Triangulation

Since everyone from the far left to the far right has decided to dissect Hillary Clinton's campaign and opine on what went wrong I thought I'd add my burst of wind to the mix and state that her problem was "triangulation".

Many of us remember this tactic from the Bill Clinton years. Set a point that lies between point A and point B then use the hostilities from both disaffected groups to prove that you are doing the right thing. This is why he surrounded himself with advisers like Dick Morris and Mark Penn. It is why he and Hillary are members of the DLC who's very goal is to walk that line between the left and the right.

The problem for Hillary is that she attempted to triangulate during the primaries when the majority of voters would be coming from the left. She played to corporate Democrats instead of the average Democrat. This gave her a huge warchest but it was not enough to let her pull away from Obama in the early contests. This destroyed her aura of invincibility giving Obama the chance to play the dragon slayer taking on the hydra. After that, she had little chance because his story was more compelling than hers.

I'd go further to state that while I don't believe Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" had any major effect on the Democratic primaries, I do believe cross-over voters out to hurt the front-runner, Obama, did. While it is impossible to gather any hard numbers on this kind of thing I can state positively that this does happen to a large degree when one party's nomination is no longer being contested. In 2000 the Democratic contest was effectively over by the time our contest was held, so many of us voted for McCain in order to hurt bush's* chances in November. We gave McCain a win and boosted his sails for a few weeks. Then, just this year, as we were told our votes wouldn't count we voted for Romney in order to hurt McCain. This is just how politics work and this time it was the repubs turn to give us a little back. I do believe that the only reason Hillary did as well as she did in the end was due in large part to repubs boosting her. That's not to say she isn't a formidable campaigner, but political activists don't like to sit out the chance to vote, on either side, and they helped her over many a hump.

Anyway, I think once you strip away the effect of cross-over voting, you will find that Hillary's support base never ran much over 45% with the exceptions of places like WV and KY where the Appalachian vote against Obama was very strong. This 45% is the net effect of triangulation. It was able to pull in a large minority in the primaries, and possible a small majority in the GE, but was never going to be enough to give her a win against Obama.

So there's my stupid opinion. Please feel free to tell me how very wrong I am (or at least make fun of my grammar). :D