The Huffington Post has climbed in off the ledge long enough to put together a piece that says maybe … just maybe… it was the Clinton campaign’s loss was maybe less about “hate and racism” and maybe somewhat due to “neglect” of the upper midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin, and also Pennsylvania (which is culturally midwestern outside the suburbs of Philadelphia) and “a touch of arrogance.”
In Michigan alone, a senior battleground state operative told HuffPost that the state party and local officials were running at roughly one-tenth the paid canvasser capacity that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) had when he ran for president in 2004. Desperate for more human capital, the state party and local officials ended up raising $300,000 themselves to pay 500 people to help canvass in the election’s closing weeks. By that point, however, they were operating in the dark. One organizer said that in a precinct in Flint, they were sent to a burned down trailer park. No one had taken it off the list of places to visit because no one had been there until the final weekend. Clinton lost the state by 12,000 votes.
Neglect? Sure, I can buy that. Those states that were sneered at as ‘The Rust Belt’ by East Coast liberals were also part of ‘The Blue Wall;’ states that hadn’t gone to a Republican since the 1980’s. And it’s easy to write them off when totes everyone in the media (including the Huffers) was telling her, “This is in the bag for you, Madam President.”
But it was a lot more than just a “touch” of arrogance.
From the outset, the Hillary campaign sought to project a hip, young, urban image. From the choice of hipster Brooklyn for their headquarters, to their appointment of a gay millennial as campaign manager, to campaign themes that reflected the obsessions of urban hipsters: Climate Change, gun control (which did not play well in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, or Wisconsin), socio-ethnic “diversity Pokémon,” feminism, and income disparities. The concerns of the working class were treated as an afterthought that could be assuaged
The insularity of the Clinton campaign was reflected in the graphic design of the ubiquitous “Stronger Together” slogan, rendered entirely in shades of light blue and dark blue. No red. The message was clear. “We’re ‘stronger together,’ without red America.”
So, I imagine that while it’s very likely the HIllary campaign simply took “the Rust Belt” for granted, there was also probably an aversion, a disdain among her staff members for even paying attention to them, much less getting out there and working the streets. “You’re sending me to Michigan?” you can imagine a staffer crying. “Why? What have I done?”
Having grown up in the Midwest and lived for a long time in the environs of Washington DC, I know the attitude people have there toward the Midwest. This Onion Article — DNC Aiming To Reconnect With Working-Class Americans With New ‘Hamilton’-Inspired Lena Dunham Web Series — is one of those satirical piece that cuts so close it’s painful. (Ms. Dunham, BTW, is off talking to rocks {I am not making this up} at an Arizona Spa to cope with the electorate’s repudiation of coastal hipsters.)
it was the Clinton campaign’s loss was maybe less about “hate and racism”
It was all about hate and racism. Hate for the working class white people. If African American conservatives can be labeled “racist against their own”, so can white people.
What I find interesting… this may be the first time in her career that Hill didn’t listen to Bill (or get carried by him). He suggested she wasn’t spending enough time with the “white folk”. She decided to listen to Ada instead. So, we have another instance where Hill can’t be successful without Bill.
I am becoming increasingly certain that the real rift in America is not Democrat/Republican, is not Left/Right. It is Urban/Rural.
Culturally, urban ideas are lionized by the media, while rural ideas are scoffed at and made to look stupid. Country folk can laugh at themselves, but it seems nobody else is allowed to be made fun of…except when it is done by others in their group.
Seriously, how often do you hear redneck jokes? Country folks laugh at them because they are funny and they know that while they may be based on truth, they are not true of everyone.
But when I hear Angelah Johnson do her Vietnamese Nail Salon routine…yeah, I laugh. But can you imagine if Donald Trump were to talk like that. It seems racism is okay as long as you are liberal. Blacks can call blacks the n-word and it is never considered racist. Cracker is cultural, they say, not racist. Of course we all know what would happen if a white person were to call someone black “colored”. Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would ironically condemn it. It’s all the urban idea.
CS: All that is surface. The real rift is (and always will be) Producer vs. Looter.
The political elites are mostly looters; as would be their down-class dependents, mostly (but not entirely) in urban areas.
The Left “should” be against Hillary because of her husband’s rape-yness and her coverup-yness, both harmful to women. But no, they’re for Hillary because she’s one of them; a looter who promotes looting. Likewise, the Left will turn against a person who “should” appeal to them (by identity / characteristics) once it’s clear that the person will get in the way of their looting – via support for budget cuts, law and order, deregulation, etc.
@ILoveCapitalism I wholeheartedly share your theory.
Here, we have *lived* thru it on 3 continents, 3 countries: Colombia, France, USSA.
What were the odds?
You do have a point. There are plenty of poor in Appalachia, but how many of them are on the dole?
Another way to say it. I don’t do “rich vs. poor” politics.
Instead I do “producing rich, middle or poor – vs. – looting rich, middle or poor” politics.
@ILoveCapitalism
Indeed. Ayn Rand settled it, thru her character’s speech
“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
“Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.
So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another–their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich–will not remain rich for long.
They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth.
They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt–and of his life, as he deserves.
“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money–the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue.
In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger.
Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality.
When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming?
Watch money.
Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–
when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–
when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–
when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–
you may know that your society is doomed.
Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence.
Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values.
Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it.
Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’
“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good.
Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral.
Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded.
Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?
YOU are.”
“Ay plegli ianectu flaggen, tupep like for stahn –”
“…And to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
“Spock, I’ve found that evil usually triumphs unless good is very, very careful.”