Don't Blame the Message

Having run twice, and unsuccessfully, for the presidency, Hillary Rodham Clinton is now an official object lesson in how not to run for political office. No doubt, Clinton was a subpar candidate—especially when compared with her husband—but one strike against her is manifestly unfair: that she had no "message."

True, in hindsight, her message was not as compelling as Donald Trump's appeal to working-class voters. And equally true, the hacked emails from Clinton pollster Joel Benenson to campaign colleagues—"Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?"—make for embarrassing reading. But in fact, Hillary Clinton had three messages: I'm the best-prepared candidate for president in living memory; my opponent is a dangerous alternative; and it's time for a woman president. Of course, none of them resonated sufficiently with voters—not even the appeal to sisterhood—to overcome Trump, but that's not the same as their being nonexistent.

Moreover, if things had gone slightly differently in this close election—if she had spent a day or two campaigning in Wisconsin, for example, or had ever been truthful about her private email server—we would now be drawing the opposite conclusion: That the American people voted for familiarity over uncharted waters; that Republicans made a fatal error in embracing Trump; and that the dream of a female president was irresistible to millions of voters. Instead of posing for selfies in the woods around Chappaqua, Hillary Clinton and her well-oiled campaign would be the subject of admiring seminars at Harvard's Institute of Politics.