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Why Clinton Lost: The Nutcracker.
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All day today, the contributing editors will be offering different takes on why Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic primary despite having started as the prohibitive favorite. These essays approach the question from differing angles and are not for the most part mutually exclusive, but attempt to address specific pieces of the complexity of this massive, drawn-out primary process.
I first noticed the nutcracker in late December, next to a rack of doomed "Rudy for President" shirts at a National Airport kiosk specializing in ephemeral topical kitsch. At the time, I was taken aback at the sheer misogynist chutzpah of the product, but I figured that it was a niche political product being sold at a niche political store in a niche political city -- Washington -- and that it would disappear from the shelves in a couple weeks, relegated to fringe online backwaters like the Newsmax store. Yet the nutcracker spread from DCA through the airports of the nation like a tacky virus, and soon one couldn't clear security anywhere without being confronted with its stainless steel thighs. Eventually, the nutcracker escaped from the sterile zones and its TSA protection into mainstream American retail, and became minor fodder for late night comics and "wacky news" types like CNN's Jeannie Moos. But the nutcracker never became a serious news or commentary item -- there was very little discussion, at least in the mainstream media, of what the novelty, and its apparent popularity, said about the 2008 campaign or about the nation itself.
And that was the most remarkable aspect of the nutcracker blight: the manner it which it was just accepted. Here we had a blatantly sexist product which traded on one of the most misogynistic archetypes of the last 50 years -- the castrating, pantsuit-wearing, hyper-ambitious professional woman -- being sold in otherwise anodyne, apolitical stores throughout the country, and no one with a serious microphone was saying anything about it. Anyone with a hint of consciousness about gender politics had to be asking themselves what the hell the deafening silence meant. Is America irredeemably sexist? Does the fact that a similarly racist Obama doll couldn't be sold without massive public outrage mean that casual sexism is more tolerated than casual racism? Would any woman running for president be subject to the same mockery, or is Hillary somehow more susceptible than other female politicians?
I wouldn't begin to presume to try and definitively answer those questions, or to seriously decipher the semiotics of the nutcracker -- at least not in an essay as brief as this. The deeper meaning of the nutcracker is extremely complicated, and myriad intelligent people can and likely will construct wildly divergent hypotheses about its importance and message. But I can, without any hesitation or reluctance, conclude that the existence of the Hillary Nutcracker is symptomatic of a contempt that seriously compromised Hillary Clinton's electoral chances. Regardless of whether people wanted to dehumanize Hillary Clinton personally, or ambitious women generally, the nutcracker was symbolic of their endeavor. Regardless of whether any woman would have been as open to the mainstreamed sexist attacks to which Hillary was subjected, the nutcracker showed that in 2008, it was OK to mock Hillary Clinton -- at least -- as a castrating bitch. The nutcracker was a perfect, plastic, $19.95 incarnation of the invective of Chris Matthews and Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson and every other talking head who used explicitly sexist language to demean Hillary Clinton with relative impunity. And just as we wonder whether Tweety and Rush and Tucker would have gotten away with it if their target had been, say, Sebelius or Napolitano rather than a woman who had been hated by factions on both the left and right for over 15 years, we wonder whether a Napolitano Nutcracker would be blithely accepted by the American public.
But you don't need to know the answer to that question to know that Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign was deeply hurt by a casual, mainstream sexism that earned far less of a backlash than one would have hoped when she entered the race.
For that, all you need to know about is the nutcracker, and the silence that attended it.
Trapper John
Why Clinton Lost
Sexism
Hillary Clinton
president
2008 elections
primaries
Democrats
Mon, 09 Jun 2008 05:07:01 GMT
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Why Clinton Lost: The Obama Express
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All day today, the contributing editors will be offering different takes on why Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic primary despite having started as the prohibitive favorite. These essays approach the question from differing angles and are not for the most part mutually exclusive, but attempt to address specific pieces of the complexity of this massive, drawn-out primary process.
To this point, a good bit of the focus of our symposium has been on the reasons Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 Democratic nomination, as opposed to the reasons Barack Obama won it.
This makes sense, in a way. From an analytical standpoint, it's probably best to focus on the tactical mistakes of the past, rather than the tactical successes. My father was a leading academic in the field of technology and operations management; he first became well known for a 1984 paper which posited that it is best to study "things gone wrong" on the factory floor, on the assumption that things that go well are already understood.
So it is, in a sense, with the Obama and Clinton campaigns. We can point rather easily to Obama's most striking successes; no Democratic presidential candidate in the near future, for example, will underplay the importance of caucus states in their election strategy.
Nevertheless, I think that it's somewhat difficult to analyze Clinton's downfall, without studying vis-a-vis the successes of her former opponent. So I'm going to pose the question of just how difficult, or even impossible, Obama's own strengths as a candidate and strategist made Clinton's ultimate victory.
Put another way: amid all the talk of Clinton's inevitability, was Obama the unstoppable one all along?
Some of you probably think that's a silly question to even ask, and I understand why. Despite Obama's political blessings manifold, Hillary Clinton had the kind of institutional support and engendered the kind of unswerving loyalty in such a broad base of supporters that only the best of candidates could have overcome her advantages.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Barack Obama is a genuine phenomenon, the greatest phenomenon in the party since at least Bill Clinton (and I seriously doubt that that has escaped the attention of Clinton himself). He has been a major factor in spurring Democratic primary turnout to record numbers (although Hillary Clinton and frankly George W. Bush deserve some credit for that too). He has raised astonishing amounts of money from astonishing numbers of individual donors. We've all seen the crowds large enough to fill football stadiums, the lines at school auditoriums wrapping three times around the block, all holding their breath for a glimpse of Barack Obama. We've all borne witness to the passion he engenders even in people who have not been especially political for most of their lives.
I was in college in Illinois, watching Obama's Senate race, when he burst onto the national political scene in 2004 with his now-legendary speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. Being on an Illinois college campus for Obama's birth as a political rock star was a political experience unlike any I'd seen. I got back for fall quarter in 2004 and the Obama buttons, stickers and signs were everywhere, rivaling even the Kerry stickers for prominence. Because of his victory that fall, and Kerry's loss, Obama became the most popular politician on campus even before he took office in the U.S. Senate; he enjoyed such widespread adulation that it was almost off-putting (in the way that you're almost annoyed when an indie band you know and love suddenly hits it big, and then everybody and his brother has their T-shirt).
On paper, it's difficult to draw up a more appealing candidate than Barack Obama. He is young, attractive, extremely intelligent and well-spoken, and has a fascinating variety of life experiences. Furthermore, his youth and relatively recent appearance on the national scene (though coupled with a very prominent national profile) left Obama in a uniquely strong position to position himself as a "change candidate", in a year when the electorate was desperate for anything other than what we've seen since Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House.
Kos wrote "If Obama runs, he wins" in 2006. When Obama started to seriously consider running for the presidency, I myself assumed that he would be the nominee if he wanted to be (I didn't start to support Hillary Clinton until late summer 2007). I figured that Obama was the most charismatic figure in the party, had the largest and most flexible established following, and represented an obvious and appealing change from the last six years.
So I think that while several mistakes were made by the Clinton campaign, it's entirely possible, even probable, that Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee today, four elections out of five. It so happens that this time, she went up against a candidate kissed by the gods, and even so, we saw a historically close result in the Democratic primary.
As georgia10 wrote earlier, it's arguable that the greatest failure of the Clinton campaign was to fail to recognize (or alternatively, to dismiss) the genuine movement that was Obama 2008. I'm not so sure. To me, the story of the Clinton campaign since the Iowa loss has been an effort to contain that movement, whether by publicly dismissing it, or by galvanizing other parts of the electorate by pursuing a demographic-oriented strategy, or by publicly dismissing the impact of Obama's victories in smaller states by claiming victory in larger ones.
You know, all the things that drove you crazy about the Clinton campaign if you're an Obama supporter.
All of them, I suspect, were reactive to having confronted the scope and depth of the Obama movement and trying desperately to minimize its impact.
I think that since Iowa, the Clinton campaign has been quite aware that they were up against a behemoth they could not control. They have used almost every strategy in the book to try and contain that behemoth, and they came damned close to so doing, but ultimately, not even a candidate with the strength and support of Hillary Rodham Clinton could contain the Obama phenomenon.
How long has the campaign been out of Clinton's control? Since Super Tuesday? Since South Carolina? Since Iowa? I don't know, although I'd say that given her early decision to abandon caucus states to Obama (she figured she'd never need them, and that was probably the most critical mistake her campaign made), her last real chance to win the primary was on Super Tuesday. She had many chances to win this race; hell, if she'd voted against the IWR initially, there wouldn't have been much of a 2008 race in the first place. Still, I seriously doubt that Hillary Clinton would not be the nominee today, if anyone other than Barack Obama had been her primary opposition.
As many of you probably know, I was an avowed supported of Hillary Clinton (which is interesting, because if you look at my profile as a young, well-educated, politically active, ethnic minority liberal male, I should by all rights be Obama's core voter). I supported Clinton more out of what I envisioned her presidency to be, rather than what I saw out of her as a candidate.
That is how she sold herself, too, from the beginning of her campaign; she was a future president first, a candidate second.
Generally, it may be a bad strategy to do this. But against someone like Barack Obama, almost no one in the world will ever be the stronger "candidate". So in a sense, perhaps Hillary Clinton made the only smart play in crafting her campaign strategy-she sold what she had to sell, and it just didn't work out.
Was Obama unstoppable? Certainly not. But Clinton's loss is, I think, as attributable to a freakish set of circumstances (the presence of an exceptional candidate uniquely well positioned to present himself as an agent of change in an election in which the nation was begging for change), as to any mistakes made by her campaign team (and there were several, as the other front-pagers have written today). She could have won this race, of course she could have, and she nearly did. But I think it's an open question whether Hillary Clinton lost this election, ultimately, or whether Barack Obama won it.
