So...I had some die hard Clinton supporter bump some old thread on reddit with a helping of WELL ACKSHULLY HILLARY DID HAVE POLICIES when I pointed out she didn't run on much and her campaign mostly bullied supporters into voting for her. They then posted her campaign page with her platform on it, and I figured, what the heck. Let's regrade Hillary Clinton in a more objective way. Admittedly at the time I was more pissed at her being an obvious downgrade from Bernie Sanders, and given the dirty tricks she used against him and his supporters, I really wasn't buying what she as selling. But...let's be honest. At this point my standards are a bit lower and more forgiving. So let's dust off metric 1 and evaluate HRC. Btw, one change I'm making to metric 1. I was gonna save this for 2028, but basically, I wanna replace those 10 points I gave to dem candidates over greens with an "electability" metric. Obviously greens will get a 0 but otherwise I'll judge the candidates by how likely they are to win an election out of 10. Because we know HRC lost, I'll instead use her polling data before hand to rate her.
With that said let's begin.
Basic Income Support- 1/10
So...back in 2016, my metrics were pretty simple. I wanted 3 policies. UBI, Medicare for all, and free college/student debt forgiveness. Sanders supported 2/3, Clinton at best maybe supported a watered down version of 1/3. I was pretty unforgiving. And yeah, she ain't a UBI stan. To be fair, most dems aren't, but yeah. I really felt like Clinton screwed us out of having someone who at least met some of my prioriries some of the way.
I have to give her one point for a child tax credit expansion, but it was extremely mild. Like $2000? Even at the time I had a UBI plan of $12,000 with $4000 per child. So...this is like 1 point's worth of UBI.
But yeah, most of what she talked about was job creation which basically sums up why i can't stand her so much. Because jobs arent the answer, they never were, and she was an establishment democrat running in a populist era where more change was, and is needed.
Medicare for All (Public Option)- 0/10
She didn't support medicare for all, she didn't support a public option, she didn't support much of anything. Just band aid fixes. Again, some centrist thinks linking her platform is an own like "look at these policies", yeah, it's all a bunch of incrementalist BS. And then she gloated about it on stage.
Other economics- 6/10
I mean, she supported a higher minimum wage and labor rights, but I remember that the $15 on her website wasnt her original proposal. She wanted $12 and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to $15. She had free college, but I recall her original proposal had arbitrary work requirements to avoid the appearance of giving "something for nothing." She still has some weird income limit because she "didn't want to pay for donald trump's kids" (if it's a public service, everyone should get it, besides, trump's kids wouldnt be caught dead going to a public university). Her student debt forgiveness plan was basically a slightly modified IBR plan incrementally better than the one that already existed at the time. I mean, let's face it. This is mid. It's mostly just a whole lot of job creation nonsense and job retraining that isn't gonna amount to anything, because anyone who follows my blog and understands the economy as I do understands that the whole job creation game is a bunch of nonsense that sounds good in conventional terms, but never fixes the root problems of the economy. Clinton was just a horribly out of touch candidate for the time. She wouldn't have been terrible, but she would've been rather middling. I guess I'll give her some credit for paid parental leave though. So some good stuff here and there, but it's mostly a whole bunch of "meh."
Social issues- 8/10
Most of her platform is just...feminism. Women this, women that. I mean, sure, that's an important part of it, but she clearly had her own thing going here. I dont even see a mention of abortion ironically, although it is 2 AM and I'm kinda just skimming. I know she was kinda weak on that issue, given her christian faith seemed to contradict with abortion and gay marriage. Which irked me given I was peak New Atheist at the time. Still kinda does. Like, come on, if you can't commit and give a full throated endorsement and gotta do that public-private position crap, how can you be trusted to act for those issues in office? Her gun reform is refreshingly moderate, I'll give her that. Her immigration positions seemed reasonable. If anything, she seemed to lean hard into that stuff when as a white new atheist type...yeah, I just didn't connect to her at the time. Looking at it now, was she okay? Well, she was better than a republican. And yeah, SCOTUS WOULD have looked different if elected. But yeah, I still cant give her full points because I just don't feel like she connected to me and my own priorities here at the time.
Actually she was anti citizen's united at the time, so that will make me give her an extra point in itself.
Foreign policy- 10/10
Let's face it, foreign policy wise, I basically am in line with the libs here. I might have mild disagreements on Israel now, but in 2016, that wouldn't have come up. She also had some protectionist impulses as she caved to political pressure there. I mean, yeah, she was qualified AF for the "commander in chief" part of the job.
Worldview- 11/20
Clinton...was a centrist lib. Her worldview was informed by her liberal christianity (methodism) and it showed up in her economics all over the place. Everything had the work ethic shoehorned in, and given I'm the pro UBI anti work guy...I really didn't vibe with her economically. On social issues, her ideas are more informed by idpol and especially feminism, but also a lot of deference to racial minorities on stuff, which I found offputting at the time. Like, again, white guy who would be considered an ABAWD under her policies and was mostly animated by a secular humanist/new atheist worldview. I really didn't vibe with her at all, especially compared to bernie who offered more universal policies at the time. So I really didn't like her as the nominee.
Consistency- 2/10
So remember the whole Graham Platner "political adultery" thing I was going on about recently? Yeah. That's what I measure with this metric. Like Bernie? Loyal AF to his ideas, 10/10. HRC? Flip flopper, regularly changed positions over the course of her campaign, had a public position and a private position. She was like Forest Gump's box of chocolates, you never know what you were going to get. I even discussed that because I explicitly remember her platform evolving over time, and how she changed her positions on issues, seemed all over the place, and just came off as fundamentally untrustworthy.
Experience/Competence- 10/10
Say what you want about Hillary, but one thing she had was competence. She was one of the most qualified people to run for the position and basically trained for the position her whole life. She clearly had her eyes on it since her husband was in office. But yeah, extremely seasoned, extremely long resume. That just doesn't matter if you're not what people want.
Electability- 6/10
Again, she lost, but putting that aside...she was winning almost the whole time she was running. She had a 56% chance on election day, which gets rounded up to 60%. Her numbers gave her the advantage, she just got unlucky. Or...alternatively, she just ended up somehow throwing away what should've been a sure thing because of hubris. Which...maybe that should tank her numbers, but even in my final forecast, she was still the favored winner. So...grading her objectively based on that, yeah. She should have been able to pull it off. She had slightly better odds in 2016 than trump did in 2024. And Trump's path to the white house in 2016 was extremely narrow. He basically pulled off the unthinkable. So....again, objectively? I'll give her a 6, if I knew nothing about the actual outcome on election day.
Overall- 54/100
Now, let me present a rubric for how these numbers should be judged.
80+- S tier candidate
70-79- A tier
60-69- B tier
50-59- C tier
40-49- D tier
<40- F tier
At the time, i would have judged her as a D tier, somewhere in the 40s. But at this point, eh, yeah, I'm happy to rehabilitate her to the 50s. Which is still...unremarkably mid, but she's not bad. She was a mediocre candidate. And that was the problem. We needed an actually good one.
But yeah, to the weirdo centrists who throw her platform in my face and act like I don't know what Im talking about because I dislike(d) her so much...yeah no. I did read her platform. I even gave a bit of knowledge about my mindset at the time. her economic policy was mid, and kind of out of touch with progressive politics. Centrists always seem impressed by the most mediocre of policies and always seem to love to lecture people about what they should find acceptable. And I;m sorry, you have low standards, and your ideas kinda suck. And on social issues, we have very different ideas of what "progressive" means. For a white male "new atheist" (in 2016) like me, I'm mostly talking about being unmoored from religion and mostly being pro abortion and gay marriage. I'm actually pretty moderate on the idpol nonsense that clinton leaned pretty hard into. So she was kinda moderate where i was progressive and progressive where I was moderate, and yeah, ideological mismatch. Still, clinton was very qualified for president, very good on foreign policy, and would she have been better than Trump? Oh yeah, definitely, of course what does trump score? I mean, he's pretty close to a fricking 0 by this point. We're talking single digits, maybe low double digits at best (like 12). But she wasn't good. And she didnt connect. And considering she displaced sanders, a literal S tier candidate, and did so in some pretty bad faith ways, yeah, I hated her guts at the time and ended up voting green. Was Stein any better? Eh, given my last metric gave her a 45....probably not. But in 2016, I was obviously a lot harsher on clinton than i would have otherwise been given the bad blood with the democrats at the time. What really tipped me toward stein was just the fact that i couldnt stomach voting for a dem after they basically spent the past 2 years prior to that crapping on my own brand of politics, tanking my own candidate, and basically trying to bully me into voting for her (given how obnoxiously offputting her online outreach was). It really was a matter of principle for me.
Anyway, that's why I wanted to go over this today. Someone brought it up, and I wanted to objectively evaluate her given I've had time to cool off a bit. And also because some obnoxious clinton supporter basically pushed her platform in my face as if it was actually impressive. It wasn't. And you guys just dont understand what I want. of course, given this same poster seemed to constantly crap on sanders supporters even now, yeah. Again, I dont ALWAYS agree with the sanders types, but at least sanders broke 80, the last time I evaluated this. I mean, he IS the bar for a good candidate. Clinton was just the mediocre slop the dems wanted to sell us, and given we already had 8 years of democratic party fatigue and she wasn't offering anything unique or special we didn't already hear out of the big O for the past 8 years (Obama), it just didn't resonate. That's something both parties need to learn. After 8 years, people dont tend to want a third term of the same thing unless that thing is transformationally popular (see: FDR, Reagan). You gotta shake it up or you lose, and clinton just....lost because it was a red year, and she wasn't an inspiring candidate. Had she run in 2008, she would've won in a landslide just like Obama did. Had she run in 2020, she also would've won probably. But in 2016? No one wanted THAT. And as someone who was there, I don't blame them. We should have way higher standards.
But yeah. Still C tier, still okay. Biden/Harris were better, but had she not pissed me off so bad, I probably would've voted for her tbqh. She actively alienated me from wanting to do so. That's how bad her campaign actually was. And that's why despite the 6/10 electability rating, she somehow lost. Because she was actually bad at this.
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