{"id":180824,"date":"2016-12-20T18:49:00","date_gmt":"2016-12-20T23:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/12\/20\/hubris-ate-nemesis\/"},"modified":"2016-12-20T18:49:00","modified_gmt":"2016-12-20T23:49:00","slug":"hubris-ate-nemesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/12\/20\/hubris-ate-nemesis\/","title":{"rendered":"Hubris \u2014 Ate \u2014 Nemesis*"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is new information about the Clinton campaign emerging, and it reveals profound arrogance juxtaposed with an inability to find their ass with both hands<\/a>. One would hope that this would bear negatively on future employment prospects in electoral politics for senior campaign staffers:<\/p>\n

Ever since election night\u2014when Hillary Clinton<\/a> tanked and Donald Trump<\/a> became the next leader of the free world\u2014the most prominent allies and alumni of Bernie Sanders\u2019s presidential campaign have maintained a succinct message for Team Hillary: We. Told. You. So.<\/a><\/p>\n

In the final months of the brutal and chaotic<\/a> 2016 campaign, there were plenty of Democratic activists freaking out about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (the three states that ultimately cost the Democrats the White House) and Clinton\u2019s fatal shortcomings there. Many of them were envoys of the Sanders camp who wanted to help fix those problems, including Clinton\u2019s difficulties with the block of the mythical \u201cwhite-working-class,\u201d economically anxious voters who Sanders had championed during the primaries.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey f%$#ing ignored us on all these [three] battleground states [while] we were sounding the alarm for months,\u201d Nomiki Konst, a progressive activist and former Sanders surrogate who served on the 2016 Democratic National Committee platform committee, told The Daily Beast. \u201cWe kept saying to each other like, \u2018What the f%$#, why are they just blowing us off? They need these voters more than anybody.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Konst and multiple other people involved with these discussions, the Clinton campaign agreed to a meeting with a cadre of Sanders surrogates during the Democratic National Convention<\/a> in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July. The purpose of the meeting, which included Clinton\u2019s national political director Amanda Renter\u00eda and Team Hillary\u2019s progressive outreach coordinator (and former Sanders senior aide) Nick Carter, was to address the concerns many Sanders camp alums were voicing about Clinton\u2019s strategy going into the general election against Trump. Carter declined to comment on this story.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

\u201cWe were saying we are offering our help\u2014nobody wanted [President] Donald Trump,\u201d Konst continued, noting that the \u201cBernie world\u201d side was offering Clinton\u2019s team their plans\u2014strategy memos, lists of hardened state organizers, timelines, data, the works\u2014to win over certain voters in areas she ultimately lost but where Sanders had won during the primary.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were painting them a dire picture, and I couldn\u2019t help but think they literally looked like they had no idea what was going on here,\u201d she continued. \u201cI remember their faces, it was like they had never f%$#ing heard this stuff before. It\u2019s what we had been screaming for the past 9 months\u2026 It\u2019s like [they] forgot the basics of Politics 101.\u201d<\/span>

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

Assurances were then made with various Clinton senior staffers that they would follow through with subsequent meetings and phone calls to address these gaps and warnings. Instead, meetings were canceled and \u201crescheduled\u201d into oblivion.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe not only screamed about this, we wrote memos, we begged,\u201d Jane Kleeb, Nebraska Democratic Party chair and another Sanders booster who was at the DNC meeting, said. \u201cI spent a good chunk of time writing memos about how [Bernie\u2019s surrogates] could be utilized on the campaign trail, about \u2018issue voters,\u2019 about the environment, Black Lives Matter, Dakota Access Pipeline, rogue cops, you name it\u2026 I was [also] talking specifically about rural communities, and how [Hillary] completely ignored and abandoned anything that we cared about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Clinton campaign believed they had the strongest and brightest people in the room\u2026 and they had no concept of why people would choose Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton,\u201d Kleeb continued. \u201cThey mocked us, they made fun of us. They always had a\u2026 model that was supposed to save the day. We were street activists and they don\u2019t get that. And that\u2019s a fundamental divide. They ran a check-the-box, sanitized campaign. And voters don\u2019t think like that. You don\u2019t win elections that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cA ham sandwich could beat Donald Trump,\u201d Melissa Arab, a Michigan delegate for Sanders, told The Daily Beast during a protest outside the Democratic convention in July. \u201cAnd Hillary cannot beat Donald Trump.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(%$# mine<\/i>)<\/p>\n

“Strongest and brightest” is not the proper term. The proper term is “Best and the brightest”, who, after all did SUCH<\/b> good job in Vietnam.<\/p>\n

I suppose that I could psychoanalyze why this happened, but I am an engineer, not a psychologist, dammit.\u2021<\/sup><\/p>\n

*<\/sup>The cycle of the classic Greek tragedy: Hubris \u2014 Ate \u2014 Nemesis translated to Arrogance \u2014 Insanity \u2014 Destruction.<\/span>\u2020<\/sup>
\u2020<\/sup>Apologies to fans of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, etc. for conflating their works and the Clinton campaign.<\/span>
\u2021<\/sup>I love<\/span><\/b> it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is new information about the Clinton campaign emerging, and it reveals profound arrogance juxtaposed with an inability to find their ass with both hands. One would hope that this would bear negatively on future employment prospects in electoral politics for senior campaign staffers: Ever since election night\u2014when Hillary Clinton tanked and Donald Trump became …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[768,807,799,823,816,824],"class_list":["post-180824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-fail","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-politics","tag-presidential-campaign","tag-stupid","tag-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180824"}],"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=180824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}