Clinton and the campaigns

It's been interesting looking at the contrast in the campaigns from the two fields this year. The Republican party has been pretty much a dumpster fire from day one, and not just because no one seemed to care enough about Trump to attack him, the campaigns were underfunded and way overspent, Scott Walker dropped out early after basically draining his campaign by the time the first debate rolled around, he spent tens of millions and ended long before the first primary happened, and he was far from the only one.
JEB! The anointed one, the heir to the throne, started out mishandling the most obvious questions possible, that of how his brother responded to 9/11, and went downhill from there, his most egregious example of spending too much money was on the truly bizarre mini DVD player things with a documentary on them that were mailed out en mass to supporters.

I want one of those for my collection.

Anyway, it's a huge pile of egos running amuck, and they had fully internalized the GOPs own message about how experts are not to be trusted, which meant they kept far to tight a grasp on the reins of their campaign, responding to things they should have ignored, ignored what they should respond to, and putting out statements that didn't coordinate with the messaging of the rest of their campaign apparatus.

Trump is by far the worst offender of course, he has been running his campaign as something of a scam as well, putting his own money into it in the form of loans, paying that money back to himself via donations, and spending a lot of that money with companies he owns, he hasn't shown much interest in ad buys or setting up campaign infrastructure because it is much harder to steal the money when you pay it out to employees or media that you don't actually own. He also doesn't care, or even appear to know, what his own staff say to the media, contradicting them on more than one occasion, and even outright telling reporters to not listen to them at all.

The Clinton and Sanders campaign meanwhile showed two ways of doing it right, we'll focus on Clinton because she is the presumptive nominee and I haven't really talked about her in depth in a while.

Clinton's campaign was largely reminiscent of JEB! at the beginning anyway, well funded and supported by the party elites, but she managed to not piss away all that money and goodwill, running a fairly quiet campaign at the start, mostly ignoring the Republican field while her exchanges with the Democratic opponents tended to actually be substantive conversations about policies and so on, not good TV perhaps, but an excellent way to save money and put up a good image. She didn't neglect the dirty part of politics either, which morally I find pretty reprehensible and one of the major arguments against her, but as a strategy in today's climate worked out pretty well, with her surrogates and supporters engaging in a whisper campaign of lies and half truths against Sanders, as well as what is probably, though will likely never be proven in court, organized efforts to suppress his votes.

The woman is a hardcore political operator and her foes would do well to remember that, if the Sanders campaign made any mistakes, it was not accounting for that aspect of the run and assuming that the populist support would overwhelm any opposition, it is my opinion that even without the lies and suppression Clinton would still have won due to her advantage with the establishment, but Sanders ran with a bit too much optimism that because his heart is true it would overcome his disadvantages.
I realize I am oversimplifying here, and Sanders probably was fully aware of some of Clinton's advantages and simply didn't have a way to counter them, but I think enough of my point remains.

I also think that within the next couple cycles, shit like Clinton pulled might not end up being enough to overcome a populist uprising within the Democrats, but that is beyond the scope of today's post.

Clinton made one mistake during the first part of the campaign, she attempted to be likeable, presumably in an attempt to appeal to the millennials, this was a poor decision that resulted in Tweets about emojis as well as the Grillary Clinton apron, which I also covet. Her attempts to be hip just came over as fake and "twee" to me and much of my generation I think, and detracted from her strength as someone who knows politics, has connections, and can get shit done.

I don't want to elect a kindly grandmother, I want to elect a war leader, not that I want a war, this is a metaphor, but the nice person role was played by Sanders, who did it much better than she ever could, probably because he is actually a fairly nice fella, Clinton is not and should not be trying to convince us of this. Given the choice I would have picked Sanders, but since I have Clinton, I want the real Clinton, who can and will cut her opponents off at the knees without mercy should it be required.

To me, this election is less about getting an agenda I support enacted than it is about making sure Donald Trump, or any other figure from the right, does not take the presidency, if the Sanders campaign has pulled the DNC far enough to the right that they are forced to enact some nods towards real progressive policies then that is a bonus as well. But the Supreme Court is too important to give to the GOP and the left has an almost unprecedented opportunity in the next couple cycles to break the Republican stranglehold on progress.

I feel like Clinton has the chops to do that, she sure as hell has the campaign structure to get elected, with a large number of employees, a robust get out the vote organization developed over the last couple elections, and a shitload of money. She is also hiring good people and letting them do their thing, I rather suspect her Twitter account hasn't had a Tweet written by her for months, but whoever they do have in charge has done a marvelous job lately sticking barbs into Trump, and last night the campaign launched Art of the Steal, a site devoted to breaking down exactly how terrible a businessman Trump is, and how odious he is to work for or with. It is slickly designed, well laid out, sharply written, and exhaustively sourced from public statements made by the man himself, as well as interviews and articles written by reputable organizations. Also it has some excellent writing and quotable attacks.

"He's Mitt Romney, but bad at his job."

So yeah, the Clinton we are seeing now is I think a lot closer to the real Hillary, and she should have been out from the first, she may not be the politician we deserve, that was Sanders, but at this point she is the politician we need, and we need her to be destroying her enemies rather than attempting to make friends, we don't have to like her to need what she can do.