How Hillary Went Wrong

I would have bit the bullet and voted for Hillary had she won the nomination (sorry, but I still have some skepticism about the Clintons from Bill's tenure, and rightly or wrongly, it rubbed off on her). (And yes, I'm voting from Canada.) In fact, I was planning on it. But she didn't win, and The New York Times offers some various perspectives on "what happened." I agree with Ana Maria Cox' assessment below: Hillary's campaign played to old fears and paradigms that many of us have left behind.

Hillary Clinton’s 1998 invocation of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” put her squarely among those Richard Hofstadter classified as practitioners of the “paranoid style of American politics,” those for whom “what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”

Barack Obama spoke of a world without these Manichean dualities. He dismissed the notion of “red” and “blue” America. He refused to demonize his preacher or Iran, and painted governance in a palette of grays. Mrs. Clinton could not see anything in terms that were not — it pains me to use this metaphor — black and white.

And similar thoughts from Frank Rich:

Mr. Obama is a liberal, but it’s not your boomer parents’ liberalism that is at the heart of his appeal. He never rattles off a Clinton laundry list of big federal programs; he supports abortion rights and gay civil rights with a sunny bonhomie that makes the right’s cultural scolds look like rabid mastodons. He is not refighting either side of the domestic civil war over Vietnam that exploded in his hometown of Chicago 40 years ago this summer, long before he arrived there.

He has never deviated from his much-quoted formulation in “The Audacity of Hope,” where he described himself as aloof from “the psychodrama of the baby boom generation” with its “old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.” His vocabulary is so different from that of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain that they often find it as baffling as a foreign language, even as they try to
rip it off.

The selling point of Mr. Obama’s vision of change is not doctrinaire liberalism or Bush-bashing but an inclusiveness that he believes can start to relieve Washington’s gridlock much as it animated his campaign. Some of that inclusiveness is racial, ethnic and generational, in the casual, what’s-the-big-deal manner of post-boomer Americans already swimming in our country’s rapidly expanding demographic pool. Some of it is post-partisan: he acknowledges that Republicans, Ronald Reagan included, can have ideas.