Tuesday, November 29, 2016

They Had One Job

As I've said, I was never too critical of the actual Clinton campaign (though prominent Clinton surrogates, whose actual "connection" to the campaign is always debatable, were almost universally horrible). At least to the extent that I could see what they were doing, they seemed to do about what they could given the cards they were dealt. Some of those cards, like the media coverage, were unfair, but you go to campaign with the media you have. Some of those were the fault of Hillary Clinton, and it isn't echoing a right wing smear to say so, a claim oddly regularly made by many. Right wing smears are bullshit things like Benghazi which are basically made up in the fever swamps. Things that are true that right wingers pretend to care about and left wingers actually do care about aren't right wing smears. That right wingers are full of shit hypocrites doesn't invalidate all criticisms.

Monday morning quarterbacking - figuring out went wrong, with hindsight - is a certainly fair to engage in, but it isn't necessarily an indictment of the people involved. Hindsight makes everything clearer, or so it seems at least.

But a bunch of people assumed the responsibility of protecting the nation from Donald Trump. This wasn't a game, a sportsball contest, this, you know, mattered. And they lost. Jeebus help us all because of it. Most of them aren't going to see their family members be deported or die of pregnancy complications. With great responsibility comes great responsibility. They took on a job, and they fucked it up. They lost the election to Donald Fucking Trump.

As for all of the absolutely horrible non-campaign surrogates, I suppose it depends on what they thought their job was. That's the problem with the modern cable news and twitter campaign. I used to think Dems needed to close the hack gap, but that assumed our hacks would be any good. They weren't.

On Earth-2, Clinton might be president right now. A couple of different dice rolls, a bit of a different wind pattern on the right day, and she would have won. But she didn't, and now we're fucked, and I really don't want to hear much other than apologies from the people who were paid a lot of money to make sure President Trump didn't happen.*

*I say "people who were paid a lot of money" because I've already seen some George Bush-style blame deflecting. You remember those days when the response to "Iraq is a disaster" was "how dare you blame the troops!" Criticizing the Clinton campaign is of course not criticizing all of the people who worked very hard with little authority for little personal reward and little publicity and little future career enhancement. It's the people in charge. Some of them probably didn't even get paid that much money, but were sure of their post-campaign careers. So, same thing.