I suspect we actually know very little about Trump's intentions. I believe that, like Clinton, he was willing to say just about anything to get into office, regardless of what he truly intends.
If anything, I think what killed her is that she is a very unexciting stay-the-course President. No major changes, just incremental improvements. Very likely what is actually happen in any Presidency. What's sad is that the American people punished her for actually being realistic about what a President can actually do.
There's not going to be a new border wall and there's not going to be any more jobs for the middle class. Clinton knows that, Trump doesn't.
I don't see making the case for her "experience" and "qualification" anymore. With all the resources, media, donations, etc she should have had this election in the pocket.
The irony of this failure is that heeding to the message "It's the economy, stupid!" was what put Bill in the White House to begin with.
Also lies and corruption, that's what killed her. But you're right that it would have still been "no major changes" from what she was before.
She had major investors behind her, all that money from speeches, all the media, Obama, the DOJ, people at CNN passing her debate questions before hand. And she still lost. To a TV show star.
I don't buy the idea that was "experienced", "the most qualified", "a good manager". She lost to Trump. That is a fact now. The argument of her competence, integrity, intelligence is very hard to make at this point.
So what do think she should have done better? Did she not lie convincingly enough, and Trump was a better liar?
But yes charisma is often the ability to persuade, and persuasion passes through exaggeration, bravado, and if you are completely lost, lying. Everything indicates Trump is a pathological liar (same with Hillary). But because voters got caught up in his narcissism, he "won" (again electoral college only etc.)
Whether justified or not, many of the Trump voters/fans I've spoken to did not get caught up in Trump's 'narcissism'; they just feel so sick of 'the establishment' that they'd do anything to not get another Clinton in office.
To be clear, I myself would probably have voted for Hillary instead of Trump, because I'm a cautious person and I prefer the 'evil' I know over the unpredictable nature of Trump. But if I squint, so to speak, I could see myself voting for Trump just because I dislike Hillary so much. That in itself scares me a bit (I'm big on LGBT rights and whatnot, on a very personal level).
The reason why I'm pointing this out is that 1) we are now stuck with Trump, so let's try and make the best of it, 2) part of why we got here was the incredibly shallow name-calling and condemnation and stereotyping from both sides, encouraged by the media.
Our best way forward is to try and understand the situation and most important the people involved, and why they voted the way they did, and go from there. And perhaps being honest and factually correct is a good idea too.
Could be further analysis proves you right, btw. But right now I have no reason to believe that most people voted Trump primarily because they got 'caught up in his narcissism'.
She was a lawyer, first lady for 8 years, a senator, and secretary of state. She's incredibly experienced and qualified.
Trump is nothing but lies and corruption. It's hypocritical to whine about Hillary and ignore trump.
I didn't know I was "whining" sorry about that. Will try to keep my tone in check.
> and ignore trump.
Have you read the rest of the posts? Are you responding to the same comment section in HN? There is a lot of stuff being ignored but Trump is not one of those things.
> She's incredibly experienced and qualified.
Let's accept that. How do we reconcile the fact that she completely blew this election? With a star team of strategists, Obama behind her, all the financial support, media helping her every single step of the way, even down to passing her debate questions in advance, all that experience. Out of all people she lost to Trump? What happened there?
Yes Hillary blew the election. In the end Colin Powell was right - whatever she did right she ruined with hubris
The ones I read in Podesta's emails were quite clearly leaked, and then Donna lied about the message being changed by Russia. That was false, because it's DKIM validate and those headers cover the body as well as the headers.
Trump has, in his way, an Obama like gift for getting people excited to vote for him. It makes him look god awful to his opponents, but it gets people to vote.
We don't reconcile them, because while not unrelated, they also aren't tightly correlated. "Experienced and qualified" don't guarantee success in an election (or anything else for that matter). Trump is clearly not experienced politically and a large number of people agree that he's not qualified, yet he still won.
Experienced and qualified people fail at stuff pretty regularly.
Everyone fails. But this was not a simple tactical fail, this is a strategic type long sequence of failures.
> "Experienced and qualified" don't guarantee success in an election (or anything else for that matter).
What good are those things for then? I would imagine such a long experience at being a politician should translate into the ability to manage an election, understanding and communicating the issues to the constituents, seeing what the voters want, and so on.
Really? Because from what I saw, the biggest failure from Hillary was the email scandal, and of course the failure to actually get elected. I didn't see sequence of failures. If anything, Trump had a much bigger sequence of failures, from the tax leaks, to the Trump University fraud, to belittling a former Miss Universe, to the pussy grabbing comments and more. He got elected nonetheless because he managed to sell a message people wanted to hear.
> What good are those things for then? I would imagine such a long experience at being a politician should translate into the ability to manage an election, understanding and communicating the issues to the constituents, seeing what the voters want, and so on.
Those things are helpful, in the same way that being smart is helpful if you're starting a company. But smart people start failing companies all the time and experienced politicians lose elections all the time, too.
I would say the sequence of failures is not understanding what voters were looking for. That didn't happen as a singular event. That happened at first, then later, it happen probably up until she canceled the fireworks show for celebration party. As a politician, knowing what the voters she (hopefully!) planned to represent wanted, should have been one of the top qualification requirements, would you say?
Losing the Rust belt was a major strategic failure. I can understand if it was down to a few electoral votes, could then argue it was random, but it was 60 votes.
> he managed to sell a message people wanted to hear.
But she's been in politics with all that experience. Out of all the people shouldn't she be the one who can sell people what they want to hear? Maybe the idea is that she has a higher integrity than Trump and wouldn't want to do that?
> biggest failure from Hillary was the email scandal,
Email scandal was not one thing. The contents of the emails show sequence of failures.
> If anything, Trump had a much bigger sequence of failures
Exactly, it was terrible, and she still couldn't win. That is just baffling to me.
> Those things are helpful, in the same way that being smart is helpful if you're starting a company. But smart people start failing companies all the time and experienced politicians lose elections all the time, too
That's a fair point I agree with that in general.
You seem to be convinced that experience and qualifications necessarily lead to winning elections, and therefore Clinton's loss proves that she has neither. But this is fundamentally untrue. Many times voters have chosen someone with less experience and weaker qualifications. I'd argue that Clinton was more qualified and more experienced than Obama when he beat her in the primaries. McCain was arguably more qualified and certainly more experienced when Obama beat him in the general election, too. He won because at the time voters preferred his message and his vision.
That makes sense.
Also good point on experience regarding Obama/Clinton/McCain
> I'm not clear where you're going with all this.
Nowhere really. I am just baffled about this and wanted to discuss stuff and see what other people think about it. As much as we don't do political stuff here, this still a more sane forum than reddit for example.
We had no data whatsoever on Trump or the RNC. Beyond his barrage of lies, low-level offenses (paying fines with his nonprofit, bribing elected officials, all that), and alleged sexual assaults, that is. I think he did so many little bad things that the American People couldn't keep track of them, and voted for the interesting television personality.
It is unfair to assume that "no news is good news", but assume we did. The Clinton campaign lost the information war badly. (And apparently against state-sponsored adversaries!)
And what did we conclude from Hillary's emails? That she got paid by investment banks and accepted donations to her Foundation from foreign dignitaries that she interacted with while Secretary of State? While I don't think that influenced her decision-making, the appearance of impropriety is just as bad as actual impropriety, and so I can see why people were upset. But like I said, I trust her decision-making and voted for her anyway, because her positives vastly outweigh her negatives.
(The DNC is another issue altogether, but it's very simple why they didn't support Bernie. They're the DNC, not the "independent who suddenly claims to be a democrat" NC. The system of political parties sucks. But it's the system we set up and keep voting for. I don't think Bernie would have beaten Trump. College students can make some pretty good subreddits and Facebook posts, but they just aren't enough of the electorate. Clinton and Trump both have Very Powerful Friends, and you need them to be elected.)
If the DNC's role in the primaries was replaced with a laptop to add up the popular vote of all of the primaries, all delegates and superdelegates eliminated, the members of the Democratic party who would otherwise be "superdelegates" -- elected Democrats in Congress, top members of the state Committees, past and current Democratic Presidents, Democratic governors, etc -- would still have an outsized influence in backing one candidate or another, because they are influential people with personal experience with the candidates whose opinions are trusted by many people.
Pretending it could be any other way is silly; when I need an opinion on someone, as either a political candidate, a plumber, or a potential new engineering hire, I talk to people who have personal knowledge, whose opinions I trust. Demanding that these people not share their opinions is absurd.
There's also sexism.
Presidents generally do try to fulfill their campaign promises, and building the wall is the biggest, most concrete, and earliest campaign promise he made. Realistically, it's also one of the most straightforward of all his promises to achieve, and at $25-30B it's not very expensive in the grand scheme of a presidency. Its overall effect will be minimal, meaning that it won't wreak havoc, it won't do much good either (in fact it might ironically backfire by keeping people in instead of out), but it will satisfy his supporters.
I'd be interested to know the CO2 estimates for a 5,000 mile wall.
President Obama ridiculed him to his face at the Correspondent's Dinner a few years back. The campaign is a Fuck You to Obama and the rest of the establishment that laughed at him as a lightweight.
He worked very hard and won and now he'll be improvising. He'll have to pay back some people that supported his campaign, many of whom have specific political goals. He'll allow them to work towards those. But apart from a big tax cut for the very rich (strangely) I'm almost certain see that he doesn't care much at all about the rest of his platform. Certainly not the Christian-right stuff.
Maybe he has a real conviction about trade deals. It'll be interesting to see if he moves the needle on any meaningful trade metrics.
That's just my personal impression from listening to him talk.
That said, Trump's candidacy was not enthusiastically received by most of the wealthy conservatives. Carl Icahn and Peter Thiel are the only billionaires that I can think of that supported Trump. Charles & David Koch didn't endorse or fund his campaign or use their political entities to support him.
So your point remains and is good. I wanted to remind the HN audience that the elite is comprised of conservatives too, and they disagree with the liberal elite about much.
I'm guessing that most of the wealth in the Republican party comes from people that are Republicans because they want a lower corporate tax, rather than people that want bans on who can use which bathroom. But somehow they ended up in the same political party.
Maybe not directly, but Pence has pretty strong ties to the Kochs and his nomination as VP was widely seen as a nod to them.
While I give credit that Trump may indeed be well intentioned but the main difference between him and Clinton is that Trump does not understand his words have consequences. Clinton knew to attack Trump the persona and not attack an ethnic group.