Back in January 2017, I insinuated in a blog post that the Democrats - who at the point completely ceased to matter - had thrown away the previous year's presidential election by doing a number of things wrong - mainly by nominating Hillary Clinton, for starters.
Among the other things I accused them of were doing little or nothing to prevent a breach in the Democratic National Committee's computer and blaming the Russians for hacking it, as well as Hillary calling half of Donald Trump's supporters "deplorables." Given how deplorable many of Trump's supporters have proven to be, and given that the Russians really were intervening in the 2016 presidential campaign with memes and bogus stories about Hillary, you might think I have regret and remorse for what I wrote over seven years ago.
Actually, none whatsoever. I've been reading John Judis' and Ruy Teixeira's 2023 book "Where Have All the Democrats Gone?," a dissection of the Democratic Party's failures over the past few decades, and their commentary on Hillary's presidential campaign only reminded me of what a lousy campaign she ran and what a lousy candidate she was. As Judis and Teixeira explain, Hillary largely ran on an agenda aimed at pleasing the coastal white-collar professionals that had sustained the Democratic Party since her husband was elected President in 1992 and discounted - indeed, disparaged - the deindustrialized areas of the interior Northeast and the Great Lakes region that had suffered from Democratic policies toward trade agreements and toward the banking sector. She forgot that the backbone of the Democratic Party was - or, more accurately, had been - the working class that built this country and were now wasting away in blue-collar communities that had lost all of those good manufacturing jobs that sustained their towns and regions. She took a condescending approach to these populations, lecturing them like a schoolmarm for not appreciating how good they would have it under her presidential administration. "Clinton was heard correctly," Judis and Teixeira wrote, "to be voicing the snobbery of the postindustrial metro areas toward the victims of deindustrialization."
And when it came to race and ethnicity, Judis and Teixeira noted that Hillary only proved how clueless she really was. Many of those same working-class voters she disparaged were black men; Republicans have actually made incremental gains among black male voters since 2016. She dismissed the concerns over border security as being anti-Hispanic; in fact, Mexican-American voters in southern Texas have been strong proponents, not opponents, of border security. Trump actually increased his support among Hispanics (and not just Americans of Cuban or Venezuelan origin) in 2020. In a rush to berate Trump supporters over stereotyping racial minorities, Hillary never stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, you should not assume that a black or brown person is going to back you just because you're a Democrat.
As noted earlier, it is true that the Russians were meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and it is also true that many of Trump's supporters were and still are deplorable. But a smart presidential campaign that reached out to blue-collar voters and made a serious effort to earn votes Democrats had long taken for granted could have easily neutralized Putin's meddling. And while Hillary did say that only half of Trump's supporters were deplorable and the other half were simply concerned voters who felt that the "new" American economy hadn't worked for them (the latter part of her quote was forgotten), many Trump supporters who were not deplorable and planned to support Trump despite their personal dislike for his bigotry and arrogance felt compelled to wonder if someone like them was who Hillary was talking about when she called half of Trump supporters deplorable. And was it really half of them? Maybe more like 30 to 35 percent of them, as polls of the MAGA movement have generally suggested, but 50 percent? But even Hillary admitted that she was being "grossly generalistic" in her cursory census of how many Trump supporters were god-awful bigots. Judis and Teixeira discovered in their own research that people who supported Trump in 2016 "were not so much voting for him so much as voting against the elites who were trying to dictate how they talked about race, gender, immigration and a host of other subjects."
Oh yeah, and a lot of people who voted for Trump in 2016 had voted for Obama twice.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in Ohio, where, at her campaign rally in Cleveland, Hillary was joined by Beyoncé (who performed at the rally) and her husband, Mr. Shawn Carter, in an effort to appeal to the cool, hip voters in Ohio without trying to appeal to the machinists, steelworkers and autoworkers who were more likely to listen to Quiet Riot (a heavy-metal band long out of style) on their CD players (because they made too little money to stream and had to rely on obsolete technology). Many of those same blue-collar guys weren't machinists, steelworkers or autoworkers; they had been, but their factories closed down and they were underemployed at the local 7-Eleven . . . and their hometowns ended up looking like this!
For the record, this is an abandoned plant in Mansfield, Ohio, along East Fifth Street on the outskirts of town.
Hillary Clinton's onetime supporters - who continued to revere her for proving that a woman could be a nominee for President of the United States, even though she, umm, lost - continue today to blame Bernie Sanders (who spoke to those same working-class voters the way Trump did), James Comey, Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange for where Trump is today, but they particularly blame the voters themselves. These are the same Hillbots who echoed her dismissals of calls for banking reform ("Yeah, we don't need Glass-Steagall reinstated!"), parroted her basic description of herself as a true liberal ("Yeah, she's a progressive, and she wants to use her power as President to get things done!") and laughed off a certain 2016 Democratic presidential contender who was not named Bernard by his parents ("Martin O'Malley? Ha ha ha ha!"). And they're blaming us for refusing to support a candidate who couldn't connect to the very voters she needed? Who hosted two hip-hop stars in a state where folks still listened to heavy metal? Who never visited a steel mill or a car factory? Who refused Debbie Dingell's pleas to campaign for the Presidency in Michigan, a state she lost along with Ohio? Go home, Hillbots, you're stoned.
Joe Biden, the most working-class-friendly President we've had since Harry Truman, has made great strides as President so far in trying to repair the damage that the Clintons - and let's be honest, Obama too - have wrought to the Democratic coalition with their pro-banking, pro-business, neoliberal economic politics. But he's only been able to go so far with his support for building new factories, his support for transportation infrastructure, the Chips Act, and his pro-union stance. That's why he's still struggling against Trump in the polls and why those of us who have publicly opposed Trump could be a year away from either being locked up or strung up for our opposition. And a second Trump administration would undo, not continue, the progress President Biden has made with rebuilding the working class. Yes, the ghost of Hillary Clinton's political career is still at work.
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