In defense of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign

A lot of comments about how Joe Biden was the best Democrat in terms of picking somebody to beat Trump in 2020 remind me that I’ve been wanting to make the following point for quite some time.

In sports, a striking phenomenon is that a game can come down to one totally random bounce of the ball at the most crucial moment, and it’s guaranteed that the fans of the losing team will treat the loss as utterly foreordained by the incompetence of the coaches, players, front office, refs etc. etc. Meanwhile fans of the winning team will treat the victory as practically guaranteed all along, by the evident superiority of their heroes in all relevant respects.

This is obviously ridiculous, and just as much so in real life, so-called, as on the playing fields of Eton, where victory in the battle of Waterloo was made inevitable by the character-building virtue amateur sport imbued upon the flower of British manhood (This is why to this very day the billions of dollars generated by college football players must be turned over to university administrators, television executives etc. btw. Because amateur sports are about building character and creating Society’s Leaders, not piling up Smaug-like hordes of lucre).

Anyway.

Hillary Clinton got millions of more votes than Donald Trump, and lost the election in the electoral college because a tiny percentage of the total national vote in a few key states went against her.

Joe Biden got millions of more votes than Donald Trump, and won the election in the electoral college because a tiny percentage of the total national vote in a few key states went in his favor.

It was one freak bounce of the ball, in both cases. It was “inevitable” in retrospect, because everything is inevitable in retrospect.

Also too:

(1) Clinton was battling the deepest, most pervasive, and most intense form of prejudice in society, that is, misogyny, while Joe Biden might as well have been generated by an AI program to be the perfect candidate, demographically speaking — soothing avuncular elderly politically moderate white man — to give our idiot swing voters their longed-for “return to normalcy,” after four years of Trumpian chaos.

(2) Clinton didn’t run a flawless campaign because nobody in the history of the recorded universe has ever run a flawless campaign. A judgment regarding how (relatively) flawed it was can’t be disentangled from the fatalistic psychology of Monday morning quarterbacking, or from the pervasive social prejudice, aka cooties, that cost her the election because she wasn’t a “normal” enough candidate. ETA: I should of course have noted that the elite media treated her horribly, the Russians worked very hard to get Trump elected, James Comey almost surely cost her the election all by himself because of his craven fecklessness, it’s hard for a party to win the presidency three times in a row, and on and on (puts on Sinatra and starts to cry).

I’ve never even particularly liked Hillary Clinton — I saw a photo of her today playing kissy face with Henry Kissinger, that filled me with wordless fury — but the whole she was a bad candidate while Joe Biden was a great candidate thing is misogynistic nonsense from top to bottom, along with a perfect illustration of why the team from my area will defeat the team from your area.