{"id":180413,"date":"2017-04-26T18:41:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-26T23:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/04\/26\/deep-wisdom\/"},"modified":"2017-04-26T18:41:00","modified_gmt":"2017-04-26T23:41:00","slug":"deep-wisdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2017\/04\/26\/deep-wisdom\/","title":{"rendered":"Deep Wisdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his review of the Clinton campaign tell all Shattered<\/i>, Nathan Robinson and he provides a potent insight, specifically that there a number of factors that had to coincide for Clinton to lose the election, and that the Democratic Party political establishment needs to focus on the ones that are they have control over<\/a>, and those factors are the fault of the Democratic Party political establishment.<\/p>\n

The alleged Russian meddling in the election and Comey’s behavior are both unlikely events, while the fact that the party establishment went all in on the worst possible candidate, and the party’s consultants ran the worst possible campaign.<\/p>\n

The last two items are something that could be fixed the next time around, though it’s clear that neither party establishment, and the consultants who feed off the party apparatus want this to happen, since it means less for them.<\/p>\n

The problem, much like the sitcom Seinfeld<\/i>, the Democratic conventional wisdom calls for the party to be about nothing, and a bad something with bad hair and bad ideas still beats nothing:<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>First, let\u2019s be clear on what we mean by identifying something that \u201ccaused\u201d the result. Because the election was extremely close, and well under 100,000 people would have had to change their minds for the result to be different, hundreds and hundreds of factors can be identified as \u201cbut for\u201d causes of the result, i.e. but for the existence of Factor X, Clinton would have won. So, say we narrow our 500 \u201cbut for\u201d causes down to 4: the Clinton campaign\u2019s incompetence, the Russian leaking of embarrassing internal documents, obstinate voters who refused to come out for Clinton, and James Comey\u2019s letter. If we assume for the moment that we think each of these had an equal effect, we can see how it\u2019s the case that in the absence of any one of them, the result would have changed: <\/span>

<\/span><\/a><\/span>

<\/span>That means that the decision of which factor to pick out for blame is subjective. Since both Comey\u2019s letter and Clinton\u2019s incompetence are equal causes, in that without one of them the result would have tipped in the other direction, the person who blames Comey and the person who blames Clinton are equally correct. Again, the actual chart would have about 5 million causes rather than 4. But the point is that we have to decide which of these causes to focus our attention on. <\/span>

<\/span>Thus the statement \u201cThe Clinton campaign lost because it lacked vision, authenticity, and strategy\u201d is consistent with the statement \u201cIf it wasn\u2019t for James Comey\u2019s letter, Hillary Clinton would have won the election.\u201d But personally, I believe it\u2019s far more important to focus on the causes that you can change in the future. You don\u2019t know what the FBI director will do, and you can\u2019t affect whether he does it or not. What you can do is affect what your side does. So the Democrats cannot determine whether James Comey will choose to give a damning statement implying their candidate is a criminal. But they can determine<\/a> whether or not to run a candidate who is under FBI investigation in the first place. <\/span>

<\/span>Note that even if you think Comey was the major cause of Clinton\u2019s loss, it still might be advisable to turn your attention elsewhere: <\/span>

<\/span><\/a><\/span>

<\/span>If you fix the other things, then even a highly impactful Comey letter won\u2019t tip the election. And correspondingly, even if you prove that Clinton\u2019s own actions were 99% responsible for her loss, a Clinton supporter would be technically correct in identifying Comey as causing the outcome: <\/span>
<\/a><\/span>

<\/span>In any scenario, it\u2019s probably best to figure out what your party itself can do to address the situation. After all, if we\u2019re really adding up causes, Donald Trump himself is probably the primary one, yet it would be a waste of time to sit around blaming Donald Trump, if it\u2019s also true that you ran a horrible campaign that alienated people. <\/span>

<\/span>You can also think certain things acted as precipitating causes without necessarily being at fault. For example, you might think that WikiLeaks was a direct cause of the result, but not think them at fault because it\u2019s their job to post the material they receive. The same goes for the New York Times covering the email story; it might have contributed to the outcome, but you might think this isn\u2019t their fault because they\u2019re journalists and that\u2019s what they do. Likewise James Comey; you might believe he was doing his job as he saw fit. And Bernie Sanders: Clinton may have lost both because she gave speeches to Goldman Sachs and because Bernie Sanders repeatedly criticized her for it, but you might think that one of those things is more justified than the other. There\u2019s a question of which things you can change to improve outcomes, and then there\u2019s a question of which things you should change. In 1992, for example, Bill Clinton realized that Democrats could win more elections if they adopted the Republican platform of slashing welfare and locking up young black men. This did change outcomes. But it was also heinous. And personally, I think you\u2019re changing something about the party, you should change \u201cDemocrats enriching themselves from Wall Street speeches<\/a>\u201d rather than \u201cpeople pointing out that Democrats are enriching themselves from Wall Street speeches.\u201d <\/span>

<\/span>Shattered is both tragic and comic. It\u2019s tragic because Donald Trump becomes president at the end. But it\u2019s comic in that it depicts a bunch of egotistical and hyper-confident people arrogantly pursuing an obviously foolish strategy, dismissing every critic as irrational and un-pragmatic, only to completely fall on their faces. There was, Allen and Parnes tell us, \u201cnothing like the aimlessness and dysfunction of Hillary Clinton\u2019s second campaign for the presidency\u2014except maybe those of her first bid for the White House.\u201d And however horrible it may be to have Donald Trump as commander in chief (it is incredibly, deeply horrible and threatens all of human civilization), reading Shattered one cannot help but get a tiny amount of satisfaction from the fact that Mook and Clinton\u2019s cynical and contemptuous attitude toward the American public didn\u2019t actually produce the result that they were certain it would. One wishes they had won, but one is also a tiny bit glad that they lost. <\/span>

<\/span>Vision, authenticity, strategy. You need to have clear sense of what you want to do and why you want to do it. You need to show people that you mean it and believe in it. And you need to have an idea of how to get from here to there. The Clinton campaign had no vision, was inauthentic, and botched its strategy. But that\u2019s not a problem unique to Hillary Clinton, and singling her out for too much criticism is unfair and, yes, sexist (especially because Bill is much worse). This is a party-wide failure, and it will require more than just banishing the Clintons from politics. If the Democrats are to have a future, they must offer something better, more honest, and more inspiring. With Republicans dominating the government, we cannot afford to end up shattered again.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his review of the Clinton campaign tell all Shattered, Nathan Robinson and he provides a potent insight, specifically that there a number of factors that had to coincide for Clinton to lose the election, and that the Democratic Party political establishment needs to focus on the ones that are they have control over, and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[588,464,689,405,496],"class_list":["post-180413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-fail","tag-good-writing","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-presidential-campaign","tag-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}