springer's 1995 documentary, Spin?
http://vid
Charisma is manufactured like any other product sold on television. So to suggest that it was some correlation to President Clinton is belittles Senator Obama's efficiently run campaign and at the same time absolves Senator Clinton's poorly run campaign.
Charisma in this respect is hardly a comparison, because roughly each candidate was loved and loathed pretty much equally. That said there had to be something else to give one the upper hand. In this case it was organizational skills. Obama blew the competition out of the water. He put people around him that made him a winner. Senator Clinton simply did not.
Back to your original point. Bill Clinton's success was hardly due to his so-called charm. The Media wanted Clinton to win because he represented a love of corporate America. His fiscal policies won back the Reagan Democrats and in his bid for re-election he was lucky enough to run against Bob Dole.
Obama on the other hand ran against the favorite and media darling and trounced her. Sure he had to have some charisma, but it was it ability to lead his team that won him the nomination during this primary process.
Be careful what you wish for. Now that Hillary has dropped out and there will be few blogs about her, I suspect the hits and comments on HuffPost will drop off considerably. The same with Matthews and Olberman viewership. The Obama/McCain business will be boring and less exciting than when Hillary was in the race. She should go silent for a while and see what happens. It's up to Obama to win over her supporters, not her job, although the same folks who wanted her out of the race for months now want her to do what he should be doing.
"...he's not Muslim, as far as I know..." 1. Being Muslim is an indictment for or against what exactly? I Muslim. a US Army veteran, and althought I shouldn't have to say this, a loyal American. 2. "...as far as I know...", meaning he could be lying about that and God's knows what else!
Every frigging American, even those that once supported the (undeclared - among other reasons - and therefore illegal) war in Iraq now knows and acknowledges that the war was/is the 2nd biggest mistake of American history (400 years of Chattel Slavery and Jim Crow being the 1st). Even the onetime court jester Scott MacClennan (sp?) knows that now. What does that say for HRC? And then of course there is the gambit of the undercover "southern strategy"! What Black folk are supposed to be so ignorant that we can't "suss" that out? Add to all that they just ran a poor, disjointed, politically fracas campaign.
And after all that Senator Obama should consider her and Bill ( and yes Bill would be a factor) to be VP? Only if Senator Obama wants to lose for sure.
I'm just not sure that there ever was a real Hillary "there."
I always wanted to believe the best of her and her motives, but this race made her increasingly hard to defend -- not that I was ever a supporter of her after her 2002-03 Iraq actions, but it made it hard not to buy into all the worst assumptions about who she is as a person, and what core beliefs she has -- if any.
My Father, who was very active in the anti-war movement at MIT the same time Hillary was an undergrad at Wellesley, knew a number of people who got to know her back then. On their word, he's never trusted the Clintons, but this was the reason: The general consensus was that yes, she was smart, she was hard-working -- but above all she was an opportunist. She came to the school as a Goldwater Girl, but there was no way you could ever get a position of leadership with that student body, at that time, without being an "activist.
I never wanted to believe that someone could really be so thirsty for power and recognition that their very principles are shaped by whatever with further that the most But after this campaign, I don't know what else to think!
This was spot on. As an early Obama supporter, I had the same emotional connection that I did as an early Bill Clinton supporter.
The Bonus: Obama is not the skirt-chasing double-talker that Bill has been later revealed to be. And as unfair as it may seem to be, a lot of us "educated feminists" cannot support a woman who puts up with that.
It's one thing to support her as First Lady, and to respect her decision to stay with her husband. It's quite another to believe that the same woman who allowed a philanderer to humiliate her, then chose the likes of Mark Penn (another untrustworthy man) to run her campaign, could possibly make for a good Commander in Chief.
I imagine Chelsea is very glad her mother didn't leave her father, so maybe Hillary wasn't just thinking about herself. That's one possible interpretation.
Yes. Clinton has shown poor, even disastrous, judgment repeatedly, from her vote on war, her claim to be willing to attack---"
That's it in a nutshell, really: Hillary proved she would do anything to win, not that she would be the one to do the best for our nation.
In the end, no matter personal feelings, I couldn't imagine voting to give more power to a woman who shirked her Senatorial duty in supporting (what she stated she knew at the time would become) war without fact-checking first. And she didn't check because she was voting to preserve her electability, so she admitted.
She's very Big Brother, Nanny State, as if he is a queen not an elected leader--which alone might have turned me off from her.
But what ELSE made me unwilling to vote for her were:
how Hillary likes to spend taxpayer money on proven-unc
those ways in which she resembles our current president by not listening to, seeking, or respecting the advice of experts, such as in making her failed, insurance- and big company-rewarding and unwieldy universal healthcare plan, or ignoring the education experts to side with federal oversight and testing because she likes centralization.
Basically, Hillary is just too ambitious, too controlling, and too Machiavellian.
What the hell does her choosing to stay married have to do with her presidential skills? You are no feminist if you deny a woman's right to make her own decisions about her marriage, or criticize her for what is her choice and hers alone.
StephenDed
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