The sorry Democrats, whose blowout in the presidential election of 2016 was indicative of much greater issues, have a lot to introspect on; there’s been a demand for a postmortem on the campaign of Hillary Clinton by big-money donors.
But it doesn’t take a genius or an expensive political consultant to see that the party ignored numerous interrelated problems.
From start to finish, the party of the left took feedback from potential voters and pretty much threw it out the window, choosing a candidate to run their race who was perceived by many to be so thoroughly corrupt that by some measurements she made Richard Nixon (whose potential impeachment she helped prepare Congress for) look more honest by comparison.
Any reasonable political observer could have given ample warning to top Democratic leaders that accepting the Clintons with open arms was an invitation to dance with the Devil. The last four decades have borne witness to scandal after scandal, culminating (before 2000) with Bill Clinton’s own impeachment over the Monica Lewinsky affair in 1998.
If the shenanigans and the corruption had ceased with the end of Bill Clinton’s term in office — if the Clintons had miraculously decided to change their ways — they might have had a chance to return to the White House. But unsurprisingly, this was not to be.
Instead of changing their modus operandi, they took the ball of patronage and benefaction and ran for the Big Leagues, parlaying entrée to Big Government and globalist donors into a personal fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars and billions for their eponymous Foundation.
Right up until the present day, the Clintons continued to operate their ostensibly nonprofit Foundation, despite obvious conflicts of interest and red flags that would have made even an illiterate person suspicious. The State Department emails, Benghazi affair, Filegate, Travelgate, Vince Foster, Whitewater, Norman Hsu… the list of scandals the Clintons have stained their reputation with goes on for days.
And yet, for some reason, the Democratic Party apparatus thought that these people were the best faces it could present to the public in its quixotic quest for another presidential administration. Not only did the party elevate the Clintons on a national stage, it tilted the playing field to a crazy angle, disadvantaging its other major candidate Bernie Sanders, who by many accounts might have turned out more key voters than Clinton was ultimately able to.
WikiLeaks revealed that the Democratic Party had become rotten to the core; instead of merely presenting its candidate to the general public, it was led around by her and given marching orders. One doesn’t have to look further than the fate of former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to see proof of this.
For many voters, any objections they had to the candidacy of Republican nominee Donald Trump were outweighed by the obvious corruption and pomposity of the Democrats and the campaign attitude of Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s public dismissal of Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” was the strongest affirmation of this.
Almost as offensive as Clinton were the people she had working for her, such as her smarmy, smiling campaign manager Robby Mook and her cagey campaign chairman John Podesta. Of the latter, it can be said that the revelations of the WikiLeaked Podesta emails were nearly as damaging — if not more so — than those that besmirched the DNC.
And then there was Huma Abedin and her now-estranged perverted husband, former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. Abedin’s dubious background and near ubiquitous presence around Clinton raised more questions than they answered, and her relationship with horndog Weiner mirrored Hillary’s relationship with perennial philanderer Bill. Is it any wonder that these birds of a feather flocked together? (Bill Clinton even officiated at the wedding of Abedin and Weiner.)
On top of all of this, Hillary Clinton’s health as a campaign issue should have been an immediate disqualifier, but it’s likely that Clinton hid some of this from her own party. And yet, a person of her intellect should have known that at some point her health problems would become publicly visible (as they did), so her putting her party’s election efforts and the funding of her heavyweight donors at risk is just further proof that the Clintons’ Machiavellian ways knew no bounds.
It’s no wonder that Hillary Clinton’s unfavorability ratings were at sky-high, record levels. The refusal by both Clintons to curtail big-money associations and fat-cat fundraising coffee klatches on Martha’s Vineyard even as parts of Louisiana were underwater infuriated alienated voters and convinced many that the Clintons were unabashed tools of globalists and billionaires.
It was all too clear that under Hillary Clinton, the country’s direction would not change for the good; in fact, given ominous rumblings about conflict with Russia and higher taxes for some Americans, it seemed that things were assured to get worse, instead of better. Clinton all but ignored the economic reality of middle America in favor of focusing on narrow audiences of elite voters on the country’s East and West coasts.
Like Obama, Clinton was all about social justice issues, with few words spoken about the economy, jobs or employment. In the end, most of Clinton’s campaign was based on hot air; even a cursory perusal of her campaign website — 85 percent of which was merely a cataloging of reasons why a voter should not have voted for Donald Trump — was a confirmation of this.
If there’s one thing the Democrats can take away from the Clinton campaign, it’s that one can’t win an election by claiming only to be a lesser evil (or a woman).
For the Democrats, there were so many elements of their campaign that were clear mistakes, demographic miscalculations and terrible misjudgments that it’s hard to know even where to begin. A better question to ask instead of what went wrong might be what went right; for the DNC, the answers to this latter question might sadly be few in number.
~ American Liberty Report
