HRC and the political moment
I keep thinking that I don’t need to say this any more … and it keeps coming up. So for my own convenience if for no other reason, here is my take on whether Hillary Clinton was a “good candidate” in 2016.
I am not talking here about Clinton’s merits as a potential actual President. Nor am I talking about the tactical particulars of her 2016 campaign. Just whether she was a fundamentally strong candidate.
I submit that she would have been a great candidate for the race everyone thought 2016 was going to be, but the worst possible candidate for the race we actually got.
The lesson of the George W. Bush era was that a Democrat running for President has to face a movement conservative slime machine which can find bullshit to sling at anybody. After they slimed Bill Clinton for a real estate investment where he lost money, they perfected the art and slimed Al “Most Square Democrat” Gore for being a “liar” and slimed John “Sliver and Bronze Star” Kerry for being a coward.
Barack Obama slipped that punch by getting unprecedented Black turnout. But there is no going back to that well; even if Fredrick Douglass and Martin Luther King came back from the dead and ran on a ticket together, I don’t think you could get the same numbers Obama brought out for his historic first.
So the Democrats needed a candidate who could counter the slime machine.
On that basis, Hillary Clinton was the best possible candidate. She had been facing the full force of that machine, under the most intense possible scrutiny, for decades. She knew all of their moves; she had already made every mistake you can and taken every punch they had and lived to tell the tale. Recall that they ground away at the Benghazi pseudoscandal for years, with Congressional subpoena power in their pocket, and couldn't make it stick.
Any other candidate was a risk, might turn out to have some unforeseen vulnerability which the conservative media machine would exploit. Not Hillary Clinton. She was the most thoroughly vetted candidate for oppo research of all time; no conservative was going to come up with new dirt on her, they had already tried everything.
If the Republican candidate for President in 2016 had been a movement conservative — Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or one of those guys — she would have crushed him like a bug.
But that was not the race we got.
Instead of a movement conservative, the Republicans had Donald Trump, buoyed on the enthusiasm of conservative voters disgusted with (or at least tired of) the movement conservatives whom Clinton had spent half a lifetime learning to fight.
To fight Trump, the Democratic candidate had to peel away a few conservatives and conservative-inclined “independents” who were unenthusiastic about Trump. They didn’t even need those voters to switch sides, just to stay home.
Any other candidate could have done it. They could have played left, reaching for “conservatives” who actually like liberal policies but have a taste for conservative rhetoric. They could have played right, promising that they were moderate enough that four years of their Presidency wouldn't be too bad.
But Hillary Clinton could not. For two decades “President Hillary” had been conservative media’s metonym for götterdämmerung, the worst nightmare imaginable. Anyone who gave the least bit of credence to conservative politics could not sit out an election with the Devil Herself on the slate.
That didn't make Clinton’s loss a sure thing; recall that the race was a squeaker. But it did make Hillary Clinton a uniquely bad candidate for running against a unique Republican candidate named Donald J. Trump.
HRC and sexism
Adding another important point I was thinking about during the run-up to the 2020 primaries —
During the 2020 primary campaign the Washington Post ran an article about Elizabeth Warren’s pay as a lawyer in the 2000s, which has been (I think rightly) criticized as creating a false insinuation that there is something scandalous there. On my social media feeds I saw people making comments which cast this as primarily a demonstration of misogyny directed against Warren: “see what happens when a woman gets paid for her expertise” et cetera.
I see a lot of misogyny directed against Warren just as I did against HRC and racist bigotry directed against Obama, because I have eyes and I am not stupid. And there is a whole sexist thing about women being expected to undertake all kinds of unpaid labor.
And. Also. Casting this and other bullshit news media behavior as primarily or simply a question of sexism is dangerously dumb. Just on that example with Warren, it is not hard to see other forces at work, like unreasonable expectations of college faculty. This is about a bigger problem with how American political media works. As I alluded to above, Bill Clinton faced endless bullshit press. As did Al Gore. As did John Kerry. As did Howard Dean. The vast rightwing conspiracy has been working the refs for so long that bullshit press for anyone left of the center of the Republican Party is baked in.
We need to examine how sexism and racism compound and interact with this press dynamic, in order to figure out how to counter these challenges, rather than collapsing all of that into a simple narrative of “see: sexism!” Because when we talk about the sexism of the political press without talking about the rest of its dynamics, we perversely produce sexist blowback.
For a certain kind of Democratic Party booster, focusing entirely on the role of sexism in the 2016 primary and general election campaigns has let them avoid facing failings by — or challenges faced by — the Democratic Party. If you believe that it was nothing other than sexism which denied HRC her place as the rightful President … and see only racism accounting for all of the bananapants bullshit that Obama faced … and you recognize that Trump is a dire threat to the Republic … then one concludes that the only Democratic Party candidate for President who can face Trump is a white guy.
I saw this simplistic thinking about racism and sexism behind for a lot of the hesitation over Warren and support for Buttegeig and O’Rourke and especially Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries, and I think it explains why the Party establishment eventually lined up behind Biden, the old white guy. Biden’s victory in 2020 locked them in to that reasoning.
It is false, and it perversely turns recognition of misogyny into doing more sexism. We need a sophisticated reading which supports us supporting women candidates, rather than refusing to vote in primaries for the candidate we prefer because we second-guess the bigotry of other people.
Brittany Cooper explores this further on Twitter:
I’m still mad. In the first debate with Bloomberg, which had record breaking ratings, Americans watched Warren singlehandedly tank dude’s campaign. It proved she could also handle Trump on a debate stage. Her reward for cleaning up the Bloomberg mess: voters coalescing for Biden.
How gender matters: folks are fine with women doing the custodial work of democracy. Sinking candidates that shouldn’t be there, writing actual plans for the progressive revolution, and in Black women’s case — us showing up to vote as long as we don’t demand too much.
I am still processing Black voter pragmatism in this moment, and trying to do so in ways that respect my deep sense of Black folks as people who care about both progress and democracy. I know essentially that our pragmatism shows that we don’t trust white folks to be progressive.
I get this. But I will say this: Warren is only the candidate that reached out to Black women constituencies early and often, took their pushes and correction, and thought substantively about what Black women’s issues specifically look like. This Black feminist appreciates that.
And though I can’t parse it all this morning, bc I have a plane to get to: it is Black feminists who have worked to crystallize the argument that Black women’s issues matter specificaly, not as an add on to other ppl’s issues. And Warren is only candidate who truly heard that.
Sanders thinks we are covered on his class revolution and Biden thinks that giving us the cherry of a Black woman SCOTUS pick (which Barack should have done) is enough. We would fare better with a class revolution and we deserve to sit on SCOTUS, but we matter in other ways.
So yes, I think gender mattered here. I think far left folks think that class matters more and pragmatic liberal voters think getting Trump out matters most. And I get it but we should ask why a revolution for women is never urgent enough to be a priority. That is all.