If you want to know why Hillary lost—and deserved to lose—go back to Philip Bump’s October 22 story in the Washington Post about how the Clinton campaign considered 84 (eighty-four) different campaign slogans before settling on “Stronger Together.” I missed this story when it first appeared, but it has returned to currency as people continue to pick over the wreckage of the Clintons’ political machine.
Some of these you have to read not to believe, and Bump supplies some fitting commentary:
- Rise Up. You know who says “rise up”? Robots and Chilean freedom fighters. Who does Clinton want America to rise up against? The moneyed elites in Washington? Probably not. (It has been brought to my attention that this maybe has something to do with the play “Hamilton,” so I’m glad it’s in dead last.)
- Because your time is now. Why not just, “You will soon die; vote Clinton”?
- It’s about time — and it’s about you. There’s nothing less about me than someone else running for president.
- Keep moving. The TSA plans to use this for when it runs for president.
And the rest of the list continues in this vein, so read the whole thing. When you go through a process like this to decide your headline message, you don’t have a clear message. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” may be vague, but you at least had some idea what he’s about. Why didn’t Hillary go with an honest slogan, like: “Just give me the damn job, because I want it.”
Meanwhile, Politico has a long story out today about how Clinton lost Michigan, and it makes for schadenfreudetastic reading for its exposure (as it we needed more) of the Clinton campaign’s arrogance and cluelessness:
Everybody could see Hillary Clinton was cooked in Iowa. So when, a week-and-a-half out, the Service Employees International Union started hearing anxiety out of Michigan, union officials decided to reroute their volunteers, giving a desperate team on the ground around Detroit some hope. They started prepping meals and organizing hotel rooms.
SEIU — which had wanted to go to Michigan from the beginning, but been ordered not to — dialed Clinton’s top campaign aides to tell them about the new plan. According to several people familiar with the call, Brooklyn was furious.
Turn that bus around, the Clinton team ordered SEIU. Those volunteers needed to stay in Iowa to fool Donald Trump into competing there, not drive to Michigan, where the Democrat’s models projected a 5-point win through the morning of Election Day.
Michigan organizers were shocked. It was the latest case of Brooklyn ignoring on-the-ground intel and pleas for help in a race that they felt slipping away at the end.
Finally, liberals stamp their feet and insist there’s no voter fraud to speak of (except by Russian hackers), but this Detroit News story is rather curious, no:
Records: Too many votes in 37 % of Detroit’s precincts
Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News.
Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday.
I’m sure the Russians did it.
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