Notes from the Cafe Fiasco

The Envelope Please

Got the mail yesterday and opened a nondescript envelope from MIT. It was a check for $98,000 (the roll-over from my pension headed to my IRA). But you know, this sort of thing doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it should.

Hillary Needs Women

 

It is not a good day for Hillary Clinton. Not only did she get pasted in New Hampshire yesterday (a shire that has been very good to the Clintons over the years) but she lost a key constituency big time - women.  Hillary undoubtedly thought that she, being the first woman who has a legitimate shot at becoming President, could pretty much take the woman vote for granted. But this was not the case upcountry. She lost to Bernie Sanders by 7 points in the distaff category and that's a lot of women to lose.

This would be bad enough, but her prospects for fixing the situation are not good. Points for your consideration:  

1) The symbology of just showing up as a member of a category doesn't seem to matter much in this election. Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio don't seem to be pulling from their respective minority/majority groups very well. The only identifiable group that seems to have any sway is the evangelical vote, but even that is split between Cruz, Carson, and Trump. Identity politics isn't doing it.

2) What women on the Democratic side seem to want is a commitment to concrete policies that will help them and this, at the moment, seems to imply a clear economic policy or at least an analysis.  As a part of the Good Old Girl network, it's hard to believe that Hillary will be advancing anything that will be anything but the status quo and this hurts her in the main issue of the campaign.

3) I haven't been a organizer in many years, but I don't think that Madeline Albright damning young women to hell if they didn't vote for Hillary probably wasn't a very good tactic. I've found that damning people to hell tends to alienate them. At least that's what my former Catholic friends tell me.

4) Hillary has never totally shed the air of calculated "inevitability" that she had earlier in the campaign. This tends to put people off. People want to be considered for their vote individually (the mantra of someone who knew something about politics - Tip O'Neal) and don't like to be taken for granted. This is especially the case in a Yankee state like New Hampshire. Big no-no Hill.

5) If young women don't understand what it took to get Hillary into the position that she's in, the only people to blame are the people of Hillary's generation who didn't teach them. It could be that women boomers just spent too much time and energy working their own way up the ladder to pay much attention to those behind them (e.g. - Carly Fiorina). This is the difference between being connected to an actual movement and not.

Given all this, I don't have a clue how Hillary fixes this problem. Bernie Sanders seems to have started an actual movement based on an analysis of what's wrong and an agenda for fixing it. He may be right or wrong, but these are two assets that Bernie has that Hillary doesn't. Record numbers of people on both sides right or wrong are involved in politics this year because they don't like what's been going on for the past few years. I would argue that Hillary offers neither Hope nor Change while attempting to wrap herself in the Obama agenda. 

I think that she's got a tough sell if she doesn't change some very basic things in her campaign.