I’m struck, reading the angry and confident columns and tweetstorms as the left reckons with its defeat, how much the conversation among Democrats now mirrors the conversation among Democrats after 2004. 

Then, like now, Democrats were shocked by a loss to a Republican they considered obviously unfit to lead, and whose win felt like a fundamental rejection of their worldview. Then, like now, Democrats blamed that loss on losing touch with the white working class. Then, like now, Democrats lamented nominating a charisma-challenged politician who comes off as an out-of-touch elite. The major difference is that the role same-sex marriage played in 2004 — the cultural flashpoint blamed for scaring and repulsing white Midwesterners — is being played by a combination of Black Lives Matter protests, viral comedy videos, and “wokeness” politics now.

The post-2004 consensus was that Democrats had to reconnect with the white working class — they should nominate a culturally conservative populist, like Montana’s Brian Schweitzer, or a smooth-talking Southerner, like John Edwards. And then what they actually did was nominate a liberal African American with the middle name “Hussein.” And it worked. Four years later, they won the White House in a landslide with a coalition that seemed impossible in 2004.

Which is to say that there are many ways to win elections, and when you’re talking about a 2-point swing, there are many ways to make up the gap.

Anyone who didn’t predict Tuesday’s election results should interpret them with humility. I did not predict Tuesday’s election results. So I begin this admitting I don’t really know what happened. 

Worse, Tuesday’s election was more than close. Hillary Clinton looks likely to win the popular vote, albeit by a slim margin. Fewer people voted for Donald Trump’s agenda than voted for her agenda. Fewer people wanted Donald Trump to be president than wanted her to be president.

An argument that makes more sense is one that my colleague Jeff Stein makes: The problem isn’t that Clinton is an elite — Trump, after all, is a self-proclaimed billionaire who wants to deregulate Wall Street, and Obama is the president of the United States. The problem is that Obama and Trump are seen as political reformers and Clinton is seen as politically corrupt. Some of that is fair (the Goldman Sachs speeches) and some of it is unfair — the overblown emails, the disastrous Comey letter, and Americans’ distaste for career politicians — but it perhaps proved deadly. 

Like a lot of journalists, I had a prewrite ready for a Clinton victory. It argued:

There’s deep ambivalence toward Hillary Clinton among people who otherwise share her values, and I think this is the reason why: The system we have is the problem. Hillary Clinton is part of that system. How can she solve the problem when she is the problem?

But Clinton has a different definition of success than the presidential candidates we’re used to. She is not running to change the system. She refuses to paint an inspiring vision of a political process rid of corruption, partisanship, and rancor. If anything, she is contemptuous of the quadrennial promises to remake American politics — she views them as distractions from the hard, important, unsexy work of politics. And she views her appetite for that work, and her readiness to work tirelessly and cheerfully within the system we have, as her core political attribute.

I think there’s a case to be made for Clinton’s political realism. But I don’t think it’s a case Clinton was comfortable making, and it clearly wasn’t a case voters wanted to hear. If exit polls are to be believed, voters thought Clinton cared more about them, had better experience, and had better judgment, but they thought Trump could bring about change.

Read more:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/11/13578618/why-did-trum...

Assange still holds the high side of the street... It is quite extraordinary that a single Australian holed up in a small (now resentful) embassy in London, under the international right of Asylum, can still be at the cornerstone of US politics. And Mueller knows it. He would have to be careful as to manage this dynamic. He would have to guess that the Hillary emails did not come from "Russian" hacks (despite the narrative with no proof) but from within the DNC and that the (real) leaker(s) are now "dead".

With Hillary as President (!), by now, Damascus would have been bombed, Iran would have been bombed — and Russia and China "would be quaking in their boots" (fat chance on this one) but far more international incidents would have been manufactured... If Russiaphobia is high at present, you would have seen it ten times worse under La Woman Warrior Clinton.

Read also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/32971

The former 2016 Democratic nominee who lost to Donald Trump is still thinking about giving it another shot.

“Clinton is telling people that she’s not closing the doors to the idea of running in 2020,” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny said Sunday on “Inside Politics.” “I’m told by three people that as recently as this week, she was telling people that look, given all this news from the indictments, particularly the Roger Stone indictment, she talked to several people, saying ‘look, I’m not closing the doors to this.'”

READ MORE: Graham Plans to Dig Into Clinton, Obama Scandals, Angering Democrats

However, although Clinton is still considering continuing with her plans for the presidency, it doesn’t mean she has made any concrete steps to prepare for a rematch with the current US President.

“It does not mean that there’s a campaign-in-waiting or a plan in the works,” Zeleny said, noting that “it would surprise me greatly if she actually did it.”

Clinton won the popular vote against Trump in 2016, but lost the electoral college, giving him the win and disappointing most of her Democratic supporters. According to the most recent polls, current support for her candidacy is very low, with a negative 32 — 61 percent favourability, according to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted in December. Former US Vice-president Joe Biden remains at the top of a survey of Democratic presidential hopefuls for the 2020 election with a favourability rating of 53 percent among all voters and an 84 percent rating among Democratic voters.

A Clinton spokesman didn’t comment on the report.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201901281071872918-clinton-still-considering-...