The fact that Clinton lost when everyone expected her to win has made many people conclude that what Obama did by beating her was easy. And even with it, Obama’s popular vote margin over Hillary wasn’t huge.
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Without it, her coalition is smaller than Clinton’s. It is unlikely that Warren could count on anything approaching that level of black support. He combined young and affluent white liberals with a supermajority of the black vote, the coalition Clintonite Paul Begala derisively referred to as “eggheads and African-Americans.” He did not just appeal to the voters who would have cast primary ballots for Gary Hart, Bill Bradley or Howard Dean (and for that matter, Elizabeth Warren). Obama, as the first viable African-American presidential candidate, was able to pry the black vote away from Clinton. She lost independents, whites and men to Brown. Scott Brown was impressive, it looks rather less so when you take into account that Massachusetts is a liberal state and Obama was also on the ballot. It’s to say whether Warren is in Obama’s league as a politician, since the fight with Mitt Romney was the latter’s most competitive general election. From his debut at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to his comments extricating himself from the Jeremiah Wright controversy, Obama demonstrated a capacity to move people with words that Warren has not. It is easy to forget after more than five years of listening to the president drone on at press conferences how much of his appeal was derived from successful major speeches. Warren isn’t in Obama’s league as an orator, however. Remarks of hers that were widely circulated on the Internet were even the likely inspiration for “You didn’t build that!” Warren can be eloquent in discussing the middle-class economic anxieties, bankers avoiding accountability for the financial crisis and what corporations and the rich owe the rest of society. There are other important differences between Warren and Obama. It’s unclear how far Warren could ride Hillary’s Iraq war vote in 2016. Other hot spots from Iran to Syria are still potential targets of military intervention.īut liberal antiwar passions have cooled somewhat and Democrats have become at least marginally more hawkish with one of their own as command-in-chief. The possibility of reinserting troops or conducting air strikes certainly exists (Clinton favored keeping a residual force after 2011). Iraq remains in the news due to the country’s deteriorating conditions. The Massachusetts senator has instead pushed for restraint in dealing with Iran and repealing the Iraq authorization of force. Nor was she a major voice for military intervention within the Obama administration, as by all accounts Clinton was during her tenure as secretary of state. Warren, like Obama, never supported the Iraq war.
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Supporting Bush’s Iraq invasion was like a liberal Democrat still favoring the Vietnam War during the Nixon administration. It was one thing to support Kosovo, as all but a few principled Dennis Kucinich types within the Democratic Party did. The number one issue that doomed Hillary, however, was her vote for the Iraq war.