Hillary 2016: Pit the voters against…each other
Does The New York Times anticipate Hillary’s defeat?
The New York Times yesterday featured an article on Hillary Clinton’s electoral strategy for 2016. In short, she apparently is mimicking President Barack Obama’s strategy for his second term.
Instead, she is poised to retrace Barack Obama’s far narrower path to the presidency: a campaign focused more on mobilizing supporters in the Great Lakes states and in parts of the West and South than on persuading undecided voters.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides say it is the only way to win in an era of heightened polarization, when a declining pool of voters is truly up for grabs. Her liberal policy positions, they say, will fire up Democrats, a less difficult task than trying to win over independents in more hostile territory — even though a broader strategy could help lift the party with her.
There’s a phrase in those two paragraphs, “era of heightened polarization,” that’s worth reflecting on. I know how all right thinking people lament the growing partisanship in politics, but there’s a pretty clear cause and effect implicit here, though the Times won’t admit it: Obama in his quest for reelection, pursuing a narrow strategy, has increased the polarization in politics. Clinton plans to follow suit.
I question if this is a wise strategy for Clinton to pursue. I’m not alone.
“If you run a campaign trying to appeal to 60 to 70 percent of the electorate, you’re not going to run a very compelling campaign for the voters you need,” said David Plouffe, a top Obama strategist who has consulted informally with Mrs. Clinton.
Obama could get away with a narrow strategy, regardless of the consequences because he was a known quantity and there were enough true believers who he could convince to get to out to vote. Obama also benefits from being a political celebrity. But Clinton is running for her first term and is unproven as a president, which makes such a strategy riskier. But also the celebrity she has is less due to her own charisma, than to the reflected charisma of her husband.
That last quoted paragraph is notable because of the source. Plouffe (even if he’s informally consulted with Clinton) is widely viewed as the architect of Obama’s successful run in 2008. Why would he get this dig in at the presumed Democratic nominee in 2016?
Noah Rothman characterized Clinton’s run as The Scorched Earth Hillary Clinton Campaign…
Is it possible that the Times is having doubts about Hillary’s candidacy? The political reporting of the Times, as evidenced by its hit piece on Marco Rubio, can’t be viewed as an objective news source but as an adjunct of the Democratic Party. So is this critique of Clinton’s campaign an effort to lay down a marker in anticipation of her defeat saying, effectively, that Clinton had an opportunity to build on Obama’s legacy but blew it?
[Photo: ABC News / YouTube ]
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Her problem is there won’t be a Mittens Romney to run against.
Hellary isn’t running for president.
She’s running FROM accountability. Her campaign is noteworthy for contact only with Deemocrat plants and contempt for the people.
And, as Jonah Goldberg has rightly observed, the Hellary you know now IS Hellary. There isn’t any other.
She would love to be President – or more specifically, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet America – but if she can’t make it, she will stay in the race until it is evident to every potential foreign despot who might have donated that the Clintons no longer have influence to sell.
But Hillary knows the most important thing is for her and Bill to stay out of jail, which is why they used and then wiped their personal server despite the huge political risks. Better to lose an election than a criminal trial, right, Lanny?
Clintons & Obamas hate one another. Obamas want to replace Clintons as a dynastic family. Different forms of poison for America.
Don’t read too much into Obama’s hatred of the Clintons. They’re white and were not early supporters, that’s all.
The Clintons hate him because they see him as the Usurper, an unqualified buffoon (right so far!) who snatched away Hillary’s shiny prize in 2008.
Obama’s arrogant narcissistic personality disorder can not be ignored when evaluating the relationship between him and Hillary.
“Shame on you, Barack Obama” was all the fuel he needed to feed his hatred of them both. Same deal with his hatred of Sarah Palin.
His hit squad went on the attack and the rest is history.
In Dollar Bill Clinton and Barracula you have dueling narcissists. Hard to know which on is MORE sick, since they manifest their pathology differently.
Clinton, at least, had some grounding in the real history of the U.S., while Pres. ScamWOW shows no evidence of that.
The relationship the Clinton’s and Obama’s hold for each other brings to mind the adage of “hold your friends close, but your enemies closer” while the NY Times appears to be assisting in keeping the Obama term legacy intact by administering a drip..drip..drip dosage of relevant reporting on the Clinton Foundation and it’s two primary CEO’s to assure that there be only one successful candidate for this legacy award. Those at the NY Times are hedging their two term candidate as the “winner take all”. Letting Hillary loose in the White House would be the surest way to diminish that legacy. Better a “no body, than the wrong body”. As they have the means to formulate the message on content and substance of the person holding the office, they’ll have 4 years to re-group during the same time they will crucify an elected Republican. That is the nature of the beast.
Mobilizing all the party’s Melowese Richardsons
This is probably, at least in part, coming from that off the record meeting they held with reporters at Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn.
The aides, first of all, were lying.
Allegedly, they were explaining Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy.
In actuality, they were trying to explain away (with untrue answers) some peculiar things that reporters were noticing, particularly her lack of real campaigning – she wasn’t even trying to get news coverage (and of course her not taking questions)
To the question (not that necessarily any such question was asked, but it is something that stands in the air) why wasn’t she holding big rallies, they explained thet she was concentrating on the first primary states. And they went further and said she wasn’t making the mistake she made in 2008 of ignoring states.
The problem with that, is that it does NOT answer the question of why she is not holding big rallies in Iowa or New Hampshire.
Furthermore, her mistake in 2008 was not ignoring the first primary and caucus states, but in ignoring what happened after that, assuming that everybody else would have dropped out. And so she did no planning for the caucuses after the first four or so states in February, 2008. By the time they caught on to this, Barack Obama was in the lead.
Sammy there was also the matter of Florida and Michigan where she said she wouldn’t compete because they were being penalized for holding their primaries too early. She didn’t compete and Obama did. Then with his advantage in part by taking advantage of this, he turned enough super-delegates saying that he was inevitable. (Only after he secured the nomination did he say he would not benefit from the Michigan and Florida delegates.)
Yes, there was the matetr of those two states.
They were supposed to lose all their delegates.
Not quite.
In Michigan her name was on the ballot, and Obama’s wasn’t. And she
campaignedheld fund raisers in Florida in the few days, and held a victory rally scheduled for after the polls closed, while the Obama campaign attempted to sort of hold on to their pledge of not campaigning by attempting, or pretending to attempt, to prevent an ad from running.Hillary Clinton actually won both the Michigan and Florida primaries. Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Joe Biden, and John Edwards had pulled their name off the Michigan primary ballot, but Hillary Clinton, Christopher Dodd and Mike Gravel did not (Dennis Kucinich failed to get his name off the ballot) The other choices were Uncommitted, and Write-in. People for other candidates wer being encouraged to vote uncommitted.
You can see what her strategy was. And Joe Biden accused her of hedging her bets.
She probably always intended to have those states count, and to come out ahead because of name recognition, but didn’t start asking for Michigan and Florida to be given delegates until Friday, January 25, 2008, which was a week and a half after the results were in for Michigan, which voted on January 15, and four days before the Florida primary.
In Michigan she almost couldn’t help but win, but in Florida
apparently felt she had to encourage people to feel that the results mattered.
I really had forgotten the details, and almost the whole episode.
Some facts can be extracted from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Democratic_primary,_2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Democratic_primary,_2008
I left put a word above. She didn’t
campaignhold fund raisers in Florida until the last few days.Superdelegates were added to the Democratic convention after the 1980 election on the grounds this made it easier for Ted Kennedy and it shouldn’t have been so easy. Republicans don’t have them, except for a very few, although most members of Congress and Governors can get themselves included. Superdelegates of course help insiders. Strange, nobody is talking about it yet. Of course, last time, they did tend to follow the committed delegate count.
Hillary was so sure she would win, she decided not to waste any resources in the red states at all. Most of them held caucuses anyway and she assumed she’d win with no problem. Obama used his time to organize those caucus states and in the end they provided the margin of his narrow victory. Remember, even then, he had to shame the Super Delegates who leaned to Hillary that doing what they were designed to do – weed out unqualified candidates who endangered the party – was racist, else he still might not have beaten her at the end.
Not racist – that would not have worked or made much sense, but undemocratic.
Now, caucuses, of course, can be packed. Even with legitimate local voters.
In Texas, which had both a primary and caucuses on the same day, Hillary Clinton won the primary, but lost the caucuses.
The continued referring to her as “Mrs. Clinton” – makes one want to puke.
How about referring to “Mr.Walker,” “Mr. Cruz,” or “Mr. Paul?”
Hillary Clinton is a skank. But perhaps we should call her “Mrs. Skank.”
How ’bout referring to her as: “The former First Lady” …
The question that her aides were trying to explain away was why making many campaign appearances, and when she did, why she didn’t seem to be too interested in getting free media.
And the real answer is, that after the e-mail scandal broke
– broken by the New York Times by the way – she declared earlier than what she had planned to do. She had wanted everybody else to postpone their decisions as well. That would give them less time to organize and to raise money. People might also not bother researching her record. she still doesn’t want to do much.
She’s only doing just enough to avoid the implication she is not running for president. At least for now.
She not only doesn’t want to take questions, she really doesn’t want any coverage at all! because that will mention things that are not so good for her.
Basically, one and half years before the election, she’s trying to run out the clock!! That’s what it really is.
The NYT also hate the Clintons. This piece is simply part of an agenda to get Her Hillaryness out of the campaign, make sure there isn’t another viable candidate (seriously, O’Malley or Sanders???) left at the convention and then draft Sasquatch to keep the Obama Dynasty.
Sorry, but if you think Pinch Sulzberger is that crafty, you don’t know Pinch.
The New York Times likes to crusade against corruption until, sometimes, they wake up and ask themselves, wait a second, who is this helping win the next election?
They don’t think about this till it gets close to the election.
No, Sulzberger, at this point, has no candidate.
If Hillary isn’t running the extortion value of the Clinton Foundation drops precipitously. They haven’t raked in as much as they want yet. If she drops out now they are just two old crooked pols with nothing much to sell. I don’t think she even wants to run, her health is bad and so is old Bill’s. Both of them are running out of gas but have enough fumes left to block a party that turned on them in 2008. Let her run and finish off the Democratic party which may be her intent.
Plus, she wants people to feel that she is the only outlet for whatever it is she is promoting. In advertising this is known as the unique selling proposition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition
http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/5521-unique-selling-proposition.html
http://www.webs.com/blog/2012/10/05/how-to-find-your-companys-unique-selling-proposition-infographic/
Of course her aides put this in a way so this would not sound like an attractive idea to her opponents. This is called doing things to encourage turnout among Democrats.
She’s really trying to motivate nonvoters, who don’t consider themselves anything and also may not be familiar with the type of person Hillary Clinton is.
Does The New York Times anticipate the defeat of “The New York Times?”
Billy the Rapist unleashed once again in the White House. And the bottomless appetite of ambition, need and enablement co-signing his slime. Are we not Blessed…?