Did she have a choice?

and it was a great speech full of terrific ideas for addressing housing, health care, jobs, foreign policy, education, urban food deserts, college loans, you name it. No one asked about emails and I don't remember her saying more than a passing word about it. But that's all she was ever asked about on TV.

Were very policy-focused. In fact, they were great.

However, speeches are heard only by true believers and/or politics afficianados. Campaign ads and other forms of outreach are what are heard by voters deciding whether to vote and who to vote for and those were almost completely devoid of policy.

The issue was a losing one for her, regardless of what she did. She was under a secret attack and the people that should have brought clarity (FBI) totally fumbled the fucking ball. Given the secret Russian attack on her and collusion in that attack from rich Americans and Trump, what could she do but hope that the overwhelming number of Americans were clearheaded enough to research her past and come to the right conclusions (but if you saw the attacks on her even her on DU, it is clear that DID NOT happen).

She seems to have been given really lousy and cumbersome telecommunications options and had to use her own email to get anything done. Her emails also turned out to be more secure than the options she was provided with which seemed to leak directly to wikileaks.

Was the efficient communication among government officials needed improvement on system security and protocol. She realized that and was ahead of the game, but paid an unfair price for being proactive.

What the fuck else was she supposed to do?

...nothing she said about them would have convinced anyone. Minds were already made up.

I have a lot of criticisms of Clinton and more specifically her campaign and campaign staff. But I don't think that specific action would have made a damn bit of difference.

With less than two weeks between the second Comey announcement and the election, there wasn't time to reverse the poll drop she suffered. She lost 1 to 4 points in polls. Without that she is far more likely to win.

If she never had the server in the first place, being aware she was all but certain to run for president and how she is perceived as being shady (regardless of the lack of validity), it wouldn't have been an issue.

I agree that she should not have had the server in the first place. There's a lot of things she shouldn't have done but didn't or didn't do but should have. But at the point where this person is saying they should have spoken out, it wouldn't have done any good.

The media wasn't interested in talking about Hillary unless it had to do with fake scandals.

because drumpf kept beating the drum and the media kept asking her for an explanation. she gave it, and they asked her again.

IF we had actually focused on policy in our campaign ads over the final weeks of the election.

The entire collection of television ads released by the campaign are available online. Look at them. There are almost none about policy. Instead, they are attack ads on Trump's character designed to convince middle right values voters that his sexual/moral degeneracy disqualifies him from office.

We had a great platform. Too bad our ads didn't talk about it.

How do you know what the entire collection of ads were? I don't live in the U.S., didn't see any ads. Can anyone else who saw the ads confirm this?

I don't watch much TV at home and saw them in public places but they were all policy and didn't mention Trump. I thought they were very effective and would have liked to see more.

It's another anti-Dem talking point.

..I live in NJ right near NYC. Two massive Dem strongholds, and as sure a pair of "gimmie" states that we had. We were saturated with ads, that must have cost a fortune. Near constantly run, in what is probably the most expensive media market in the country.

My parents live in PA. I was visiting them the weekend before the election and say maybe half the amount of ads I was seeing in my own district/state/media market. How that made sense in one of the biggest, most key swing states in the country, I have no idea. And at least half of them were of the "Trump is bad!" variety rather than the "Hillary is great!" variety.

and would have to see if my history goes back far enough. There is a story I linked to more recently that reviewed our campaign and found it was the most character-based campaign in history.

When I can get to a real computer, I'll look for it.

She got scared and pulled them when the Comey intervention happened, convinced she needed to remind voters why Trump was disqualified.

I believe the evidence from the election indicates that the anti-Trump ads were the right strategy. She was going to win, decisively, until about 2 weeks before Election Day. That is when Comey and Putin destroyed her.

I think voters who were concerned about the economy voted for Hillary Clinton. And Donald Trump's economic message fell on dead ears.

in the last couple of weeks, I doubt that discussing the emails would have made any difference.

??????

People are stupid and don't look at details. All they do is hear the same shit talked about over and over again.

Truth mutated to fiction and vice versa.

Such was the effect of Pravda-like propaganda unleashed on Americans via FOX and 1200 right wing radio stations across the country.

Such was the effect of a mainstream media that ran with the ball rather than reporting objectively and ratting out the ratfuckers.

Who could have ever imagined that Hillary's use of an email server, the same as many Republicans had used (and continue to use) would have been her undoing? It just goes to show how deeply ingrained misogyny remains in American culture. We have far to go.

Regardless of it being that important of an issue or not.

Instead of tackling it head on, they kept issuing nuanced statements emboldening the press to keep digging deeper and deeper.

First it was that it was just personal emails about Yoga and Chelsea's wedding, than that there was nothing classified, which was then changed to there was nothing marked classified.

All that did was keep it in news feeds for weeks and weeks. Her joke about "wiping the server with a cloth" didn't need to be made either. The press wasn't doing her any favors to begin with, but no reason to keep handing them ammunition.

may be the most unfortunate "zinger" in the history of zingers. I thought she tamed that issue until Comey and the bullshit announcement.

27 replies in 50 minutes, most talking about our brilliant issue-oriented campaign (do I need to put this in? ), and attacking any contrary opinion as "anti-Dem" or "untrue,"

then a link to the ACTUAL campaign ads

and now

CRICKETS

I gave the OP a rec, because we need to be having reality-based discussions like the one in your OP about how to beat Trump because our country and our party depend on it, but I don't think it will help.

Sorry again.

I’ve said it before and I will again. On the whole issue she was failed by the people she trusted. And I think those same people botched the campaigns response when the whole issue broke because they were responsible for the mess to begin with.

Hillary isn’t a tech person. All the reports came out made that clear. Nothing wrong with that.

She said she wanted X,Y and Z. Other people she trusted to make that happen failed her by first badly implementing it on a private domain and server. They should have insisted on a solution with State. She led the agency, policies could have been changed at her direction to allow it.

That would have been the harder way to go, but they would have avoided all this. Even if they had used the private system as a bridge only until the solution inside State was ready and shifted, they could have said “We got on the official systems as fast as we could”.

But they went with the easiest solution, and the since it worked stayed with it.

They badly implemented it, hiring less than competent people (I mean the guy was on Reddit asking people how to do things).

Then they failed to comply with open records laws when she left the State Department. Once again, had they done this then that would have taken all the wind out of the sails of ten people making a big deal of this and also would have made it not look like they were hiding it. And anything that would have been made an issue it would have been out there well before the campaign instead of in the middle of it.

Then all this did break in the middle of the campaign. And the people who she was listening to on how to respond were the same ones who botched the whole thing up in the first place and created the opening for the right to go after her. So they acted like it wasn’t as big a problem as it was and failed to get in front of it.

They kept acting like it was just a minor thing issuing badly done and worded responses, often evasive or vague, that instead of getting ahead of it made it look like they were hiding something and keeping the media looking.

We let Teabaggers take control of that narrative and we're still paying for it...