Hillary's elitists ignored warnings from working class communities that this was coming... 'In the final months of the brutal and chaotic 2016 campaign, there were plenty of Democratic activists freaking out about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania...' but 'HILLARY' ignored them...
While some in the Democratic Party are blaming everyone but themselves for the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, a look at the bumper stickers and lawn signs that told much of the story of the grass roots election work shows that the anti-Hillary campaign was much more creative -- and explicit -- than the opaque "I'm with..." Hillary H stuff. At their worst, Hillary's bumper stickers (with the arrow and the H only) arrogantly assumed that everyone already knew who "H" was. Likewise, the Clinton campaign returned to the fatal elitist decision making trends of the early 2000s in the Democratic Party, devoting tens of millions of dollars to expensive consultants and ad buys, while refusing to provide grass roots lawn signs and straightforward bumper stickers to the "masses." [Editor's Note: Expensive TV ads and even more expensive consultants may have many ways to taking your dollars in an election campaign, but one way you can tell the extent of enthusiasm at the "grass roots" is by counting lawn signs and bumper stickers. Each is a personal statement, and an opening to neighbors for a political conversation. And it was clear as early as August that the HILLARY campaign was ignoring these indicators of reality at the "grass roots." The rest, as we now know, is history. Donald Trump took over the movement that had been built in part by Bernie Sanders. Hillary's elitists arrogantly disdained it.
Anyone who drove through Michigan in August or September, 2016, as my family did, couldn't help notice that miles of state highways were dotted with 'Trump!' signs. Many were hand-painted, on the sides of barns (and even double-wides), but as you got closer to Chicago, there were also lawn signs -- many of them. Anyone who has done an election at the grass roots knows the importance of lawn signs to voters, especially in a close election: They are an insistence that we have a conversation with our neighbors. And coming from a ward in Chicago where on recent election was won by less than one vote per precinct, I can assure you that we know whereof we speak.
And yet when our family drove home from summer vacation all the way down from Mackinac Island through Grand Rapids into the Chicago area, we saw not grass roots output for "Hillary" -- and much evidence that the grass roots were rooting for Trump. What we didn't know at the time, but know now, was that the official Hillary campaign was not producing or encouraging laws signs or that other necessary grass roots stuff. Hillary's Brooklyn brain trusts had edicted that such campaigning was not necessary.
The self-destruction of the Hillary Clinton campaign was in part a return to the "triangulation" days when Rahm Emanuel and Bill Clinton boxed the Democratic Party into the neoliberal corner from which is never escaped. It was more than that, however. The arrogance of a leadership group that acted as if an expensive Ivy League education indicated that someone was better (and "smarter") than others was also in play throughout the HILLARY phenomenon. The Ivy League arrogance of the Democratic Party leadership had been in evidence from the beginning of the Obama White House (think Arne Duncan and others, as if "Harvard" stamped on your ass meant you had to be listened to...). The Hillary Clinton campaign denigrated the Brooklyn College and local community college realities of the Sanders campaign -- and paved the way for Donald Trump to capture a "movement" that had begun within the working class and lower middle class.
But now we are getting more and more evidence of just how bankrupt the "Hillary" campaign was -- FROM THE TOP. Not only did they produce the worst bumper sticker in election history -- that silly "H" with an arrow that forgot to tell voters who you were supporting, as if they already knew the secret code -- but the worst campaign. Donald Trump didn't win the 2016 election: Hillary Clinton and her elitist grouping lost it. And we are all going to pay the price for a long time to come. Here is another installment in the analyses that aren't getting to everyone. George N. Schmidt, Editor, Substance].
#TOLDHERSO...Team Bernie: Hillary ‘F*cking Ignored’ Us in Swing States
Hindsight is 20/20, but members of Bernie Sanders’s team in critical swing states say they knew Hillary Clinton was going to lose well before Election Day—and their warnings were ignored. Asawin Suebsaeng
Ever since election night — when Hillary Clinton tanked and Donald Trump became the next leader of the free world —t he most prominent allies and alumni of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign have maintained a succinct message for Team Hillary: We. Told. You. So.
In the final months of the brutal and chaotic 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’s fatal shortcomings there. Many of them were envoys of the Sanders camp who wanted to help fix those problems, including Clinton’s difficulties with the block of the mythical “white-working-class,” economically anxious voters who Sanders had championed during the primaries.
“They fucking ignored us on all these [three] battleground states [while] we were sounding the alarm for months,” Nomiki Konst, a progressive activist and former Sanders surrogate who served on the 2016 Democratic National Committee platform committee, told The Daily Beast. “We kept saying to each other like, ‘What the fuck, why are they just blowing us off? They need these voters more than anybody.’”
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 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in July. The purpose of the meeting, which included Clinton’s national political director Amanda Rentería and Team Hillary’s progressive outreach coordinator (and former Sanders senior aide) Nick Carter, was to address the concerns many Sanders camp alums were voicing about Clinton’s strategy going into the general election against Trump. Carter declined to comment on this story.
“Once we were at the convention, Bernie people were on the ground — we could feel it, people were pissed off, there with their pitchforks ready to fight,” Konst recalled. “But before the convention, after the platform committee meeting that I was on, Bernie surrogates were talking constantly, saying, ‘Oh my god, Hillary is going to lose if she doesn’t address TPP and [free] trade and [all these] other issues. We were looking at the polling and thought that if these people stay home, she’ll lose.”
When their meeting finally happened during the Democratic convention, the progressive activists’ fears were only inflamed.
“We were saying we are offering our help — nobody wanted [President] Donald Trump,” Konst continued, noting that the “Bernie world” side was offering Clinton’s team their plans—strategy memos, lists of hardened state organizers, timelines, data, the works—to win over certain voters in areas she ultimately lost but where Sanders had won during the primary.
“We were painting them a dire picture, and I couldn’t help but think they literally looked like they had no idea what was going on here,” she continued. “I remember their faces, it was like they had never fucking heard this stuff before. It’s what we had been screaming for the past 9 months… It’s like [they] forgot the basics of Politics 101.”
As the days and weeks flew by, the Bernie delegation kept underscoring TPP, jobs, union allies, the youth vote, and the environment, and pitched multiple rallies with Sanders in states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan (a state where Sanders unexpectedly beat Clinton in the Democratic primary, and a state that Clinton actively neglected during the general).
“The math that they lost on, is the math we won on,” Konst said. “So we wrote out a plan, and sent it to them, telling them to stop thinking you’re going to get this ‘Obama coalition,’ it’s not going to happen.”
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 “rescheduled” into oblivion.
“We not only screamed about this, we wrote memos, we begged,” Jane Kleeb, Nebraska Democratic Party chair and another Sanders booster who was at the DNC meeting, said. “I spent a good chunk of time writing memos about how [Bernie’s surrogates] could be utilized on the campaign trail, about ‘issue voters,’ about the environment, Black Lives Matter, Dakota Access Pipeline, rogue cops, you name it… I was [also] talking specifically about rural communities, and how [Hillary] completely ignored and abandoned anything that we cared about.”
Kleeb noted that instead of subsequent discussion about battleground strategy and resources, what she got was a handful of conference calls, where Sanders alumni would get to hear about the “three top talking points for Hillary Clinton’s email server, or something.” She said that the only member of Team Hillary who would take them seriously was, unsurprisingly, Carter, who didn’t have much luck convincing the crew leading the Clinton ship to listen more attentively.
“The Clinton campaign believed they had the strongest and brightest people in the room… and they had no concept of why people would choose Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton,” Kleeb continued. “They mocked us, they made fun of us. They always had a… model that was supposed to save the day. We were street activists and they don’t get that. And that’s a fundamental divide. They ran a check-the-box, sanitized campaign. And voters don’t think like that. You don’t win elections that way.”
Rentería, however, saw their meeting, and conference calls, in a different, far less bleak light.
“I think what we took from them on a national message — her tone of ‘our cause is your cause’ at the national convention was the right tone — that really did derive from listening to them in that meeting we had,” Rentería told The Daily Beast. “And in the calls I had with them every other week, we inserted college affordability and climate change at their pushing.”
She went on to say that she had a “deep respect for” what Sanders mounted in the primaries, reserving specific praise for his team’s “really robust online support base.”
“Because we ran such a different campaign in the primary, I think fully integrating [aspects of the Sanders campaign] was a bit more difficult, especially when we were talking about organizing,” she said.
But the fact that much of the Clinton campaign top brass would rebuff the advances of Sanders alumni and allies isn’t in itself shocking. There was a deep hostility fostered in the Clinton team toward the Vermont democratic-socialist senator ever since the primary, during which Hillary’s side repeatedly blamed Sanders’s rival candidacy for weakening her in the run-up to the general.
“To them, we were a leftist nuisance, nothing else,” a former senior Sanders campaign aide said.
On the pro-Bernie wing of the Democratic Party, Clinton, and neoliberal Clintonism itself, were widely viewed as a failure and a cynical sellout of progressive values.
“A ham sandwich could beat Donald Trump,” Melissa Arab, a Michigan delegate for Sanders, told The Daily Beast during a protest outside the Democratic convention in July. “And Hillary cannot beat Donald Trump.”
The ongoing hostilities between the Hillary and Bernie camps all but helped ensure a scenario of missed opportunity, spurned collaboration, and hobbled organizing efforts in the fight against Trump.
“I offered to help and never heard back from anybody—quite frankly, I wasn’t surprised,” Robert Becker, a veteran organizer who ran Iowa and Michigan operations for the Sanders presidential campaign, told The Daily Beast.
“There was no outreach to me… but I did get a call three weeks out [from Election Day] from someone who was in the DNC sounding the alarm [about Michigan],” he said. “They didn’t feel like they were getting strong support from [unions members]… I mean, these trade deals that were going on for decades that were enabled by the Democratic Party in large part, they hurt. [The Clinton campaign] didn’t address the anger about this. We picked up on that during the primary. People were furious at these bad trade deals. We were connecting with those voters in Michigan, Iowa, Wisconsin… Everyone’s trying to point a finger as to what went wrong, and I just point to the operational malpractice.”
Of course, everybody will have his or her own explanation and rationalizations for why Trump was just handed the keys to the White House. The defeated Clinton campaign routinely blames the media coverage of its candidate. It repeatedly blames the Russians, and FBI director James Comey’s letters, for the hard loss. “We weren’t measuring the white vote correctly,” Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, further explained late last month at an event at Harvard University.
“In a race where people wanted fundamental change, Donald Trump sure was a fundamental change,” Mook said. “It was a strength being an outsider.”
And according to the remnants of Team Bernie, Mook and the rest of the Clinton team need to carve out a large space for self-reflection.
“For me this is not about Hillary Clinton, this is about HIllary Clinton’s staff becoming too insular, too professional where regular working-class folks did not matter to them,” Kleeb said. “She had too many people [on her campaign] wearing Prada going into pollster meetings, not enough of us.”
Comments:
By: Rod Estvan
Clinton also alienated white supporters of the 2nd amendment
Well there is another aspect to the appeal of Senator Sanders amongst some white working class voters and their failure to turn out for Sen Clinton, guns. Sanders consistently refused to join the liberal elite in promoting greater restrictions on gun ownership and their reasonable use in the USA, Clinton’s people and she herself attacked Sanders for this repeatedly. That message got through to white gun owners who have voted Democrat for years, Clinton is really anti-gun ownership.
Politico ran a major article on how Sen Clinton tried to use the gun issue against Trump in May 2016 titled “Trump, Clinton gird for epic battle over guns.” In that article this section out at you: “Indeed, her (Clinton’s) full-throated advocacy for gun control is unprecedented for a Democratic presidential candidate (and for her, for that matter), and Democrats down ballot are increasingly following her lead. While she has not called for abolishing the Second Amendment, as Trump has charged, she's pushed hard for ‘common sense gun laws,’ including expanded background checks. She has made exposing the gun industry to liability a central plank of her Democratic primary campaign against Sanders, whose home state of Vermont highly values its gun rights.”
I give Sen Sanders credit for clearly arguing that solutions to murders in Chicago and elsewhere in our country had their roots in social economic causes and not primarily in the availability of guns in America. Sanders did not alienate some of the white working class, particularly in smaller town America, that believe gun ownership is a birth right.
I know at least one white working class American who was raised in the trade union movement who hated Trump and refused to vote for either Clinton or Jill Stein who went even further than Clinton arguing Australia should be a model for US gun control. In Australia following a mass killing all six Australian states agreed to enact the same sweeping gun laws banning semi-automatic rifles and shotguns - weapons that can kill many people quickly. They also put more hurdles between prospective gun owners and their weapons. Australia has 28-day waiting periods, thorough background checks, and a requirement to present a "justifiable reason" to own a gun. Unlike in the US, self-protection is not accepted as a justifiable reason to own a gun in Australia.
There are many aspects to Clinton’s failure to understand the white working class outside of urban centers.
By: John Kugler
Millions Wasted
think about all the resources and money wasted.too bad we can not get a refund.
By: George Schmidt
Armed self-defense in the 'Black Community'...
As everyone who pays attention to real working class history, armed self defense did not begin with the Hollywood-addled prancings of the Black Panthers safely in California in the 1960s.
One of the books sitting on my table tonight is "Negroes with Guns." That came out of a North Carolina NAACP during the early days of the Gandhian version of the civil rights movement. Many who know the grass roots history factually remember that long before the Black Panthers overdid it with their macho strutting, the majority of men and women in America's Black communities had guns -- and let their enemies know they were willing to use them. The survival of families in the Deep South in the face of night riders was based on the shotgun, rifle, and pistol behind the doors and the knowledge that the Klansmen (and women) knew the owners of those homes would use those weapons, even in the dead of night.
When I began teaching in Chicago in the Black community (DuSable, Forrestville, Manley, Marshall, Tilden, etc etc all the way to my last posting, Bowen) once I got to know my Black colleagues (and administrators; I usually worked "under" Black principals and APs) we would discuss the fact that everyone owned a pistol or shotgun.
Despite the liberal illusions about history, gun ownership among Americans has never been a "black versus white" issue. Both "sides" (when there were sides) were armed. And when things got worse and worse with the drug gangs terrorizing the Black community, friends I knew often had to stand their ground (never more than once) against those silly little gangsters.
When I took advantage of my white privileges to work "behind the lines" in the "White Community" or Marquette Park during those nasty years in the 1970s, I always went seriously correct. And that meant having, at the ready, my Walther P-38 (not that puny thingy of James Bond fame, but the serious .38 caliber shoulder holstered piece). I am glad I never had to utilize it when I'd ask those Nazi and neo-Nazi assholes why they were so racist (once, across a table in a bar in "Lithuanian Plaza"), but that was reality.
And it still is.
Among the many delusions of American liberalism and neoliberalism is that the majority of Americans want to unilitaterally disarm. At any major rally, Hillary could have mustered up her own "Second Amendment" people -- were she and her elitist Ivy League patronizing punks not blinded by their own puerile whitwashings of history. Just as our brothers and sisters survived from the Deep South to the South Side against decades of Jim Crow and other nastiness, so we will survive the next few years.
But whether we can survive the illusions of the neoliberals -- epitomized by the arrogance of Hillary's Brooklyn Central Committee -- is another question for another time.
By: bob busch
Monroe NC 1960
Just look that up before you talk about gun control and the role the NRA played in that story.You see the NRA does more than talk the talk.
By: Rod Estvan
NRA case against Chicago
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down Chicago’s 1982 gun ownership ban (McDonald v. Chicago), concluding that the Constitution gives individuals greater or equal power with states on the issue of possession of certain firearms for protection. A community activist from Morgan Park who sought a hand gun to protect himself and his family from gang violence filed the appeal. That community activist was an African American named Ottis McDonald who died in 2014.
Upon winning in the Supreme Court with a legal team sponsored by the NRA and the ISRA in an interview with the Tribune after winning the suit, Mr. McDonald said the journey had been a lesson in history. He had come to understand more about his ancestors and the "slave codes" enacted in Southern states during the Civil War that prohibited slaves from owning guns. After slavery was abolished, states adopted "black codes" that kept guns out of the hands of freed blacks.
"There was a wrong done a long time ago that dates back to slavery time," he said in the interview. "I could feel the spirit of those people running through me as I sat in the Supreme Court."
By: John Kugler
Neo-libreal Facists
Thanks Rod
By: bob Busch
morning report
Merry Christmas, well not so merry for the 52 casualties so far on this holy day. it was 11 0r 12 killed with another night to go.As a NRA member and proponent of the second amendment my heart is very sad.But my mind remembers the 42 years I spent in South Side High Schools and I get angry.Whats going on in the streets of Chicago is War between Drug Nations disguised as gangs.Modern warfare uses firearms as their primary weapons, so just connect the dots.
By: Jean Schwab
Progressive Radio
I listen to Progressive Radio FM 820 - It is interesting and needed. Yesterday a Chicago Public School teacher was talking about our new Secretary of Education. She feels that this women will destroy Public Education, as she has done in Detroit) in her desire to spread her conservative Christian Religion. Did anyone else hear that interview?
By: Al Korach
Hillary
Great Article George, There was another winner in the election. Millions after millions were spent by newspapers, polestars, and others to no avail. Hillary has only to look in the mirror to see who cost her the election. As a good American I will support the new president!!