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https://www.yahoo.com/news/van-jones-hillary-clinton-disastrous-130808010.html
The Democratic Party is stuck in a moment that it can’t get out of. That moment is 2:30 a.m. on November 9, 2016, when Donald J. Trump took to the podium at the Hilton Midtown in Manhattan to deliver his victory speech, having just won the presidency of the United States. Since then, Democrats have been reliving the shock that was the day before, aware they have to most past the trauma of a devastating loss but unable or unwilling to do so.
Seven months later, they remain stunned, their questions ultimately focused on a fundamental inability to explain how they could blow a 50-point late-fourth-quarter lead, in a contest that had them holding every advantage. If "she-didn’t-campaign-in-Wisconsin" became a popular refrain in the days and weeks after the election, it is only because people needed some means to explain away the inexplicable.
Since then, other explanations have emerged, including from Hillary R. Clinton herself. They suggest that even as the political class begins to look to 2018, much of the Democratic establishment remains stuck in 2016.
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The latest round of recrimination came from Van Jones, the CNN commentator who was previously a green energy adviser to President Obama. Speaking in Chicago on Saturday, he harshly criticized the Clinton campaign of squandering its $1.2 billion war chest.
"The Hillary Clinton campaign did not spend their money on white workers, and they did not spend it on people of color,” Jones said according to The Hill. “They spent it on themselves. They spent it on themselves, let's be honest."
Jones seemed to be exploding the debate over which demographic Clinton had failed to attract: What is it the Midwestern whites who’d voted for her husband Bill in ’92 and ‘96, or the racially diverse millennials who went for her onetime rival Obama in ‘08?
Neither, Jones said at the outset of his remarks: "This is the stupidest false choice I've ever heard," he said to loud applause.
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“They took a billion dollars, a billion dollars, a billion dollars, and set it on fire, and called it a campaign!" He continued, “A billion dollars for consultants. A billion dollars for pollsters. A billion dollars for a data operation, that was run by data dummies who couldn't figure out that maybe people in Michigan needed to be organized."
Jones’s diatribe may have been a dig at her young campaign manager Robby Mook, who reportedly rejected investing more money in the upper Midwest, where the famed Democratic “firewall” collapsed on Nov. 8, paving the way for a Trump victory.
Did the Clinton campaign waste the enormous amount of money it raised? Yes, but only because the efforts of any losing campaign seem wasteful after the fact. If you wake up with a hangover, you’re bound to lament the choices you made the night before. Did I really need that seventh bacon-tini?
More substantively, it is true that Clinton’s campaign was an expensive enterprise, especially when compared to Trump’s threadbare operation, which was largely predicated on free press coverage for his daily outrages.
For example, in early 2016, Clinton reportedly spent more than $700,000 in one quarter on polls; in an earlier quarter of 2015, she’d spent $1.9 million, vastly more than any other candidate of either party. During the summer before the general election, she was spending $500,000 per day on television ads, while Trump was shelling out nothing for the same. **************** TBH the fact that you're even a mod here fits squarely within Jag's narrative of OK-sanctioned aggression, bullying, and toxicity. *shrug*
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