2016 Postmortem

If your point is that she overestimated the intelligence of voters, I agree. She's not good at simplistic slogans. She is strong at developing substantive policy that told voters exactly what she planed to do as president, but that required voters to care enough to inform themselves because the broadcast media wasn't going to focus on issues let alone policy. It's clear that many Americans across the political spectrum have no interest in policy and prefer rhetoric that channels their anger. They don't care how something is going to be accomplished. They just want to be told what the want to hear. That was never Clinton's way. She took governance far more seriously than that, and her respect for voters meant she didn't feed them the empty promises others made central to their campaign. The fact is some voters, far too many, want to be pandered to. That is why our country is fucked. As Steven Breyer said, without a population with an understanding of civics, democracy cannot survive. We have a population that not only doesn't understand the separation of powers, they don't want to. They simply want a charismatic figure to fix it for them, which is not possible under our constitution.