FEATURE ARTICLE

Temple Chima UbochiMonday, January 30, 2017
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Bonn, Germany

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FACTORS WHICH DETERMINED THE 2016 UNITED STATES' PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION'S (CONCLUSION)

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Continued from Part 13

Do not count your chickens before they are hatched (Aesop) A sleeping shrimp is carried away by the current (Filipino Proverb) Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring (Proverb 27:1)

Hillary Clinton as Factor

illary Clinton, as a democrat, banked on the minorities to help her win, but, more Latinos voted for Trump, a Republican, than in previous elections, despite the fact that he promised to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and is anti-immigration; the blacks didn't vote for her en masse, like in previous elections, and many of them didn't even vote. The fact is that the minorities didn't give their usual full support to Hillary Clinton, as a democrat, on that fateful Election Day.

As stated above, things are changing, and this should be a lesson for the democrats, and just as Bloomberg View noted, the Senate map in 2018 is brutal for Democrats. If Democrats want to get their mojo back, they're going to need to do more than get a small minority of voters to turn out for a march. They're going to need to get back some of those rural votes. To do that, they're probably going to have to let go of the most soul-satisfying, brain-melting political theory of the last two decades: that Democrats are inevitably the Party of the Future, guaranteed ownership of the future by an emerging Democratic majority in minority-white America. This theory underlay a lot of Barack Obama's presidency, and Hillary Clinton's campaign. With President Donald Trump's inauguration, Jan. 20, we saw the results. Why was this such a bad theory? Obama had unusually high turnout and support among black voters. He was also a phenomenally gifted campaigner in his own right, who garnered a lot of extra votes from people of all ethnicities and all walks of life. These two things gave Democrats the illusion that the future was arriving faster than it actually was. When Obama wasn't on the ticket, and minority voting habits returned to a more normal pattern, millions of Democratic votes evaporated.

The widespread expectation that Hillary was going to win made it difficult for her campaign to see weaknesses. Also, Clinton's campaign underestimated the electorate's desire for change, just as The Atlantic added that Clinton need not have wholly ceded white working-class voters to Trump, who won them by a larger margin than Ronald Reagan in his 1984 landslide. Meanwhile, she failed to get young people and minorities-the too-aptly-named "Obama coalition"-excited about her candidacy. Both of those weaknesses, critics say, could be traced back to a message that emphasized social diversity over economic fairness. Trump galvanized white voters without college degrees, particularly in the Rust Belt; Clinton's team calculated that this bloc was a lost cause and could be ignored in favor of focusing on her base and trying to persuade white-collar voters. Bill Clinton reportedly agitated for the campaign to pay more attention to the "bubbas" that had once been his base, only to be rebuffed by a campaign staff that believed his worldview was out of date. Clinton's leisurely pace fed the perception that she thought she was marching to an inevitable coronation. Inevitability didn't work out too well for Clinton in 2008, and it didn't work in 2016, either.

To reinforce the point that Hillary Clinton refused to work hard for the post, thinking that she has already won, because Trump was a "mismatch", she took time off her campaign in August, and didn't even care to visit some states, hoping that they will vote for her, whether or not she goes there, because they have voted for democrats for decades; and when some of her states' agents requested for human capital and other helps, she ignored them. As reported by huffingtonpost.com, the Clinton Campaign was undone by its own neglect and a touch of arrogance, according to some of her campaign staff, who complained that in the key battleground states, calls for help weren't taken seriously enough. The Paper wrote that in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton's staff in key Midwest states sent out alarms to their headquarters in Brooklyn. They were facing a problematic shortage of paid canvassers to help turn out the vote, which were ignored. "It was arrogance, arrogance that they were going to win. That this was all wrapped up," a senior battleground state operative told The Huffington Post. Several theories have been proffered to explain just what went wrong for the Clinton campaign in an election that virtually everyone expected the Democratic nominee to win. But lost in the discussion is a simple explanation, one that was re-emphasized to HuffPost in interviews with several high-ranking officials and state-based organizers: The Clinton campaign was harmed by its own neglect".

Jerry Adler wrote that as we now know, thanks to the hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, Clinton's staffers argued heatedly among themselves about campaign tactics and questioned Clinton's judgment and her reluctance to apologize for mistakes.

Even though some factors have been mentioned for determining Trump's win and Hillary's loss, such as the role of Russian hacking in the election, but Hillary failed to connect with the voters. Even the Speaker, House of Reps, Ryan, said: "I just think what [Hillary Clinton] did not do is connect with people", and he added that even if Putin influenced the election, but he didn't tell Hillary Clinton not to campaign in many swing states, meaning that she has herself to blame for under-estimating Trump.

As I wrote previously, If President Obama's "failure to get things done" frustrated so many people, and made them to vote for Trump, the worst culprit who gave the election to Trump was Hillary Clinton herself. She was uninspiring and hollow during the campaign. She was only interested in attacking Trump's character without talking about the issues the voters are more concerned about. Hillary Clinton underestimated her opponent, and seeing him as having no political base, she thought the election would be a walk over for her, and she decided to go to sleep. It was even reported that Hillary Clinton was so sure of winning that she had lunch with her classmates in Manhattan, on the Election Day, and her guest went home with a souvenir bearing the inscription: Hillary Clinton, President of the United States on it. Yahoo Finance also reported that "Hillary Clinton's aides were so sure she would win that they reportedly popped champagne on the campaign plane on Election Day. Hours later, instead of becoming the nation's first female president, as polls had predicted, Clinton suffered one of the most stunning political defeats in history, and Donald Trump became the new president-elect". Not only that, the democrats were so sure of winning, that they started sharing posts and appointments during the summer, months before the election.

Hillary allowed Trust to ruin her ambition

When things started going wrong, caused by her aides, Hillary Clinton should have sequestered herself and her campaign from those aides to save her ambition, but instead, she still stick with the "liabilities", and they helped pull her down. Trust is good, but a blind one is catastrophic. Jerry Adler wrote that through the series of scandals involving Abedin's husband, touched off by his habit of sending sexually suggestive pictures to strange women, Clinton stuck by her aide. In retrospect it was all too predictable that this association would blow up eventually, as it did when the FBI examined a laptop used by both Abedin and her husband, Anthony Weiner, and discovered a trove of emails to and from Clinton. If anyone on her campaign staff foresaw the potential for this kind of disaster, they evidently didn't bring it up to Clinton, or if they did, she didn't act on it. Cutting ties with Abedin in the midst of that ghastly embarrassment would have been emotionally wrenching for Clinton, who has described Abedin as like a second daughter. It would have been cruel to Abedin, and it would have been, above all, disloyal. But it might have saved the election. As Hillary Clinton left the Capitol after Friday's inauguration, she was accompanied by a familiar figure, her longtime aide and confidante and the vice-chair of her presidential campaign, Huma Abedin. The campaign, and almost certainly Clinton's political career, had ended months earlier, but it was not surprising to see Abedin, who has worked for the former first lady since joining her White House staff as a 19-year-old college intern, still at her side. Whatever you think of the competence of Clinton's staff, there is no questioning the loyalty of the men and (mostly) women in her inner circle. They will be with her, to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, until the last dog dies.

In comparison, that was par for the course for the Trump campaign, transition and administration so far. Trump went through three campaign managers in 2016, and a rumored romance between two key staffers erupted into a messy public scandal during the transition. His combative aide Kellyanne Conway mounted a public Twitter campaign to derail Mitt Romney's possible nomination as secretary of state. Never having held public office, Trump doesn't have a cadre of longtime aides to draw upon, so his inner circle is heavy on family members, including Kushner, and veterans of his real-estate business. Many of his close aides - like Conway, who joined the campaign after working on behalf of Trump's rival Ted Cruz through most of the primaries - are relative newcomers, who make up in ferocity and sycophancy for their lack of deep personal connections to him.

Other salient points here were:

  • The appointment of Supreme Court judges, as Hillary Clinton vowed to name liberal judges to the Supreme Court where they would form a majority, which many saw as a way to further weaken the Constitution's protections of civil liberties, and according to Bloomberg News, this, perhaps, hurt her, as voters may have felt their rights would be threatened.

  • Bad economy and trade deals, as Many Americans, according to The Guardian, were not sold on Clinton's proposals for improving the economy of the nation. Stagnant wage levels and soaring inequality were some of the persistent problems faced during President Barack Obama's rule that were felt by many voters. During his campaigns, Trump successfully convinced them to believe this was caused by bad trade deals and a rigged economy.

  • Nothing new in Clinton's policies, as Clinton, according to Politifact, spent all her time and resources just to promote herself, ignoring that what voters would be looking at was the role she would play as a leader.

Those involved having been wondering what went wrong that they lost an election that was almost in the bag, and one of them is Navin Nayak, the Clinton campaign's head of opinion research, who revealed to CBS News that apart from the FBI Director's letters to the Congress, there were other challenges for Clinton -- like the "inherent desire for change" after two terms with a Democrat in the White House, Clinton's gender, and the challenge of "reassembling" the Obama coalition. Nayak also acknowledged the "slight drop" in African American turnout. The campaign also thought that it had successfully "disqualified Donald Trump, making him unfit to be president," and cited exit polls that showed he was hugely unpopular, and that the 63 percent of voters didn't think he has the temperament to be president. And Clinton, Nayak felt, had won the economic argument, as well. A week before the election, Nayak asserted, there was "no question" that "Sec. Clinton was posed for a historic win." And he lamented that "less than 110K votes out of tens of millions cast on Election Day made the difference in this race."

To conclude: Hillary Clinton's faults unleashed Trump as the president, and today, Americans, and infact, the whole world has started paying huge price for that. Hillary Clinton, and of course, the democrats, should have gotten their act together, and should have saved the world from this schizophrenic fellow called Trump. To summarize, huffingtonpost.com, noted that under the less than ten day old Trump presidency, it seems that every day there's a new war. A war against the facts. A war against the president of Mexico. A war against the media. A war against the environment. A war against NATO. A war against Muslims. A war against our election system. A war against Hollywood celebrities. A war against women's rights. A war against China. A war against presidential etiquette. A war against refugees. Barack Obama's presidency is just a few days into the rear view mirror, and already questions are being raised about whether or not these wars that Trump has incited, will ever end. The sitting president's continued flame-throwing and open hostility towards the world, both domestically and internationally, is increasingly raising tensions inside the United States and abroad, while sowing the seeds of conflict, chaos and instability across the planet. Trump's actions are even raising questions about whether his dangerous and divisive moves are putting Americans, and all of Earth's human inhabitants, on a collision course destined for global war. We sincerely hope not, as this question is downright scary to imagine or even to conceptualize.

At the heart of what makes the Trump presidency so dangerous is his overt willingness to look the American people in the eye- and flat out lie to them.

For me, the worst of Trump is yet to come, and the world should have Hillary to thank for the mess we are about to get into with Trump. It's unfortunate!

TIT BITS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p5yexy0pI0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-J2jI2C3rg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nWGDY_ND70

THE THANX IS ALL YOURS!!!

Continued from Part 13

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IMAGES IN THE NEWS