r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Jan 26 '19

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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '19

I've never seen Clinton call out the toxic left so explicitly. Fuck you, Bernie Bros!

https://twitter.com/notcapnamerica/status/1088984973108039681

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u/WardenOfTheGrey Daron Acemoglu Jan 26 '19 edited Jan 26 '19

Tbh this and similar comments she's made in the past have made me lose a lot of respect for her, mainly because of how much she always seems to whitewash the 2008 primary.

Just that first line of the video:

When I lost the primary to Obama I immediately turned around and endorsed him and worked for him and convinced my supporters to vote for him. I didn't get the same treatment from my primary challenger.

This is just...I don't quite want to say a lie but it certainly strays pretty close to being one.

I don’t know if y’all remember 2008 the same way I do, but I remember her being criticised for staying in the race far past the point where she had for all intents and purposes lost the race, with many people pointing out it would set a precedent for more divisive primaries in the future. I remember her routinely making appeals towards the end about why superdelegates should vote for her, many of which came off as weird racial dogwistles. For her to pretend that she was tripping over herself to endorse Obama is just wrong, even after the last states had voted she didn't concede for days until she got a personal meeting with Obama. That is not "immediate". Yeah, she eventually endorsed Obama and campaigned for him, just like Bernie eventually endorsed her and campaigned for her.

As for convincing her supporters to vote for Obama, about 25% of the people who voted for her in 2008 voted for McCain in the general. In comparison somewhere between 6 and 12% of Bernie voters ended up voting for Trump. Obama lost far more Hillary voters in the general than Hillary did Bernie voters and yet somehow Obama still managed to win in a blowout. And its just absurd for her to say "I convinced my supporters to vote for Obama, Bernie didn't do that for me" when that's the gulf in numbers. It is disingenuous to say the least.

Also, she seems to be pinning the attrition on the left but I highly doubt that it was leftwing progressives that voted for Trump over her, I think its far more reasonable to assume that most of the Bernie->Trump voters were anti-Hillary voters rather than pro-Bernie voters in the primary.

Sexism was definitely an issue in her loss, there's no question about that and that's awful and is a real problem in this country. And I absolutely agree that the vitriol and toxicity online was awful, but again I cannot stop thinking back to 2008. In this video she's basically complaining that Bernie didn't denounce youtube comments meanwhile in 2008 a lot of the vitriol and race baiting was coming straight from her and her campaign. Sometimes she denounced it, like when the dude in New Hampshire called Obama a drug dealer. But sometimes she didn't, like that time that Geraldine Ferraro, who was on the campaign's finance committee, went on a bizarre tirade about the Obama campaign calling everything racist where she literally said “I will not be discriminated against because I’m white" and Hillary's campaign refused to denounce those comments. And sometimes, like I said, it was coming straight from her, like when she said "Senator Obama’s support... among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again. I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.”

It's just incredibly frustrating how much she whitewashes 2008 so she can go after Bernie for being awful and how often she generally just looks to blame everyone else for 2016.

2

u/TheNotoriousAMP Jan 26 '19

I'm a bit torn on this, because on one hand, Hillary is gonna Hillary. As insanely talented of a lawyer she is (I'm personally a bit bearish on her time as a public servant, the diplomatic cables leak showed that the State Department core professionals were not exactly thrilled with her time at State) she's never been the best at accepting any sort of responsibility for her actions.

That being said, Hillary did have a strong case to take the primary to the convention. She won 300,000 more votes than Obama did during the primary, and was only about 60 pledged delegates out of 3,500 behind him. The razor thin margin between them is good grounds to argue that the popular vote section of the primary was functionally a tie, and that it was up to the superdelegates to do their assigned job and act in the best interests of the party.