In most nomination battles the front runner wins or there is a single event which is commonly blamed for the loss. Ed Muskie cried in New Hampshire, before the same act gave Hillary Clinton a temporary reprieve. George Romney admitted he was brainwashed about Vietnam, while Hillary Clinton stubbornly refused to admit she was wrong on Iraq. Gary Hart was caught in activities which now sound ridiculously tame after Bill Clinton. This year was unusual in having the front runner both lose and remain in the race for so long with no single moment which caused defeat. In a race which was so close there were many factors which caused the loss, allowing different writers to present different ideas, with many of them being at least partially right. The New York Times presents an assortment of such writing.
Not surprisingly Mark Penn shows a total lack of understanding as to why Clinton lost. He argues that the problem wasn’t the message–it was the money. Hillary Clinton had all the advantages going into this race, including fund raising. If she had the right message the money would have kept coming in. In reality she did raise quite a bit of money, but Barack Obama had the better message and brought in more.
Penn’s problem in advising the Clinton campaign can be seen when he writes, “As the primaries came to an end, she had built a coalition of working-class voters, women, older voters and Latinos, and it held together — and even strengthened — as Barack Obama gained enough superdelegates to put him over the top.” One problem is that she did concentrate on building a coalition based on old fashioned identity politics in an age when voters wanted a change from this mind set.
Clinton not only attracted members of certain groups but she resorted to tactics which repelled members of others. She resorted to racist tactics, losing the black vote. In going after the working-class voters her campaign labeled the rest of us as elitists, ensuring that she would never receive our votes. Such tactics backfired. Not only did she lose the support of many Democrats outside of the groups she attracted, but her tactics also resulted in a backlash causing some members of her core groups, along with party leaders, to also oppose her. As Carl Bernstein wrote, “Faced with unanticipated adversity, Hillary and Bill Clinton took the low road too often, and voters noticed. So did the party leadership and superdelegates, who abandoned her and the idea of a Clinton Restoration.”
Penn also argues that “Experience was a major part of the campaign message” but this did not work when the message was untrue. The media examined her claims and her record and noted that her national security credentials were highly exaggerated, along with all her other claims of being the more experienced candidate. Following George Bush, Obama’s experience in Constitutional law has become far more meaningful than Hillary Clinton’s experience as a first lady. Obama’s experience as a community organizer both paid off in election strategy and in developing his political philosophy. Obama’s message of empowering individuals was far stronger than Clinton’s top-down philosophy of expanding the nanny state.
The other essays vary in their accuracy. Some of the woman writers over emphasize the role of sexism. While some of the media coverage was undeniably sexist, Hillary Clinton was in a position to overcome this if not for her faults. She started out far ahead in the race, which would not have been a possibility if sexism was really all that important this year. Hillary Clinton lost because she was Hillary Clinton, not because she was a woman.
Bob Kerrey understands that this was a battle between two individuals in writing, “I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton with an unusual perspective: I was defeated by her husband in the Democratic presidential race of 1992.” He understands that the mismatch in their political skills was more important than their gender or race:
She shouldn’t be too hard on herself. If Barack Obama had been born 10 years earlier and had been a candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1992, neither I nor Bill Clinton would have defeated him.
Focusing on her mistakes is an exercise in making someone who is already miserable even more so. As is true with every other walk of life, mistakes in politics shrink to insignificance if you win and are magnified beyond their actual importance if you lose.
The hard truth is that from the moment Mr. Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 10, 2007, Mrs. Clinton was facing a candidate with greater skills than any candidate her husband had ever faced in his life.
Rather than looking at this as an isolated race, I prefer to look at this as part of a trend starting in earlier primaries. Often we have had a front runner and establishment candidate facing an insurgent candidate such as Barack Obama. Typically the insurgent is beaten early in the primaries and the establishment candidate goes on to win.
This year was different. As Bob Kerrey notes, the insurgent candidate was far more talented than those running in the past. We have often had the more educated and affluent Democratic voters backing the insurgent, but we lacked the votes to win. This year the addition of the black voters gave the insurgents the majority. This was certainly helped by the tactical errors made by Clinton, including failing to compete in the caucus states and deciding to take the low road which repulsed even many in the party establishment.
Clinton also had the wrong message. This included her support for going to war in Iraq, as Kathleen Hall Jamieson wrote, but extended to other issues. With the conventional wisdom erroneously claiming that the two held the same beliefs most voters were unaware of all the differences, but the core of their beliefs did come through as her similarities to George Bush became increasingly apparent.
Ultimately the campaign lost because of their candidate. Peggy Noonan did a far better job of explaining Clinton’s loss in The Wall Street Journal than any of the writers for The New York Times.
Mrs. Clinton would have been a disaster as president. Mr. Obama may prove a disaster, and John McCain may, but she would be. Mr. Obama may lie, and Mr. McCain may lie, but she would lie. And she would have brought the whole rattling caravan of Clintonism with her—the scandal-making that is compulsive, the drama that is unending, the sheer, daily madness that is her, and him.
We have been spared this. Those who did it deserve to be thanked. May I rise in a toast to the Democratic Party.
They had a great and roaring fight, a state-by-state struggle unprecedented in the history of presidential primaries. They created the truly national primary. They brought 36 million people to the polls, including the young, minorities and first-time voters. They brought a kind of dogged brio to the year.
All of this is impressive, but more than that, they threw off Clintonism. They threw off the idea that corruption is part of the game, an acceptable fact. They threw off the idea that dynasticism was an unstoppable dynamic in modern politics, that Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton could, would, go on forever. They said: “No, that is not the way we do it.”
They threw off the idea of inevitability. Mrs. Clinton didn’t lose because she had no money or organization, she didn’t lose because she had no fame or name, she didn’t lose because her policies were unusual or dramatically unpopular within her party. She lost because enough Democrats looked at her and thought: I don’t like that, I don’t like the way she does it, I’m not going there. Most candidates lose over things, not over their essential nature. But that is what happened here. For all her accomplishments and success, it was her sketchy character that in the end did her in.
If I was Mrs. Clinton, I’d have known (which I’m guessing she did) that there were lines in my D.C. congratulatory speech to Senator Obama that would be booed by my hardcore supporters, who are still licking their wounds.
I would have addressed them right then and there (which she didn’t). If you’re trying to unify a party and a people, you take advantage of a teaching moment like that. Her choosing not to take on the malcontents, who must be turned into Obama allies in order to attain her self-proclaimed goal of having a Dem take back the White House in ‘09, was unfortunate and perhaps telling.
A stern “get over and past it or suffer the consequences of four more years of national decay” would have endeared her to the party and eventually to the nation. It also would have endeared her to the committee vetting possible running mates.