Bloggers and pundits analyzing the Obama-Clinton race have got it backwards. The real question is not "Why did Hillary Clinton lose?" but "Why did a candidate as superior as Barack Obama win by such a narrow margin?" He is the best public speaker in decades, while she has a grating voice and is transparently insincere. He opposed a disastrous and unpopular war while she supported it and refused to apologize. He energized the activist base and she utterly failed to understand it. He ran one of the most competent, disciplined, and efficient campaigns in history, while she ran one of the worst, wracked by infighting, wasting millions on expensive hotels and food and consultants, blowing all the money early and going deep in debt, and failing to study even the basic rules of awarding delegates. He has written and co-sponsored more bills in the Senate in fewer years, and he had more valuable experience and accomplished more in the Illinois legislature than she did being married to the president, where her most notable actions were total failure on health care reform and the humiliation of standing by a cheating husband.
Yet, despite all this, Obama barely squeaked by in the pledged delegate race, winning 1765-1640. (The very idea of the "popular vote" is meaningless because there is no fair way to count primary and caucus states on the same scale.) If Michigan and Florida hadn't moved their primaries, it would have been even closer. If all the caucus states had held primaries instead, Clinton would have won. If Edwards had not dropped out, Clinton would have won. If Mark Penn had run Obama's campaign and David Plouffe had run Clinton's, she would have won in a blowout. If she had just saved some money to stay close in Feburary, the late Appalachian vote might have put her in the lead and won the superdelegates.
It's true that Clinton blew a 30 point lead, but how did she get it in the first place? Obama won 60% of the 18-24 age group, but why not 90%? How did Clinton win almost every county in California at a time when Obama was surging in the delegate count and the media? Who are these 17 million Clinton voters and what were they thinking?
What we should have learned from the 2008 Democratic primaries:
1. Entitlement is a great campaign strategy, if you can pull it off. They say that Americans like an underdog, but there are even more Americans who just want to be on the side that's winning. For example, in 2003 the Detroit Tigers lost so many games that stations in their market started broadcasting Yankees games instead. We are an insecure people who fear making an emotional investment in something that's going to fail, and we are a conformist people who fear going against the crowd. Even most Obama supporters took pleasure from the belief that their candidate was going to win, and Clinton supporters became furious when their guaranteed win fell through their hands, which partly explains her late surge -- but now they're already shifting to Obama as it becomes clear that he's a stronger candidate than McCain.
2. Many hispanics are racist against blacks. This is taboo in the media. Everyone knew that Clinton had an advantage among hispanics, but nobody ever gave a persuasive reason for it. In fact, it's completely normal for a minority group to turn its hostility toward another minority group instead of taking on the dominant group, and the dominant group encourages this whenever it can.
3. Refusing to apologize is a good move. I think Hillary Clinton is at heart a right winger, and this is something that right wingers understand and lefties don't: Many humans are still caught in chimp tribal war consciousness, and when a leader is a belligerent warmaker, and refuses to compromise or apologize or admit mistakes, they feel in their gut: "This is a strong leader who we must intensely support." Now, among Democrats, chimp-tribe-war voters are probably a minority. But by refusing to apologize for her Iraq war vote, Clinton won all of them, plus a lot of Republican crossover voters.
4. We have a Harrison Bergeron media. "Harrison Bergeron" is a famous Kurt Vonnegut story that takes a leftist ethic of equality to an absurd extreme, a world where strong people have to carry around weights and smart people have distracting noises put in their heads and beautiful people have to wear ugly masks, to create the result of perfect equality for everyone. This is what the media does for presidential candidates, and for many other issues. If one side is clearly superior, they feel like it's unfair to show it. That's why they were so soft on Bush in 2000 and so hard on Gore, why they were so soft on arguments in favor of the Iraq war and so hard on arguments against it, why for years they gave climate change skeptics equal time. And it's why Chris Matthews attacked an Obama supporter for not being able to name any of his accomplishments, while nobody mentioned that Hillary Clinton has no accomplishments -- or more precisely, that her great accomplishments are all symbolic and self-referential: she has accomplished being the first female presidential frontrunner, by virtue of her great accomplishment of being the first female presidential frontrunner. And when you consider that she's also a very very very hard worker, it follows that she could only achieve such a mediocre record by being ineffective. (To be fair, I think she would have been tremendously effective as a Republican.)
5. Most voters are not paying attention. They took the media narrative at face value: Clinton has deep experience and a long history of progressive accomplishments, while Obama is a lightweight who gives good speeches. Any kind of close look would disprove this, but almost nobody looked. How many Clinton voters know that Barack Obama almost singlehandedly turned around the Illinois state legislature and police establishment to pass a seemingly impossible law requiring all interrogations to be videotaped? Probably fewer than 1%, and even most Obama voters don't know it. The depressing thing about Obama's victory is how much it depended on his charisma, how many people voted for him because of his voice and his smile and his race, and not his integrity and courage and skills, how many just saw the word "change" and not his lifetime of dedication to actual bottom-up change. A lot of voters went against Obama because they mistrusted his charisma, and they were too lazy to look and see how lucky we are that his great charisma happens to be attached to somebody with great character. Next time we will not be so lucky.
6. Caucuses are the best! Some Atlantic coast Indian tribes developed a political system where small groups would get together and talk until they reached consensus, and then they would send representatives to larger groups that did the same thing, and so on. Their European conquerors copied this idea but corrupted it into winner-take-all pseudo-democracy, which evolved into the present system where people watch stupid TV coverage or know nothing at all, talk to nobody they don't already agree with, punch a secret ballot, and go back to their life that they feel they have no control over except in choosing which products to consume.
The Clinton camp dismissed caucuses for excluding certain people and favoring "activists." It would certainly be better if they were all held on weekends or special holidays, but they're always held in buildings that are just as accessible as normal polling places, and they don't take any more time than standing in long lines. The reason they have lower turnout is that they intimidate people who are only casually political. It's not that caucuses favor activists who support Obama for no good reason -- it's that caucuses favor voters who are paying more attention to politics, and voters who pay more attention can see more clearly who is the better candidate. It's almost forbidden to say this, but yes, some candidates are better than others, and you can tell which ones are better by observing and listening, so we need a system that rewards or even forces attention and dialogue.
Imagine that West Virginia woman, who said she voted for Clinton because Obama's middle name is Hussein and she's "had enough of Hussein," trying to say that in a meeting of her neighbors who can answer her, and not to a TV camera. Now multiply that by several million. When we don't just shoot our mouths off and secretly vote our ignorance and prejudice, but get together and talk, it makes us smarter and kinder and more fair. Inevitably it leads us to make better decisions and vote for stronger candidates. And if the stronger candidate loses in the general election, then we need to make the general election smarter, not the primary election dumber.
This is not politically realistic right now, but elections should be all caucus, all the time. Caucus for every state primary in both parties, caucus for general elections, caucus for state legislature, caucus for library bond and school board and sheriff. Twenty times a year we get a day off work to talk with our neighbors about how we're running our world. To allow everyone to participate without shutting the city down, we could have staggered caucuses, two alternate dates for each election. It would be expensive, but cheaper than the disastrous decisions that come out of a system of alienated, stressed-out people staring at screens that tell them what they already believe and lobbing votes like mortar shells in the darkness.
