Hillary’s “Loss” Was Hillary’s “Gain?”
P. Schultz
There is a link to an interesting
article, linked below, from The Hill, on why Hillary lost. It is quite good but
I have some thoughts about it.
First off, Hillary only lost in the Electoral
College. She overwhelmingly won the popular vote. But I will come back to that below.
Then, after a few paragraphs
summarizing Hillary’s speech, The Hill gets down to it. "The larger and
most important reason Clinton lost was that she was thoroughly out of touch
with the temper of our times, the mood of the nation and the desire for change.
She ran almost like an incumbent; a candidate of the status quo when Americans
hungered for change."
This is quite good, I think, but is
open to an important change: Hillary did not run “almost like an
incumbent," but exactly like an incumbent. And
here's my question: Is Hillary so stupid that she didn't realize she was
running as an incumbent? While I don't like her much, I do know she isn't
stupid. So, she must not have been all that concerned she might lose, and
neither were the Democrats, because both are vested in the status quo. And what
better way to make the status quo look good than to put Trump in office? Isn't
that a great way to "cure" the people of their "desire for
change?" Makes sense to me and makes sense of the apparently never-ending
campaign to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency.
And this helps to
“make sense” of the fact that Trump did not win the popular vote, but only won
by virtue of the electoral college. This too is a way to undermine the
legitimacy of his presidency. He is president only by virtue of the
undemocratic character of the electoral college, making the legitimacy of his
tenure quite superficial.
And now that Trump
seems insistent on “being Trump,” both Hillary and the Democrats, and anyone
else vested in the status quo, are looking quite good, thereby making it seem
that the American people’s “mood . . . and [their] desire for change” was
inappropriate. Hillary’s real message in her speech was something like this:
“OK, folks, now you see that the status quo, which I represented, wasn’t nearly
as bad as you thought it was. Now, folks, it is time to ‘man-up’ and get back
to the business of governing.”
Sounds like a
“conspiracy theory,” doesn’t it? Well, perhaps it is but then as Machiavelli
knew, modern government – which he invented – itself is nothing but a
conspiracy or series of conspiracies. And, besides, the only thing you have to
put aside to see that the above speculation might be accurate is the myth that
each of the two parties is always trying to win each and every election. And
that this is a myth is almost too easy to demolish by reading some history. I
will leave that up to you.
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