8 ms·

> at the expense of talking about why she should be president. Hillary couldn't make that argument because it would've drawn more attention to her most damnin

> at the expense of talking about why she should be president. Hillary couldn't make that argument because it would've drawn more attention to her most damning flaw: The fact that she's a textbook demagogue who was on the wrong side of every progressive issue until she found it politically expedient to "evolve". That's why so many people were so passionate about Sanders. You could go back to C-SPAN videos from 1992 and hear him saying the exact same things he said throughout the whole primary season. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vabeos-F8Kk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vabeos-F8Kk

komali2 10y ago
There's that picture of him being arrested during civil rights protests.
weaksauce 10y ago
he would have been something you can set a clock to and someone that was on the right side of history before it was politically expedient to be on.
btkramer9 10y ago
> That's why so many people were so passionate about Sanders. You could go back to CSPAN videos from 1992 and hear him saying the exact same things he said throughout the whole primary season. This was this the exact same case with Ron Paul 4 years ago but it seemed to hardly matter
- 13years 10y ago
  Yes, and the same thing happened to Ron Paul. The RNC colluded to ensure he didn't get the nomination. They actually changed rules during the convention to make sure that couldn't happen. I'm sure if we had wikileaks of the RNC during that time, it would have revealed much of the same type of insider corruption.
  - clifanatic 10y ago
    In fact, I seem to recall that the Ron Paul rule itself helped Trump win the nomination this time around.
  - noobiemcfoob 10y ago
    In response to clifanatic: I believe the Ron Paul rule was seen to block Ted Cruz rather than help Trump (semantics, I suppose).
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    > They actually changed rules during the convention to make sure that couldn't happen. Those knife fights over party rules (especially 40 (b)) made it possible for Trump to get into the running for the nomination, according to many GOP observers. See [1] for an explanation of how. These election results are a political pressure relief valve: significant swathes of the electorate have been systematically excluded and ignored, then they tried to organize in different ways. First culminating in Ron Paul's bid, then a different wave in Bernie Sanders' bid, and enough formed coalitions behind Trump this time around to cost both parties' establishments their desired outcomes. Ignoring such large groups of the electorate for much longer would have cost us much more in the future. There are very big chunks of the population in a lot of pain for going on decades now, and effectively ignoring that is no longer much of an option going forward. I see China possibly facing a similar issue with their rural population at some point in the far future. [1] https://alibertarianfuture.com/2016-election/2016-republican-primaries/rand-paul-explains-rule-40-gop-ron-paul-backfiring/ https://alibertarianfuture.com/2016-election/2016-republican...
- paulddraper 10y ago
  I remember the moderator during one of the 2012 debates reframing a question several times to see if it would change Ron Paul's mind. Ron Paul just kept repeating his position, regardless of how many puppy orphanages were on fire. I am convinced that he did not possess the duplicity of most politicians.
  - perseusprime11 10y ago
    This! As an example, she had her staff draft a tweet, and it goes through a chain of 12 people to approve before it goes live, I am not sure she knew how to connect with real people.
    - rdtsc 10y ago
      She doesn't. Her mistake, and the mistake of everyone around her, including the media which defended and parroted everything she said was to believe they would fool people into thinking she is genuine. A lot of people who voted for her are Democrats -- people she thought she had already in her pockets. Trump wasn't a top candidate, he wasn't the popular one, has said stupid stuff, and yet people disliked Hillary so much, they still voted for him. I looked through some emails, it was entertaining (even though CNN said it is illegal to look through them and only media was special and had to interpret them for us). There was very little in those emails of "Hey how does this help ordinary people, let's do something for them" or "You know, we should just tell the truth, let's not really spin this at all". It is all about how do fool this block "Women, ok, she is a woman, that's easy". Black voters, those are easy... what should we do for them? Organized a rap concert, of course. Because that's not condescending... Let's call Jay-z so he can drop a few N-bombs at them, I hear they like that. She is like the awkward rich person trying to find common ground with peasant that she usually would never associates with and it just looks so fake and stupid... and now more people can see that.
    - VLM 10y ago
      She doesn't. She fought a near perfect 1970s campaign. She got every Columbia school of journalism grad eating out of her hand, total control and ally to the legacy main stream media. Newspapers. Radio. Every academic in the country shilling for her or they lose their position. She had nothing fundamentally new that a 60s radical wouldn't have recognized. There's simply no way she could have lost in 1976. Of course its 2016 so Trump has approx 5 million NEETs on /POL/ shitposting insane memes about nazi frogs into every normies facebook feed on the planet while epic trolling social and legacy media and releasing all the proof of her corruption via email thru hacked servers on wikileaks. He was the only candidate talking about 2010s issues like the result of 1960s immigration reform or the marginalization and hatred of the white working class. He fought a pretty good 2016 campaign. This being 2016 and not 1976 its no great surprise which strategy won. The "R" side needs to take notes that the "D" are likely to make this mistake precisely once. The battles in 2020 and 2024 are not going to be baby boomers still stuck in the '70s losing to '10s millennials again. Also she hates half the country and calls them deplorables. Somehow, oddly, her despising them didn't magically translate into votes. The sense of entitlement is strong with that one...
- kogepathic 10y ago
  > This was this the exact same case with Ron Paul 4 years ago but it seemed to hardly matter Did it though? Did it? [1] [1] https://youtu.be/zaD84DTGULo?t=29s https://youtu.be/zaD84DTGULo?t=29s
- mars4rp 10y ago
  Ron Paul and Sanders should create a 3rd party. they have way more in common than anyone acknowledge.
  - deong 10y ago
    They have the identification of a common problem in common, but their solutions are the complete opposites ends of the spectrum and mutually exclusive. I don't think a 3rd party could exist that met both their goals.
    - hood_syntax 10y ago
      They agree fully on criminal justice reform and the removal of money from politics, at the very least. If I recall correctly, their stances on government surveillance are similar as well.
    - jeffdavis 10y ago
      It would match up quite well with a party platform based on decentralization of power. Libertarian at the federal level, Republican for large states, Democrat for small states and big cities / metro areas, and liberal for small cities or towns. This would allow for a lot of social services, but keep them more localized, so they can serve the population better and be held more accountable. And it would avoid a lot of the problems with big government at the federal level.
      - mars4rp 10y ago
        this is actually really good proposal, and it works for everyone.
Asooka 10y ago
This twitter meme basically sums up my feelings: https://twitter.com/VoteTrumpPics/status/796032206238060545 https://twitter.com/VoteTrumpPics/status/796032206238060545 If you can't open it, it's an exchange between Gimli and Legolas from the LoTR movie. Gimli (wearing Bernie hat): I never thought I'd be fighting side by side with a trumpster. Legolas (with MAGA hat): What about side by side with a deplorable? Gimli (wearing Bernie hat): Aye. Gimli (wearing Hillary for Prison 2016 hat): I could do that. Ordinarily if the choice is bad I'd vote third party, but I really didn't want Hillary in and I was pretty sure this wouldn't be the election when the third party wins it.
greenshackle2 10y ago
Having the same opinion for 24 years is not a virtue. In the (probably apocryphal) words of Keynes: > When someone persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind. What do you do? It's not a sign of vice either; I'm sure he's been believing that the Earth is round for 24+ years, and that's fine. What matters is accuracy, and updating in the face of new evidence, not consistency. Consistency in the face of new evidence is called faith.
- gthtjtkt 10y ago
  > Having the same opinion for 24 years is not a virtue. But being right for 24 years is. She adopted his ideas one by one and then tried to pretend they'd been hers all along. Unfortunately (for her), Democrats aren't that gullible. It was clear that she was only saying what voters wanted to hear, while Bernie truly believed everything he'd been saying for that past 25+ years. Case in point: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/2631 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/2631
  - greenshackle2 10y ago
    Correct, but being right is orthogonal to consistency. If you are exposed to new evidence, and it points in a different direction than your prior belief, being right means changing your mind; if there is no new evidence, or the weight of new evidence points in the same direction, being right means keeping the same belief. All I'm saying is, you can't tout keeping the same idea for years as an unqualified good thing, you have to look at the idea and history in detail, and show that it was a good idea all along. (I'm not objecting to the object-level argument that Clinton does whatever is politically expedient, I'm objecting to the line of argument that it's good for a politician to hold an opinion for a long time, without also showing that the idea is good, and that it was good all along.)
    - noobiemcfoob 10y ago
      > you can't tout keeping the same idea for years as an unqualified good thing If that's the critique you hear when comparing Sanders to Clinton, you're not listening very well. To restate, Sanders didn't just tout the same idea. He's fought for the same core principles throughout his whole career, even when in the clear minority. Overtime, the rest of our culture came around to those ideas (bringing Clinton with it). His virtue isn't his tenacity. It's his progressive thinking.
VLM 10y ago
There's a dependency tree required to get to the point of "vote", and you have to pass thru "respect" first. I disagree with, but respect, Sanders, Stein, Warren, Feingold (and some other lefties). Hillary equals revulsion, repulsion. I can't be talked from "respect" to "vote" with someone I can't even respect first. The D party worked very hard on converting "respect" people to "vote" people. I think they achieved 100% success. The problem is most of the country can never respect her, and there was zero effort put into making her respectable (perhaps it was recognized as impossible?) There's something fundamentally wrong internally with the D party when the ground seems to be crawling with respectable (possibly votable!) candidates but instead we get a movie caricature of Lex Luther combined with a slightly more chicken hawk bloodthirsty Joker from a sequel rejected in the 90s. There's something just horribly fundamentally wrong with how people gain political power inside the D party, resulting in the wrong leaders at the wrong times.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  She'll be within one percentage point of Trump in the end in overall votes (and it looks like she'll beat him actually). All of these commentators seem to be making broad generalizations about the state of politics and how the strategy is obviously going to fail but the reality is that if the election was very slightly different in ways that neither campaign could really control it would've gone the other way. Maybe I'm wrong but all this just reminds me of all of the BS narratives that ESPN concocts to fill air time after football games.
  - eru 10y ago
    Or just watch market commentators talk about stock price movements. Only after they happened, of course.
    - jeffdavis 10y ago
      That's not quite fair. This election was an upset. I think it's quite reasonable to look for an explanation beyond random noise.
  - 10y ago
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
This was actually what I thought was Clinton's best quality. I believe it's called "triangulation" and it means figuring out what compromise can be achieved in the current political circumstances and going with that rather that what you believe to be the one true right answer, if that would lead to less pragmatic progress. Basically, "the perfect is the enemy of the good" applied to politics. e.g. "Don't ask, don't tell" is a crappy policy compared with letting gay people serve openly, but it's an improvement on the status quo at that time which was setting up sting operations to catch out gay servicemen and throw them out of the army. I guess I'm condoning her fighting for something she doesn't truly believe is right, as long as it's better than what's currently the case. Does that make me bad? Does it make her bad?
- fredsir 10y ago
  Might be good if she didn't leave a trail like the one she has left with the Gaddafi, Iraq+Syria and ISIS, Haiti, and so on and so on. Really, she hasn't achieved much good for the world if any. She is good at being a power person in Washington though. I'm not pro Trump, by the way.
  - nickbauman 10y ago
    This Benghazi thing; it's a perfect example of the double standards as applied to Clinton. Prior to Benghazi, were there 13 attacks on embassies and 60 deaths under President George W. Bush. Where was the outrage then? Where were the hearings then?
    - rebelidealist 10y ago
      You missed the point. She was the most vocal about striking Libya in the first place.
      - nickbauman 10y ago
        Like George Bush was vocal about striking Iraq in the first place but got elected twice.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
burke 10y ago
> she's a textbook demagogue I mean, I know people have been redirecting Trump's flaws onto Hillary but this is just hilarious.
alkonaut 10y ago
It's interesting how my own political positions change over time and are completely unrecognizable compared to 20 years ago. I consider it a strength. Yet for a politician it's associated with hypocrisy or triangulation. I'm a big fan of Bernie, but I'm not sure I want a politician with early 90s views of everything...
- itchyouch 10y ago
  It's a matter of fundamental core values applied to situational matters. Opinions and preferences shift as time goes by. The populace sees this in the politicians of today. Bernie's actions are lauded not because they are the same, but because they represent an integrity to the core values of human life & equality. Politicians claim to value life & equality, but manifest their hypocrisy by going to war and endangering soldier's lives for profit. This is the disingenuity of the status-quo politicians.

komali2 10y ago

There's that picture of him being arrested during civil rights protests.

weaksauce 10y ago

he would have been something you can set a clock to and someone that was on the right side of history before it was politically expedient to be on.

btkramer9 10y ago

> That's why so many people were so passionate about Sanders. You could go back to CSPAN videos from 1992 and hear him saying the exact same things he said throughout the whole primary season. This was this the exact same case with Ron Paul 4 years ago but it seemed to hardly matter

13years 10y ago
Yes, and the same thing happened to Ron Paul. The RNC colluded to ensure he didn't get the nomination. They actually changed rules during the convention to make sure that couldn't happen. I'm sure if we had wikileaks of the RNC during that time, it would have revealed much of the same type of insider corruption.
- clifanatic 10y ago
  In fact, I seem to recall that the Ron Paul rule itself helped Trump win the nomination this time around.
- noobiemcfoob 10y ago
  In response to clifanatic: I believe the Ron Paul rule was seen to block Ted Cruz rather than help Trump (semantics, I suppose).
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  > They actually changed rules during the convention to make sure that couldn't happen. Those knife fights over party rules (especially 40 (b)) made it possible for Trump to get into the running for the nomination, according to many GOP observers. See [1] for an explanation of how. These election results are a political pressure relief valve: significant swathes of the electorate have been systematically excluded and ignored, then they tried to organize in different ways. First culminating in Ron Paul's bid, then a different wave in Bernie Sanders' bid, and enough formed coalitions behind Trump this time around to cost both parties' establishments their desired outcomes. Ignoring such large groups of the electorate for much longer would have cost us much more in the future. There are very big chunks of the population in a lot of pain for going on decades now, and effectively ignoring that is no longer much of an option going forward. I see China possibly facing a similar issue with their rural population at some point in the far future. [1] https://alibertarianfuture.com/2016-election/2016-republican-primaries/rand-paul-explains-rule-40-gop-ron-paul-backfiring/ https://alibertarianfuture.com/2016-election/2016-republican...
paulddraper 10y ago
I remember the moderator during one of the 2012 debates reframing a question several times to see if it would change Ron Paul's mind. Ron Paul just kept repeating his position, regardless of how many puppy orphanages were on fire. I am convinced that he did not possess the duplicity of most politicians.
- perseusprime11 10y ago
  This! As an example, she had her staff draft a tweet, and it goes through a chain of 12 people to approve before it goes live, I am not sure she knew how to connect with real people.
  - rdtsc 10y ago
    She doesn't. Her mistake, and the mistake of everyone around her, including the media which defended and parroted everything she said was to believe they would fool people into thinking she is genuine. A lot of people who voted for her are Democrats -- people she thought she had already in her pockets. Trump wasn't a top candidate, he wasn't the popular one, has said stupid stuff, and yet people disliked Hillary so much, they still voted for him. I looked through some emails, it was entertaining (even though CNN said it is illegal to look through them and only media was special and had to interpret them for us). There was very little in those emails of "Hey how does this help ordinary people, let's do something for them" or "You know, we should just tell the truth, let's not really spin this at all". It is all about how do fool this block "Women, ok, she is a woman, that's easy". Black voters, those are easy... what should we do for them? Organized a rap concert, of course. Because that's not condescending... Let's call Jay-z so he can drop a few N-bombs at them, I hear they like that. She is like the awkward rich person trying to find common ground with peasant that she usually would never associates with and it just looks so fake and stupid... and now more people can see that.
  - VLM 10y ago
    She doesn't. She fought a near perfect 1970s campaign. She got every Columbia school of journalism grad eating out of her hand, total control and ally to the legacy main stream media. Newspapers. Radio. Every academic in the country shilling for her or they lose their position. She had nothing fundamentally new that a 60s radical wouldn't have recognized. There's simply no way she could have lost in 1976. Of course its 2016 so Trump has approx 5 million NEETs on /POL/ shitposting insane memes about nazi frogs into every normies facebook feed on the planet while epic trolling social and legacy media and releasing all the proof of her corruption via email thru hacked servers on wikileaks. He was the only candidate talking about 2010s issues like the result of 1960s immigration reform or the marginalization and hatred of the white working class. He fought a pretty good 2016 campaign. This being 2016 and not 1976 its no great surprise which strategy won. The "R" side needs to take notes that the "D" are likely to make this mistake precisely once. The battles in 2020 and 2024 are not going to be baby boomers still stuck in the '70s losing to '10s millennials again. Also she hates half the country and calls them deplorables. Somehow, oddly, her despising them didn't magically translate into votes. The sense of entitlement is strong with that one...
kogepathic 10y ago
> This was this the exact same case with Ron Paul 4 years ago but it seemed to hardly matter Did it though? Did it? [1] [1] https://youtu.be/zaD84DTGULo?t=29s https://youtu.be/zaD84DTGULo?t=29s
mars4rp 10y ago
Ron Paul and Sanders should create a 3rd party. they have way more in common than anyone acknowledge.
- deong 10y ago
  They have the identification of a common problem in common, but their solutions are the complete opposites ends of the spectrum and mutually exclusive. I don't think a 3rd party could exist that met both their goals.
  - hood_syntax 10y ago
    They agree fully on criminal justice reform and the removal of money from politics, at the very least. If I recall correctly, their stances on government surveillance are similar as well.
  - jeffdavis 10y ago
    It would match up quite well with a party platform based on decentralization of power. Libertarian at the federal level, Republican for large states, Democrat for small states and big cities / metro areas, and liberal for small cities or towns. This would allow for a lot of social services, but keep them more localized, so they can serve the population better and be held more accountable. And it would avoid a lot of the problems with big government at the federal level.
    - mars4rp 10y ago
      this is actually really good proposal, and it works for everyone.

Asooka 10y ago

This twitter meme basically sums up my feelings: https://twitter.com/VoteTrumpPics/status/796032206238060545 https://twitter.com/VoteTrumpPics/status/796032206238060545 If you can't open it, it's an exchange between Gimli and Legolas from the LoTR movie. Gimli (wearing Bernie hat): I never thought I'd be fighting side by side with a trumpster. Legolas (with MAGA hat): What about side by side with a deplorable? Gimli (wearing Bernie hat): Aye. Gimli (wearing Hillary for Prison 2016 hat): I could do that. Ordinarily if the choice is bad I'd vote third party, but I really didn't want Hillary in and I was pretty sure this wouldn't be the election when the third party wins it.

greenshackle2 10y ago

Having the same opinion for 24 years is not a virtue. In the (probably apocryphal) words of Keynes: > When someone persuades me that I am wrong, I change my mind. What do you do? It's not a sign of vice either; I'm sure he's been believing that the Earth is round for 24+ years, and that's fine. What matters is accuracy, and updating in the face of new evidence, not consistency. Consistency in the face of new evidence is called faith.

gthtjtkt 10y ago
> Having the same opinion for 24 years is not a virtue. But being right for 24 years is. She adopted his ideas one by one and then tried to pretend they'd been hers all along. Unfortunately (for her), Democrats aren't that gullible. It was clear that she was only saying what voters wanted to hear, while Bernie truly believed everything he'd been saying for that past 25+ years. Case in point: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/2631 https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/2631
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  Correct, but being right is orthogonal to consistency. If you are exposed to new evidence, and it points in a different direction than your prior belief, being right means changing your mind; if there is no new evidence, or the weight of new evidence points in the same direction, being right means keeping the same belief. All I'm saying is, you can't tout keeping the same idea for years as an unqualified good thing, you have to look at the idea and history in detail, and show that it was a good idea all along. (I'm not objecting to the object-level argument that Clinton does whatever is politically expedient, I'm objecting to the line of argument that it's good for a politician to hold an opinion for a long time, without also showing that the idea is good, and that it was good all along.)
  - noobiemcfoob 10y ago
    > you can't tout keeping the same idea for years as an unqualified good thing If that's the critique you hear when comparing Sanders to Clinton, you're not listening very well. To restate, Sanders didn't just tout the same idea. He's fought for the same core principles throughout his whole career, even when in the clear minority. Overtime, the rest of our culture came around to those ideas (bringing Clinton with it). His virtue isn't his tenacity. It's his progressive thinking.

VLM 10y ago

There's a dependency tree required to get to the point of "vote", and you have to pass thru "respect" first. I disagree with, but respect, Sanders, Stein, Warren, Feingold (and some other lefties). Hillary equals revulsion, repulsion. I can't be talked from "respect" to "vote" with someone I can't even respect first. The D party worked very hard on converting "respect" people to "vote" people. I think they achieved 100% success. The problem is most of the country can never respect her, and there was zero effort put into making her respectable (perhaps it was recognized as impossible?) There's something fundamentally wrong internally with the D party when the ground seems to be crawling with respectable (possibly votable!) candidates but instead we get a movie caricature of Lex Luther combined with a slightly more chicken hawk bloodthirsty Joker from a sequel rejected in the 90s. There's something just horribly fundamentally wrong with how people gain political power inside the D party, resulting in the wrong leaders at the wrong times.

tdb7893 10y ago
She'll be within one percentage point of Trump in the end in overall votes (and it looks like she'll beat him actually). All of these commentators seem to be making broad generalizations about the state of politics and how the strategy is obviously going to fail but the reality is that if the election was very slightly different in ways that neither campaign could really control it would've gone the other way. Maybe I'm wrong but all this just reminds me of all of the BS narratives that ESPN concocts to fill air time after football games.
- eru 10y ago
  Or just watch market commentators talk about stock price movements. Only after they happened, of course.
  - jeffdavis 10y ago
    That's not quite fair. This election was an upset. I think it's quite reasonable to look for an explanation beyond random noise.
- 10y ago

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

This was actually what I thought was Clinton's best quality. I believe it's called "triangulation" and it means figuring out what compromise can be achieved in the current political circumstances and going with that rather that what you believe to be the one true right answer, if that would lead to less pragmatic progress. Basically, "the perfect is the enemy of the good" applied to politics. e.g. "Don't ask, don't tell" is a crappy policy compared with letting gay people serve openly, but it's an improvement on the status quo at that time which was setting up sting operations to catch out gay servicemen and throw them out of the army. I guess I'm condoning her fighting for something she doesn't truly believe is right, as long as it's better than what's currently the case. Does that make me bad? Does it make her bad?

fredsir 10y ago
Might be good if she didn't leave a trail like the one she has left with the Gaddafi, Iraq+Syria and ISIS, Haiti, and so on and so on. Really, she hasn't achieved much good for the world if any. She is good at being a power person in Washington though. I'm not pro Trump, by the way.
- nickbauman 10y ago
  This Benghazi thing; it's a perfect example of the double standards as applied to Clinton. Prior to Benghazi, were there 13 attacks on embassies and 60 deaths under President George W. Bush. Where was the outrage then? Where were the hearings then?
  - rebelidealist 10y ago
    You missed the point. She was the most vocal about striking Libya in the first place.
    - nickbauman 10y ago
      Like George Bush was vocal about striking Iraq in the first place but got elected twice.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

burke 10y ago

> she's a textbook demagogue I mean, I know people have been redirecting Trump's flaws onto Hillary but this is just hilarious.

alkonaut 10y ago

It's interesting how my own political positions change over time and are completely unrecognizable compared to 20 years ago. I consider it a strength. Yet for a politician it's associated with hypocrisy or triangulation. I'm a big fan of Bernie, but I'm not sure I want a politician with early 90s views of everything...

itchyouch 10y ago
It's a matter of fundamental core values applied to situational matters. Opinions and preferences shift as time goes by. The populace sees this in the politicians of today. Bernie's actions are lauded not because they are the same, but because they represent an integrity to the core values of human life & equality. Politicians claim to value life & equality, but manifest their hypocrisy by going to war and endangering soldier's lives for profit. This is the disingenuity of the status-quo politicians.