Dems Rebuild

[BigRedBuster]

Riddle me this:

 

A man with Hillary Clinton's exact record, policies, and baggage beats Donald Trump. Yes or no?

No

[zoogs]

20 years of misinformation, her general unlikeability, all the issues with Bill and the Trump Phenomenon is why she lost.

I do agree with this. And I'd also say the larger part of her unlikeability stems from being such an establishment figure in a decidedly anti-establishment time. Talk about misreading the national mood, Mr. Obama.

 

--

 

IPB keeps eating parts of my post. Anyway, I don't think this was an insane time for a woman to run. But it wasn't an unchallenging one, either. It will be for the next woman, and that's no more or less true if she's Mother Teresa or Ann Coulter.

 

More women will get into politics and it will become a lot more normal for them to both seek and attain the highest office. This is a stark challenge to decidedly male-dominated positions of power, and there's zero way that this will be an unbumpy ride. As with any groups accustomed to majorities or privilege, it's not easy as that begins to erode over time.

 

So, the gender topic, how we view women vying for legislative or executive power, these are all topics I think are worth discussing. Let's not keep it in a Hillary charge/excuse context, either; that diminishes the topic too.

[Danny Bateman]

 

Riddle me this:

 

A man with Hillary Clinton's exact record, policies, and baggage beats Donald Trump. Yes or no?

No. And breaking it down to gender is missing the point. That baggage is ENTIRELY why she lost. Her gender has nothing to do with it.

 

 

 

 

This whole conversation about gender is astounding. We just watched an election where a completely unworthy candidate beat a tremendously qualified candidate based solely on unlikeability, sound bites and blather, and here we are getting hung up the losing candidate's gender.

 

Good lord I hope the Dems aren't making the same mistake as we're seeing here or Donald will win in 2020 as well.

 

 

I'm not hung up on it, I'm just examining it and how much it affected things.

 

My question was just an attempt to remove other factors as much as possible to fundamentally reduce the thing to just gender effects and see how much we all think it played a role.

 

Zoogs pretty much distilled the conversation down to what I was getting at. I don't think Clinton lost because she was a woman-- America just didn't like her. That's fine. But at the same time, it's fair to say BOTH of the following:

 

A) Clinton is not a good presidential candidate, especially for this election. Most of that is through her own faults, though I contend not all of it.

 

B) Any woman candidate for president (at this point in time) inherently has a harder road to the presidency than does a man.

 

I'm not blaming Clinton's loss on her gender. I know why she lost. The prospect of a woman leading a country that's always been led by a man was just another roadblock she didn't overcome.

 

I agree that in order to know how much this played a role, we'd need another female candidate. But let's examine the history of female candidates NEAR the presidency in my life. Clinton? Didn't go well. Palin? Got ravaged on the national stage. Ferraro? No idea... I'm too young to have known how she was received.

 

You said Warren MIGHT have won against Trump. Why do you believe that?

[knapplc]

I don't know enough about Warren to say either way. She would certainly have had her gender detractors, but maybe her charisma would overcome that.

 

Charisma is key. Male, female - that matters less than personal attractiveness. People were drawn to Trump in a way they ween't drawn to Hillary. He seemed flamboyant, she seemed like a stuffed shirt.

 

Hillary will go into the Romney, McCain, Kerry, Gore, Dole, Bush scrapheap of history, where all the other less interesting candidates fall. Not because she's female, but because her opponent was better able to manage attention than her.

[zoogs]

To add, if you're going to ask me if I view it as a totally Hillary failing that she didn't overcome those things when she should have had a slam-dunk case against Trump, I'd agree. I'm both disappointed in her and feel she owns that.

 

On the flip side, as much as I think Trump was an obviously loathsome candidate, I don't think that tells near the story. Because he wound up being quite a popular one, buoyed rather than sunk by elite and establishment disapproval.

 

Anybody would have had a hard time putting Trump away, IMO.

 

We aren't -- we haven't -- been living in a world where these established figures with obvious qualifications are viewed the way most of us here think they should be. And that's a sobering reality we all have to face.

 

knapp, I agree on charisma. I also would say charisma is a gendered thing. I do think Warren, to her credit, has a lot more of it than Hillary. Equally I think she'd have to face and beat down charges of being hysterical. Overcome the men, like Trump, who would have folks dismiss her as simply a "Goofy" loon.

 

There's a somewhat narrower mold when it comes to women and charisma. Especially professional women. Especially when they're seeking a position like POTUS/CinC, and not for example, stewardess or barista where being professionally sweet and pleasant is basically the job description.

 

That's not to say it's not a thing for men, too. JFK over Nixon, as you say. It's equally absurd, and on the whole maybe not the healthiest feature of politics. I suspect we do agree on that, too.

[Danny Bateman]

That line about Clinton to the Romney/McCain/Gore pile is pretty apt, Knapp. I rather like that one.

 

The sad thing about Warren is that if she had been the nominee, Trump would've really gone balls to the wall with his "Pocahontas" shtick, and sadly, you'd have had entire arenas full of people hooping and hollering at that type of garbage because they think it's just so witty and hilarious.

 

I think you guys hit on a relevant point, though. If you look at our elections, going way back, it really is shocking how much it devolves into a popularity contest. Just going backwards, I would say that Obama, Bill Clinton, Reagan, and Carter were all the more charismatic choice in their elections. I'm not really sure how HW and Mondale stacked up-- again, before my time-- but HW was a VP for a very popular president in Reagan and from what I understand he was most eminently qualified. Literally I know about Mondale was that they hammered him with a commercial about being soft on felons because he didn't like the death penalty and he took a stupid photo wearing a helmet in a tank.

 

Still, that's nearly four decades worth of elections that have been almost exclusively gone to the more charismatic candidate. 2016 was another illustration of that. Obviously Trump is widely derided by a ton of folks, but he sucks all the oxygen out of the room all the time, and it's hard not to come off as more likable than Hillary Clinton.

 

Qualifications don't appear to matter that much. You'd better have a likable candidate first and foremost.

[cornstar]

 

 

 

 

Riddle me this:

 

A man with Hillary Clinton's exact record, policies, and baggage beats Donald Trump. Yes or no?

yes.

 

I think so, yeah.

Did this hypothetical man kill a bunch of people?

 

Asking for a friend.

[Moiraine]

 

 

 

 

 

Riddle me this:

 

A man with Hillary Clinton's exact record, policies, and baggage beats Donald Trump. Yes or no?

yes.

 

I think so, yeah.

Did this hypothetical man kill a bunch of people?

 

Asking for a friend.

 

No. Because that's not baggage Clinton had regardless of what some political rags say.

[BigRedBuster]

I guess I'm the only one that thinks Trump sucks at charisma.

 

He's loud, boisterous, over the top....says outrageous things that most of the time is a bald face lie. He has goofy hair that everyone makes fun of. The guy sucks at public speaking. He looks very uncomfortable in some situations. He's always saying something that offends someone.

 

To me, that is not great charisma. We elected Rodney Dangerfield from Caddy Shack.

[NM11046]

I guess I'm the only one that thinks Trump sucks at charisma.

 

He's loud, boisterous, over the top....says outrageous things that most of the time is a bald face lie. He has goofy hair that everyone makes fun of. The guy sucks at public speaking. He looks very uncomfortable in some situations. He's always saying something that offends someone.

 

To me, that is not great charisma. We elected Rodney Dangerfield from Caddy Shack.

But with smaller hands.

[Danny Bateman]

His shtick wore out pretty quickly for me. I burnt out on it very quickly and I'm now going to spend the next four years avoiding it as much as possible. Listening to him talk is like pulling teeth.

 

I guess in lieu of actual charisma, Trump just keeps people entertained because we're all living in a short-attention span, reality TV society now. I find him embarrassing, but I guess a lot of people are entertained by the spectacle.

 

Clinton definitely suffered from this environment. Trump sucked all the air out of the media, and the only time she could get news coverage was if she attacked him. She couldn't build much of a positive case for herself because in the Trump election, it wouldn't get coverage.

 

I'm curious how much his next opponent will spend time talking policy/making their own case vs. attacking his record.

[zoogs]

I guess I'm the only one that thinks Trump sucks at charisma.

 

He's loud, boisterous, over the top....says outrageous things that most of the time is a bald face lie. He has goofy hair that everyone makes fun of. The guy sucks at public speaking. He looks very uncomfortable in some situations. He's always saying something that offends someone.

 

To me, that is not great charisma. We elected Rodney Dangerfield from Caddy Shack.

To me, it's not either. But empirically this is not true in general.

 

It's an odd, and worrying brand of charisma. Yet there can be no doubt it was captivating.

 

Talking policy appears to make little difference. People need a threat they are convinced they are batting down. Whoever creates the more compelling threat wins. And you'd think Trump's threats would be considered generally threatening....but also no. Some people felt so, and many others didn't really.

[Landlord]

Why is it so hard to understand that people don't like her? Not because she's a she, but based on her own merits? She is a plastic person. That's irrespective of gender, party affiliation, anything.

 

 

That's not hard to understand, but why is it so hard to entertain the idea that a legitimate element of why people don't like her might have to due with her being a woman in a decidedly patriarchal role.

 

It's implicit bias. And studies show us what kind of situations it exists in consistently. If you're going to take this line of reasoning, then I guess my question is how do we ever point to sexism/racism/etc. as being real in specific situations outside of the most ridiculous and egregious examples of people holding onto things like, "I hate black people." or "Women don't belong outside of the home."

 

Surely those biases exist in much more subtle ways than that. So...how do we find them? Because apparently the data doesn't apply to any specific situation.

[AFhusker]

There's a big, big difference in these two assertions:

 

1. Gender bias did not affect things.

2. Gender bias was not the lone deciding factor.

 

I can agree with #2. I can't agree with #1. But I'm not sure you are arguing that, either.

 

That Barack Obama was able to overcome his own set of biases in 2008 especially should bear little relevance to this outcome. John McCain ran for a third George W. Bush term with Sarah Palin as his running mate, and Obama was and is a preternaturally skilled politician.

 

The first female President will likely also have to be so particularly exceptional, and benefit from favorable circumstances such as running as an outsider in an anti-establishment climate. The next white man after Trump certainly will not need to be. Look at Trump. Similarly, the next Black president will have less to overcome than the first one. The second female President, too. So it goes.

 

Biases are real. They play a role, all the time. They weren't the lone cause, and indeed, it seems folly to look for singular causes.

They played a role, but they were in her FAVOR. Women flocked out to vote for her just to see the first female president. To use this an part of an excuse as to why she lost is more whining and incorrectly "classifying" why they lost.

[AFhusker]

 

Why is it so hard to understand that people don't like her? Not because she's a she, but based on her own merits? She is a plastic person. That's irrespective of gender, party affiliation, anything.

 

 

That's not hard to understand, but why is it so hard to entertain the idea that a legitimate element of why people don't like her might have to due with her being a woman in a decidedly patriarchal role.

 

It's implicit bias. And studies show us what kind of situations it exists in consistently. If you're going to take this line of reasoning, then I guess my question is how do we ever point to sexism/racism/etc. as being real in specific situations outside of the most ridiculous and egregious examples of people holding onto things like, "I hate black people." or "Women don't belong outside of the home."

 

Surely those biases exist in much more subtle ways than that. So...how do we find them? Because apparently the data doesn't apply to any specific situation.

 

Dem's can start by stopping making those issue's a reason for everything that doesn't go the way they want or how to describe people who are not "progressive." Labeling everyone an "ist" or on an "ism" is not the answer, America is tired of it and it showed why the "progressive" movement needs to tone it down or it will not be able to survive much longer. The Dems need to move away from the far left crazies like Sanders and Warren if they want to make any progress in 2018 or 2020. Hillary was more center before the primaries, being pulled to the far left hurt her more than any fake "ism" or "phoebe." that the Dems want to blame her loss on.

 

I mean hell the Dem's are labeling one of their own a "sexist" for challenging Pelosi for her positon of minority leader (based on obvious poor performance) which is ridiculous. Until this stuff stops, the Dems won't gain any ground because they can't get elected based on separating people and failing to run on policy.