The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Hilllary’s 2016 Overconfidence Bothered Me

Posted on | July 4, 2019 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

I grasp that political leaders tend to be mediocre people who do the networking thing well. It’s hard to build those ‘people skills’ while also honing, say, guitar chops.

However, the media is going to tell you that an otherwise pedestrian figure whom they fancy is somehow brilliant. Yet whatever brilliance they display, whatever articulate use of English, or grasp of a subject is likely to be provided by a staff.

So why did Her Majesty’s staff blow it so badly in 2016? For a modicum of effort in a handful or Rust Belt states, Stacy and I could be sporting coveralls in a re-education camp in North Dakota.

An explanation that I haven’t heard previously might be called “To Build a Firewall“. We know that the Clinton campaign failed utterly to secure electoral votes around the Great Lakes that tipped the election to Trump.

But why? Why did she let Trump deliver an Arkanicide to her ambition? Was she just as overconfident about those blue states as she was her email server security?

The idea that the Left considered the Tea Parties a dead issue occurred to me today. After the 2009 demonstrations on the Mall, which was the high point of the whole blogoshpere experience, there was pretty much nothing. ObamaCare happened anyway; Breitbart died; Obama was re-elected: the country seemed pacified.

The 2016 election came. A Trump Administration was simply beyond the imagination of most of the conservative blogosphere. Important exceptions included Surber, Hoft and my buddy M. Joseph Sheppard, who was very patient with my skepticism about Trump. I just knew that Her Majesty was going to hang Trump out to dry after the nomination.

Except she didn’t.

And this invites the question: why do people who should know better somehow not know better? Lack of imagination.

People who think that the government ‘solves’ problems (hint: government occasionally maintains problems passably well) seemed to have thought the Tea Party problem solved.

Trump’s close reading of Sun Tzu has been celebrated. But Her Majesty’s sudden lack of paranoia about those Blue States, her complacent willingness to go ahead and lose an election instead of putting in the effort to retire all risks, even the unimaginable ones, underscores why she deserved the loss. Don’t tell me how qualified you are: prove it.

Trump’s willingness to take calculated risks–run an understaffed, shoestring, actually chaotic campaign, continue to pay dividends as he colors outside the lines of accepted diplomacy.

Hillary’s overconfidence in 2016 is related to the horror of the Foreign Policy ‘experts’ at Trump’s non-approach to diplomacy: the creative, one-man show is both:

  • a blast to watch, and
  • impossible to duplicate.

Unless Trump can magically nail everything before his term ends, we could be in a situation where a traditional politician, e.g. a Pence, just can’t even try to get his Trump on.

Which is what happened when Bush 41 failed to keep the Reagan going.

Our system is engineered against black swan figures like Trump.

Enjoy the Donald show while here.

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One Response to “Why Hilllary’s 2016 Overconfidence Bothered Me”

  1. News of the Week (July 7th, 2019) | The Political Hat
    July 7th, 2019 @ 8:53 pm

    […] Why Hilllary’s 2016 Overconfidence Bothered Me I grasp that political leaders tend to be mediocre people who do the networking thing well. It’s hard to build those “people skills” while also honing, say, guitar chops. […]