Today is the last day of an interminable primary season. When the sun sets tonight, Democrats will have their nominee, and in a stunning turnaround from six months ago, that nominee will not be Hillary Clinton. So what happened?

In no particular order, this.

If Hillary Clinton hadn't voted for the Iraq War and the subsequent Kyl-Lieberman resolution against Iran, she'd probably be the nominee today.

If Hillary Clinton had fought the Bush administration with the same zeal and fervor she devoted to a contest where she had a personal stake, she would definitely be the nominee today. Her ferocious campaign against Democrats, however, made clear that her all-but silence for the last seven years was not a matter of temperament, but one of calculation. When the country needed a champion - a fighter, as the campaign literature has it - she was quietly nursing her own resources for her own turn in the spotlight. Choices matter.

If Hillary Clinton had been as good a candidate in January and February as she was in May, she would have wrapped this thing up a long time ago. But she wasn't.

If Hillary Clinton had realized that the Democratic Party today is not the same tattered edifice she and Bill left behind in 2000, and adjusted her strategy accordingly, she would have won. As it was, she campaigned against MoveOn, against the netroots, against a fifty-state strategy, in favor of the same blinkered, the-White-House-is-all-that-matters approach that led us to disaster in the nineties.

If Hillary Clinton had realized that her husband was a net liability for her campaign rather than an asset, that would certainly have helped her. As it was, however, Bill's preening on the stage and the thinly-veiled promise of a co-Presidency brought back Clinton fatigue; the unwillingness of the nation to once again be captive to Bill's various narcissistic impulses.

If Hillary Clinton hadn't run a top-down Beltway campaign in an age of universal revulsion with the way things are, she would be the nominee today. What she did instead was to present herself as the person who would fix things for us, instead of as an instrument that would help us help ourselves. Her campaign, starting with "I'm in it to win it", was the kind of disempowering first-person-singular great-leader vision that asked us to simply entrust her with our fates; it was, in short, diametrically at odds with an age that has created a floodwave of personal empowerment and engagement.

If Hillary Clinton hadn't shamelessly played on the divisions in the electorate, seeking to come out with a larger slice of a divided pie, she would have won as well. One of the most disturbing moments of the campaign was her claim in the debates that electing a woman would in itself be historic; she overlooked that "a" woman is not the same thing as "this" woman. There are multiple ironies here, starting with the idea that a campaign and candidate nakedly representing the status quo would hitch onto any struggle for liberation. What happened instead of the intended outcome of this appeal to liberation was this: a lot of people of good will saw the gender appeal as what it was, a simple attempt at extortion. "A" woman is not "this" woman.

If sexism and misogyny hadn't been a factor, she would also have won. But it's not the sexism that her campaign decried; it's the sexism of her own assumptions of what "a" woman must do to get elected, such as, say, voting for an unpopular war. It is the sexism inherent in claiming that opposition to her candidacy was not due to her stances on issues and approaches to politics, but to her gender. That slur, gleefully and cynically used throughout, probably sank her campaign all by itself, given that in a Democratic primary, open accusations of bias are infuriating.

So many Ifs, and these are by no means all of them. If Hillary had had a strategy for after Super Tuesday; If she had competed in caucus states; if she had been a better steward of her money; If she had never hired Mark Penn; If If If.

One thing is clear: it is now over, and the sun is setting on the primary. The next few days will determine whether Democrats take the White House, and what Hillary Clinton's own future will hold.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | | | | |