Over at New York magazine, pretty smart guy Eric Levitz (unless I’m confusing him with someone else, and I don’t think I am) interviews pretty smart guy David Shor, recently defenestrated from his position at Civis Analytics for, you know, analyzing stuff—i.e., posting a link to a study suggesting that violent demonstrations are, shockingly enough, counterproductive—I definitely did not see that coming. Well, the woke folks hate nothing more than being woken up to their own folly, and Dave paid the price.
Okay, that’s enough throat-clearing and wise-cracking as prelude to what I really wanted to talk about, Dave’s theory as to why Hillary lost in 2016, something I’ve opined about extensively as well. Dave’s short take is this:
The right strategies for politics aren’t actually unclear. But a lot of people on the Clinton campaign tricked themselves into the idea that they didn’t have to placate the social views of racist white people.
Dave is smarter than those paleo-libs who say the Democrats lost because they neglected the white working class, but here’s the thing: Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because she didn’t use the State Department file server. If she had used the fucking file server, there would have been no fucking FBI investigation, no fucking Bill Clinton “accidentally” running into Attorney General Loretta Lynch just to say hello and making it impossible for Lynch to handle the decision whether to prosecute herself, and no opportunity for House Republicans to bully cowardly FBI Director James Comey into grotesquely, and repeatedly, smearing Hillary while at the same time admitting that there was no evidence that she had committed a crime.1
I agree with a great deal of what Dave has to say, but he’s ignoring the obvious: Hillary lost because she gave all the people who had hated her for decades, often with little reason, a whole new reason to hate her. Like so many politicians, she dug herself a hole and jumped into it.
Afterwords
As I’ve said many times, if Hillary Clinton had been a good secretary of state, avoiding confrontation and invasion rather than constantly seeking it, there would have been no Libya and probably no Ukraine, and she would have won almost easily.
1. Comey’s disgraceful performance, which almost surely cost Hillary the election, was very well delineated by arguably my least favorite deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, as I’ve discussed here. The thing is, Rod wrapped his well-reasoned takedown of Comey’s misdeeds in a bewildering tissue of evasions and lies, written, as far as anyone can tell, to give President Trump legal cover for an act of obvious obstruction of justice. Go figure!
