Are we back to "she should have known" style hindsight evaluation of reality? The sort of thing that implies that if any politician does anything that "looks" bad they need to quit being a politician for the rest of their life because now they're tainted, even if they didn't actually do something bad? Maybe that belief is why there's next to no Democrat politicians while the Republicans who don't give a shit about any of that fill their ranks.
Yes, she should have known that taking big money from big banks would come up when she wanted to appear authentic in her desire to strongly regulate big banks. She absolutely should have known this.
Are you arguing that you consider any Democrat who takes so much as a cent from Wall Street and/or the Big Banks to be tainted and thus untrustworthy and impossible to vote for?
I still voted, but my confidence on that front was shattered.
"I'm going to crack down on big banks" and "I'm going to talk to them for ludicrous sums of money and refuse to release transcripts" are two weirdly conflicting things. At the very least, that was terrible optics.
No they aren't. I'd take millions of dollars to talk to Goldmen Sachs in a heartbeat. Fuck yeah, easy money. That doesn't change shit about what kind of policy I'd want to implement if I could. People give speeches at these kind of things all the time. It's like commencement speeches or graduation speeches or whatever. Hire someone big and famous to come fluff the crowd.
The problem with the speeches is all optics because people are silly.
It's not like Wall Street executives giving huge sums of money to politicians has ever resulted in anything bad happening in the past.
How terribly vague and lacking in substance. Are you claiming her speeches were a form of bribery by Wall Street?
Yeah! Her answer on pay-to-play donations during the presidential debate was VERY clear... remember when she said uh....
I had a problem with that chain of events, even though I voted for him. Twice.
There are surely plenty of criticisms of Hillary and the primary between her and Obama certainly did get testy at times. Though the idea that she is less out of touch than a billionaire who literally lives (lived?) in a gilded tower seems a bit of a stretch. More out of touch than Obama in 08? probably. But she wasn't running against Obama this year, she was running against Donald Trump.
you're focusing on "out of touch" and i was focusing on "is a puppet of"
by running against someone who was not obama, she didn't suddenly stop being a puppet. - once again, I was also extremely uncomfortable with her being secretary of state after that point.
Now, if you were to try to convince me that Obama was lying about her, you'd need to tell me whether he was lying in 2008 or 2016.
Even when the 2008 primary reached it's peak I don't think Obama ever said Hilary Clinton was fundamentally unfit for office or anything. Never once do I think he suggested he wouldn't support her if she won the nomination. not once.
Are we back to "she should have known" style hindsight evaluation of reality? The sort of thing that implies that if any politician does anything that "looks" bad they need to quit being a politician for the rest of their life because now they're tainted, even if they didn't actually do something bad? Maybe that belief is why there's next to no Democrat politicians while the Republicans who don't give a shit about any of that fill their ranks.
Yes, she should have known that taking big money from big banks would come up when she wanted to appear authentic in her desire to strongly regulate big banks. She absolutely should have known this.
Are you arguing that you consider any Democrat who takes so much as a cent from Wall Street and/or the Big Banks to be tainted and thus untrustworthy and impossible to vote for?
I still voted, but my confidence on that front was shattered.
"I'm going to crack down on big banks" and "I'm going to talk to them for ludicrous sums of money and refuse to release transcripts" are two weirdly conflicting things. At the very least, that was terrible optics.
No they aren't. I'd take millions of dollars to talk to Goldmen Sachs in a heartbeat. Fuck yeah, easy money. That doesn't change shit about what kind of policy I'd want to implement if I could. People give speeches at these kind of things all the time. It's like commencement speeches or graduation speeches or whatever. Hire someone big and famous to come fluff the crowd.
The problem with the speeches is all optics because people are silly.
It's not like Wall Street executives giving huge sums of money to politicians has ever resulted in anything bad happening in the past.
How terribly vague and lacking in substance. Are you claiming her speeches were a form of bribery by Wall Street?
Yeah! Her answer on pay-to-play donations during the presidential debate was VERY clear... remember when she said uh....
er... i forgot what she said.
what'd she say?
Sorry, but this remains not an answer to my question or the point at large.
Are you claiming that being paid to give a speech was a form of bribery?
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imdointhisI should actually stop doin' this.Registered Userregular
I had a problem with that chain of events, even though I voted for him. Twice.
There are surely plenty of criticisms of Hillary and the primary between her and Obama certainly did get testy at times. Though the idea that she is less out of touch than a billionaire who literally lives (lived?) in a gilded tower seems a bit of a stretch. More out of touch than Obama in 08? probably. But she wasn't running against Obama this year, she was running against Donald Trump.
you're focusing on "out of touch" and i was focusing on "is a puppet of"
by running against someone who was not obama, she didn't suddenly stop being a puppet. - once again, I was also extremely uncomfortable with her being secretary of state after that point.
Now, if you were to try to convince me that Obama was lying about her, you'd need to tell me whether he was lying in 2008 or 2016.
Even when the 2008 primary reached it's peak I don't think Obama ever said Hilary Clinton was fundamentally unfit for office or anything. Never once do I think he suggested he wouldn't support her if she won the nomination. not once.
"Hillary Clinton. She’ll say anything, and change nothing. It’s time to turn the page. Paid for by Obama for America."
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Are we back to "she should have known" style hindsight evaluation of reality? The sort of thing that implies that if any politician does anything that "looks" bad they need to quit being a politician for the rest of their life because now they're tainted, even if they didn't actually do something bad? Maybe that belief is why there's next to no Democrat politicians while the Republicans who don't give a shit about any of that fill their ranks.
Yes, she should have known that taking big money from big banks would come up when she wanted to appear authentic in her desire to strongly regulate big banks. She absolutely should have known this.
Are you arguing that you consider any Democrat who takes so much as a cent from Wall Street and/or the Big Banks to be tainted and thus untrustworthy and impossible to vote for?
I still voted, but my confidence on that front was shattered.
"I'm going to crack down on big banks" and "I'm going to talk to them for ludicrous sums of money and refuse to release transcripts" are two weirdly conflicting things. At the very least, that was terrible optics.
No they aren't. I'd take millions of dollars to talk to Goldmen Sachs in a heartbeat. Fuck yeah, easy money. That doesn't change shit about what kind of policy I'd want to implement if I could. People give speeches at these kind of things all the time. It's like commencement speeches or graduation speeches or whatever. Hire someone big and famous to come fluff the crowd.
The problem with the speeches is all optics because people are silly.
It's not like Wall Street executives giving huge sums of money to politicians has ever resulted in anything bad happening in the past.
How terribly vague and lacking in substance. Are you claiming her speeches were a form of bribery by Wall Street?
I'm not saying it was a bribe. I'm saying it looks exactly like a bribe and no one should be surprised at how easily a grossly misinformed public could be manipulated into thinking it was a bribe.
It was a series of colossal missteps to give the speeches in the first place, charge a huge sum of money, keep the money instead of giving it to a charity other than your own and then act evasive about the content.
Are we back to "she should have known" style hindsight evaluation of reality? The sort of thing that implies that if any politician does anything that "looks" bad they need to quit being a politician for the rest of their life because now they're tainted, even if they didn't actually do something bad? Maybe that belief is why there's next to no Democrat politicians while the Republicans who don't give a shit about any of that fill their ranks.
Yes, she should have known that taking big money from big banks would come up when she wanted to appear authentic in her desire to strongly regulate big banks. She absolutely should have known this.
Are you arguing that you consider any Democrat who takes so much as a cent from Wall Street and/or the Big Banks to be tainted and thus untrustworthy and impossible to vote for?
I still voted, but my confidence on that front was shattered.
"I'm going to crack down on big banks" and "I'm going to talk to them for ludicrous sums of money and refuse to release transcripts" are two weirdly conflicting things. At the very least, that was terrible optics.
No they aren't. I'd take millions of dollars to talk to Goldmen Sachs in a heartbeat. Fuck yeah, easy money. That doesn't change shit about what kind of policy I'd want to implement if I could. People give speeches at these kind of things all the time. It's like commencement speeches or graduation speeches or whatever. Hire someone big and famous to come fluff the crowd.
The problem with the speeches is all optics because people are silly.
It's not like Wall Street executives giving huge sums of money to politicians has ever resulted in anything bad happening in the past.
How terribly vague and lacking in substance. Are you claiming her speeches were a form of bribery by Wall Street?
I'm not saying it was a bribe. I'm saying it looks exactly like a bribe and no one should be surprised at how easily a grossly misinformed public could be manipulated into think it was a bribe.
It was a series of colossal missteps to give the speeches in the first place, charge a huge sum of money, keep the money instead of giving it to a charity other than your own and then act evasive about the speeches.
It only "exactly looks like a bribe" if you are predisposed to viewing any monetary transfer from GS as such. Part of the reason people like Clinton do these speeches is to push different worldviews out to these organizations, as a way to push them to look at their thinking. And her honorarium was within the standard for a speaker of her caliber.
Are we back to "she should have known" style hindsight evaluation of reality? The sort of thing that implies that if any politician does anything that "looks" bad they need to quit being a politician for the rest of their life because now they're tainted, even if they didn't actually do something bad? Maybe that belief is why there's next to no Democrat politicians while the Republicans who don't give a shit about any of that fill their ranks.
Yes, she should have known that taking big money from big banks would come up when she wanted to appear authentic in her desire to strongly regulate big banks. She absolutely should have known this.
Are you arguing that you consider any Democrat who takes so much as a cent from Wall Street and/or the Big Banks to be tainted and thus untrustworthy and impossible to vote for?
I still voted, but my confidence on that front was shattered.
"I'm going to crack down on big banks" and "I'm going to talk to them for ludicrous sums of money and refuse to release transcripts" are two weirdly conflicting things. At the very least, that was terrible optics.
No they aren't. I'd take millions of dollars to talk to Goldmen Sachs in a heartbeat. Fuck yeah, easy money. That doesn't change shit about what kind of policy I'd want to implement if I could. People give speeches at these kind of things all the time. It's like commencement speeches or graduation speeches or whatever. Hire someone big and famous to come fluff the crowd.
The problem with the speeches is all optics because people are silly.
It's not like Wall Street executives giving huge sums of money to politicians has ever resulted in anything bad happening in the past.
How terribly vague and lacking in substance. Are you claiming her speeches were a form of bribery by Wall Street?
I'm not saying it was a bribe. I'm saying it looks exactly like a bribe and no one should be surprised at how easily a grossly misinformed public could be manipulated into think it was a bribe.
It was a series of colossal missteps to give the speeches in the first place, charge a huge sum of money, keep the money instead of giving it to a charity other than your own and then act evasive about the speeches.
It only "exactly looks like a bribe" if you are predisposed to viewing any monetary transfer from GS as such. Part of the reason people like Clinton do these speeches is to push different worldviews out to these organizations, as a way to push them to look at their thinking. And her honorarium was within the standard for a speaker of her caliber.
It doesn't matter why someone believes it. The only thing that matters is that a lot of people did believe it and the Clinton campaign did nothing to staunch the bleeding which I believe was a colossal misstep.
The nominee of the party whose platform explicitly sets out to curb the influence of lobbyists takes (personally takes, not in the form of campaign donations) over half a million dollars from the bank most associated with profiting off of the great recession. Her campaign also takes more money from the financial sector than her opponent's. How is this defensible, either ethically or from a strict optics standpoint? The only defense I can see is expediency (we needed the money to win), and that crumbles when you see the results of the election.
You know the phrase "be the change you want to see in the world?" She did the opposite of that.
Are we back to "she should have known" style hindsight evaluation of reality? The sort of thing that implies that if any politician does anything that "looks" bad they need to quit being a politician for the rest of their life because now they're tainted, even if they didn't actually do something bad? Maybe that belief is why there's next to no Democrat politicians while the Republicans who don't give a shit about any of that fill their ranks.
Yes, she should have known that taking big money from big banks would come up when she wanted to appear authentic in her desire to strongly regulate big banks. She absolutely should have known this.
Are you arguing that you consider any Democrat who takes so much as a cent from Wall Street and/or the Big Banks to be tainted and thus untrustworthy and impossible to vote for?
I still voted, but my confidence on that front was shattered.
"I'm going to crack down on big banks" and "I'm going to talk to them for ludicrous sums of money and refuse to release transcripts" are two weirdly conflicting things. At the very least, that was terrible optics.
No they aren't. I'd take millions of dollars to talk to Goldmen Sachs in a heartbeat. Fuck yeah, easy money. That doesn't change shit about what kind of policy I'd want to implement if I could. People give speeches at these kind of things all the time. It's like commencement speeches or graduation speeches or whatever. Hire someone big and famous to come fluff the crowd.
The problem with the speeches is all optics because people are silly.
It's not like Wall Street executives giving huge sums of money to politicians has ever resulted in anything bad happening in the past.
How terribly vague and lacking in substance. Are you claiming her speeches were a form of bribery by Wall Street?
I'm not saying it was a bribe. I'm saying it looks exactly like a bribe and no one should be surprised at how easily a grossly misinformed public could be manipulated into think it was a bribe.
It was a series of colossal missteps to give the speeches in the first place, charge a huge sum of money, keep the money instead of giving it to a charity other than your own and then act evasive about the speeches.
It only "exactly looks like a bribe" if you are predisposed to viewing any monetary transfer from GS as such. Part of the reason people like Clinton do these speeches is to push different worldviews out to these organizations, as a way to push them to look at their thinking. And her honorarium was within the standard for a speaker of her caliber.
It doesn't matter why someone believes it. The only thing that matters is that a lot of people did believe it and the Clinton campaign did nothing to staunch the bleeding which I believe was a colossal misstep.
How do you staunch the bleeding when the cause is totally outside your control? You can't (and shouldn't) forcibly stop fake news from spreading. No politician, hell no human being, is so squeaky clean that they are immune to this tactic.
I'm starting to think that HRC was particularly vulnerable to this because she is a) a woman and b) not charismatic, at least in the way society thinks a woman should be. She is simultaneously the best and worst candidate the Dems had.
I think in general Clinton either wasn't anywhere near the political knife fighter she was sold as (and with the people in her employ for the campaign that's particularly disappointing) or just straight couldn't adapt to the new, bizarre reality of campaigning against Trump. I definitely think that she was deeply underequipped for controlling the narrative, in a lot of ways that weren't really her fault.
I don't think that's entirely accurate. She was never sold as a good campaigner. A political knife-fighter is not the same thing. I think Obama in many ways illustrates the opposite, especially in his early time and office. And even now to some extent on key issues.
Maybe it's my memory playing tricks on me but I swear her and Bill were better at this shit back in the 90s. Or maybe Bill's charisma just smooths over the rough edges better. But things like the Wall Street speeches are just ... I can't see how you don't get how bad it looks, even though it's literally nothing.
There was definitely talk, in here and elsewhere, about how Hillary Clinton was a master of retail politics and a savy campaigner. The sausage thing at the NY state fair was brought up repeatedly.
Regardless, it's pretty clear that the entire campaign apparatus was unprepared for how this thing went down. We need to restructure for the next time out, in a major way.
National campaigns aren't really retail politics. Of course, she got beat in the Iowa caucuses both times, which is entirely retail politics, so she's probably not very good at it.
Clinton's major campaign skill is she's VERY good at debates. She's not great on the stump or a great manager of her campaign staff, which is her real biggest flaw.
Also that she has the last name Clinton and the press hates her guts.
When I talk to people all it really boils down to is this: they don't like her. It's nothing specific - not the emails, or hints of corruption, or ties to Wall Street, or political stances. They just don't like her or trust her from some vague reason. Those certainly help reinforce their biases, but ultimately, they just don't like her and everything else is justification for that fact.
More or less she ran not as Obama's third term, but as Bill's, and all of the baggage and frustration that comes with that.
Let us say you're right and this is the case. My reply is that if you have constructed so fragile a house that a light breeze toppled it, the fault is more with the house you built than the wind.
I made several posts on this back in the primary days, to the effect that Hiliary supporters wanted it both ways: she was somehow both a powerhouse politician with an unbeatable arsenal of ground game, $$$&, etc., but was also some how a house of cards that could be staggered by any faint touch so please fall in line and do not dissent lest all is lost.
Did Bernie cost her some voters? Maybe. Probably. But focusing on those few he cost her seems pitiful when you put it next to WHY it came down to that. Those votes should have never mattered. That she was in a position to be toppled by so slight a breeze should be of more concern imo.
Both are true. She did run a strong campaign, that she simply needed a few thousand voters to vote for her in the right places means she did tremendously well, that's not something to be ashamed of. She won the popular vote, for God's sake. The campaign was flawed, yes, but it did many things exceedingly well, too.
Focusing on the few that lost her victory is important so the next time it doesn't happen again, and we'd be looking at the next Democrat being president rathe tan Trump.
This is why it's important to have solid coalition, which Bernie weakened in the primaries and why it's vital new and low information voters know what happens when they fail to show up.
I think any useful lessons aren't going to take the form of 'run this candidate instead of this one' or even 'move further to the left/right' Any and all course correction should, above all else, involve ways to properly convey to the public that the values of the Democratic party are of benefit to the populace. If there's one thing this election has definitively taught us, is that if you can get the people on your side, they'll literally vote for anyone you put in front of them.
That serves the Republican side more than the Democrats, I fear.
Shit all the arguments you see in this thread are basically entirely over groups and people with very different ideas about how this primary went down. Like fucking 90% of the arguments in every thread on this topic since the later half of the democratic primary can be boiled down to one single argument. One side feels Sanders behaviour was very obviously a factor in killing enthusiasm for voting for Clinton in the election and the other side doesn't think that is true to any degree that mattered. And neither side has been willing to budge on that one point for months now. Queue arguments.
Beyond the argument itself being intractable, I don't even either side really says anything actionable moving forward.
We can sit here and moralize at each other, exacerbating the split along this thing that we can't go back in time and fix, or we can actually fix the thing that we all agree on; the party needs to get its shit together to oppose Trump.
Unless relitigating the primary is going to produce some amazing insight, which seems rather unlikely at this point, it's just throwing around blame and accomplishing nothing but extending the rancor.
Unfortunately this won't go away by ignoring it. It certainly won't when Bernie takes shots at Hillary post-peelction, either. It'll take time to heal wounds, and it's important to know what went wrong so it won't happen again.
9) Sanders taps into the frustration with establishment Democrats from members of the activist base and especially with young people. He runs an unexpectedly strong campaign, winning in early states in ways that remind people of Obama. However, Clinton wins the African-American (especially but not limited to older voters) decisively and keeps her Hispanic support from 2008. This wins her the primary.
(You can see how points 2 and 5 above create this dynamic. Bernie did better than I expected, but I wanted him to do relatively well to push Clinton to the left and force her to deal with the reality that there was a strong liberal component of the party that needed reckoning with. Which he did and she responded by moving to the left to reflect this. Did Sanders stay in the race too long? I think that's the wrong question. I think after he had clearly lost he made some errors in judgment about how he campaigned more than anything else.)
I disagree, but staying in the race Bernie continued and exaggerated the conflict, he chose to go to war despite the fact he lost in May. had he chilled out back then, and conceded when he actually lost I don't think the factions would be as heated as they are now.
10) Tensions continue to simmer between Sanders and Clinton camps.
(As evidenced by how many times that conflict got threads locked like this one is in danger of. I think there are lots of things going on here. First, there's a - to my mind completely legitimate - frustration among the left that they often feel like they're Cassandra and no one listens to them despite consistently being right on the merits. Second, Sanders really did play up the narrative that the whole system was working against people and keeping them down, including the corrupt Democratic establishment. This reinforced the above reasonably valid narratives and made it a little darker to my mind. Third, and I don't think there's a nice way to say this, but the hardest core Sanders supporters got played - hard - by Wikileaks, which is to say Russia. There are other factors, but I think those are the major ones.)
11) Things are not yet hunky dory at the convention, unlike 2008.
Personally, I think they took the wrong message of Hillary losing and failed to recognize that Bernie had flaws that weren't going to do him any favors in the general. Him winning was not guarantee by a long shot. The fact that he did lose to Hillary is ignored since it's inconvenient to the narrative that he'd do better than she could. It's underestimating Trump, and the GOP, which too many people still do - it's difficult to get into the mindspace that it's all Hillary fault when she's against one of the most dangerous political machines in the world + Donald Trump, someone who acts like a fucking psyker during election because nothing stops him. He was not an easy opponent to beat, and he only won due to a technicality at that.
(I think the quick turn around between the last primary and Sanders' concession and the convention is an underrated factor here. If the DNC is in July in 2008 instead of August, might the hard feelings over that primary have erupted into something obnoxious and disruptive? More likely than it ended up being in August. Bernie did a lot of work that week to try to slow things down, to his credit. But the feelings were still pretty raw.)
Which was too little, too late.
12) None of this shit should have mattered, except James Comey staged a fucking coup d'etat.
(The worst thing Democrats can do in the face of the Trumpening is to fracture like they did after the Rehnquist coup installed our last Republican President. A key part in not fracturing is to not overstate our differences. We all basically stand for the same stuff: civil rights, universal health care, environmental protection, a more equal distribution of wealth, etc. It's just a matter of degrees and methods.)
True, but what else can we do? Both sides aren't going to go for hugs and agree 100% with each other, especially when the general was over recently.
Rising medical costs on top of a generation of stagnant wages are going to guillotine the head right off the middle class, and the utter failure of 2008-2010 to stem the loss of wealth from most of the country lost a lot of investment by the very voters Hillary was counting on to vote for her.
Why should someone in Detroit fight their boss for their 2 hours of time on election day when they're pretty sure Hillary isn't going to fight for their wages to get better? Why should someone in Flint give a shit about voting for president after Obama came by and said things were fine, when they're still boiling water every day?
The sad truth is that for a lot of folks in the country, they can look back after 8 years of Obama and say that they weren't better off. Now you're politically savvy, you know that's because it was the Blue Dogs, it was obstruction by congressional Republicans, it was a concentrated effort by the Koch brothers to prevent action. So why wasn't the DNC selling that as a reason to vote blue? Why was Hillary's campaign out there trying to separate Trump from the Republicans, instead of tying them all to the failing policies of the previous 6 years?
Frankly we know why: because the assumption was that poor voters, black voters, were going to show up regardless because Trump was so scary, and what she needed to do was split off suburban whites from Trump to win.
(The worst thing Democrats can do in the face of the Trumpening is to fracture like they did after the Rehnquist coup installed our last Republican President. A key part in not fracturing is to not overstate our differences. We all basically stand for the same stuff: civil rights, universal health care, environmental protection, a more equal distribution of wealth, etc. It's just a matter of degrees and methods.)
i think the fracture is already happening. the DNC should have already been a warning sign. whole sections of the DNC voiced loud opposition, and the DNC leadership reacted by turning the lights off in the protesting area sections.
later, Donna Brazille refused to recognize the frustration of Party staffers.
instead of just coming out and taking the frustrations of Bernie supporters head on, the DNC barrelled on like everything was fine.
part of this was clearly fueled by polling, which to this day is still shocking in how wrong it all was. but part of it reflects an intractable party machine unwilling to listen and unwilling to give up the reins of power. that has to stop. if it takes the implosion of the Democrat party for that to happen, so be fucking it..
Yeah, the centrists can be dicks. However, the far left aren't exactly angels during this primary, and didn't I hear that they actually shouted at Brazille before walking out? Both can be wrong, y'know.
The centrists aren't going to give up their power by asking nicely, no faction in power who knows what they're doing does that. The Far left has to take that, and if they can't get organized to do that they're stuck with the centrists in charge.
An implosion of the Dems would be a worst case scenario, and we have no other left party ready to fill that void. It'd make things worse, not better in the long run.
This ignores all the pain and suffering about to happen or that happened from January 20, 2001 until hell, like nine months ago is when we finally got out from under the financial collapse Bush helped cause. I hate accelerationist talk because it commits the sin I hate the media for: treats this like a game without real effects on real people.
the problem is, the DNC leadership did exactly this.
i'm not talking about accelerationism, i'm talking about basic coalition building. Obama was hugely successful on this front in part because he focused on taking care of reaching across to as many groups as he could. this didn't result in many policy wins, but it was a hell of a political strategy.
Not every politics is Obama, you can't replace him with just anybody. There were a lot of factors at play that allowed him to do that, and near the end of his term that was slowly fading anyway. He can't govern like an idealist, but he can campaign like one. It also weakened him when it came to negotiation time since he had to keep that peaceful persona up.
Clinton used old-school Clinton politics, which considering what was happening with both the GOP and the Dem sides, it should have been obvious that that would no longer work. the emails were the last straw; i saw nothing incriminating or illegal in them, but i did see a top-down approach which kept being perpetuated by DWS and by Brazille. once those came out, the Clinton campaign should have immediately addressed them and full-stop reached out to Bernie supporters and others. but no, instead they shut the lights off sections at the DNC, stayed mum about the emails, and flat out refused to change course. that is a strategic error of gigantic magnitude, and it was possible only because the DNC leadership empowered it.
Except it did work, she won both the primary and only lost the general from the EC. She got many, many factions on board even the Far Left. Pretty sure her campaign and the DNC did reach out to Bernie's campaign, as well. Yet people act like she gave him the cold shoulder after the primary was over, which won't true. he got more concessions than he deserved when he went alls coached earth on the DNC and Hillary when he was negotiating his endorsement via Alinsky tactics, which kept tensions at a boiling point. This came months too late IMO.
Shit all the arguments you see in this thread are basically entirely over groups and people with very different ideas about how this primary went down. Like fucking 90% of the arguments in every thread on this topic since the later half of the democratic primary can be boiled down to one single argument. One side feels Sanders behaviour was very obviously a factor in killing enthusiasm for voting for Clinton in the election and the other side doesn't think that is true to any degree that mattered. And neither side has been willing to budge on that one point for months now. Queue arguments.
Beyond the argument itself being intractable, I don't even either side really says anything actionable moving forward.
We can sit here and moralize at each other, exacerbating the split along this thing that we can't go back in time and fix, or we can actually fix the thing that we all agree on; the party needs to get its shit together to oppose Trump.
Unless relitigating the primary is going to produce some amazing insight, which seems rather unlikely at this point, it's just throwing around blame and accomplishing nothing but extending the rancor.
I put an easy one just a few posts above. This primary can show us alot of things about what needs to be done going forward.
Number one is don't delegitimize the process. Don't feed into preexisting biases within the Democratic and left-wing base that encourage a lack of participation. The Democratic party and left wing politics in general in the US, live or die on participation. Turnout is a win for progress. Don't discourage voters.
I would prefer to simply remove the points within the process that only serve to exacerbate such arguments. Because we're going to argue about this stuff, anyway. It's what we do.
Your second point here is the reason your first is inadequate. As you said earlier "In politics, perception is reality." It's not enough to remove the parts of the process that create this perception, one has to actively not cultivate that perception as well. Just cause it's not real doesn't mean people won't believe it if you hammer that point.
But the hitches and complication of the system that exists served to feed the perception. In many instances, it actually served to kick off new waves of anger about the primary being "rigged", which themselves triggered angry responses about how it wasn't.
All that rigged stuff was encouraged and promoted by Bernie's campaign.
The lack of standardization and transparency is a huge problem. We can't do this again.
No, we can't. But it's not all the centrists fault for why the primaries were a train wreck, the question is did the far left learn not to repeat Bernie's mistakes? The centrists don't get off lightly either, they need to stop screwing around as well.
Even if the speeches were themselves completely benign, which I honestly feel is probably the case, they completely submarined her ability to present an authentic voice for a bunch of the stuff Progressives already doubted her on. And then they chose to hide them, which made it worse. All of this was helped along, as well, by her inability to come across as authentic on anything but children's health and women's rights. It was a total shitstorm of my (least) favorite word from the primary; optics.
This is a lot of the same stuff that Trump hit her on all the way through the general as well. That a candidate with actual plans to regulate the financial industry lost to the guy who is putting a record number of Goldman-Sachs alumni in his cabinet is a testament to how you should never, ever associate with groups like that if you want to be taken seriously on those issues.
1. Which the media and Bernie's camp tried to sink her with, deliberately. That was not an accident. And she did try to be authentic and warmer, that's why she got many liberals and progressives on board in the first place. '08 Hillary wouldn't have gotten Elizabeth Warren to be her Huckleberry. But it went enough to sooth all the Far Left. Yes, optics fucked her with this.
2. Because she was being screwed with from all sides, she was partially weakened from the primaries and Trump voters are terribly easy marks to fool if you're a conman.
3. She still won the popular vote, ran a campaign that was further left than the Dems ever had, and only lost due to the EC.
popular vote win or not, i'm not gonna accept any scenario that results in a president trump as anything resembling a good performance
running up the vote count doesn't count for much when you still lose nearly ever swing state, and a couple of major reliably democratic states. like yeah, a bunch of stuff chipped away at her margin, but her margin absolutely should never have been so tight that states that have gone reliably dem for like, thirty years actually flip. you may as well complain about a few little hull leaks as the rest of the titanic breaks in half.
there were bigger problems than a few unhappy berniebros and stein voters
Are we back to "she should have known" style hindsight evaluation of reality? The sort of thing that implies that if any politician does anything that "looks" bad they need to quit being a politician for the rest of their life because now they're tainted, even if they didn't actually do something bad? Maybe that belief is why there's next to no Democrat politicians while the Republicans who don't give a shit about any of that fill their ranks.
Yes, she should have known that taking big money from big banks would come up when she wanted to appear authentic in her desire to strongly regulate big banks. She absolutely should have known this.
Are you arguing that you consider any Democrat who takes so much as a cent from Wall Street and/or the Big Banks to be tainted and thus untrustworthy and impossible to vote for?
I still voted, but my confidence on that front was shattered.
"I'm going to crack down on big banks" and "I'm going to talk to them for ludicrous sums of money and refuse to release transcripts" are two weirdly conflicting things. At the very least, that was terrible optics.
No they aren't. I'd take millions of dollars to talk to Goldmen Sachs in a heartbeat. Fuck yeah, easy money. That doesn't change shit about what kind of policy I'd want to implement if I could. People give speeches at these kind of things all the time. It's like commencement speeches or graduation speeches or whatever. Hire someone big and famous to come fluff the crowd.
The problem with the speeches is all optics because people are silly.
I feel like I'm in crazy land here. I care about my candidate standing behind their promises. You tell me you want to go hard on the finance industry? Cool. So don't cozy up to them and take their money, dont hide it like you're ashamed of it. Put some fucking weight behind your words.
Her history and record showed me Nothing positive on this front. Nada. And then she pulled this stunt. And then she wanted me to believe she was totally on my side her and was going to crack down on the finance industry? Lol no
It wasn't a good look. At all.
How would you fund the party and political candidates then? That operations aren't cheap to run.
You can do both at once, too but since Hillary never got elected we'll never know.
I think in general Clinton either wasn't anywhere near the political knife fighter she was sold as (and with the people in her employ for the campaign that's particularly disappointing) or just straight couldn't adapt to the new, bizarre reality of campaigning against Trump. I definitely think that she was deeply underequipped for controlling the narrative, in a lot of ways that weren't really her fault.
I think in general Clinton either wasn't anywhere near the political knife fighter she was sold as (and with the people in her employ for the campaign that's particularly disappointing) or just straight couldn't adapt to the new, bizarre reality of campaigning against Trump. I definitely think that she was deeply underequipped for controlling the narrative, in a lot of ways that weren't really her fault.
I don't think that's entirely accurate. She was never sold as a good campaigner. A political knife-fighter is not the same thing. I think Obama in many ways illustrates the opposite, especially in his early time and office. And even now to some extent on key issues.
Maybe it's my memory playing tricks on me but I swear her and Bill were better at this shit back in the 90s. Or maybe Bill's charisma just smooths over the rough edges better. But things like the Wall Street speeches are just ... I can't see how you don't get how bad it looks, even though it's literally nothing.
There was definitely talk, in here and elsewhere, about how Hillary Clinton was a master of retail politics and a savy campaigner. The sausage thing at the NY state fair was brought up repeatedly.
Regardless, it's pretty clear that the entire campaign apparatus was unprepared for how this thing went down. We need to restructure for the next time out, in a major way.
The whole thing is worth reading (its short), but some excerpts:
The candidate should win by qualifications alone. Political office is compared to brain surgery. Look at this study that shows that members of the other party are less educated. Watch this video of a supporter saying something laughable. The other candidate is pathologized; he is mentally ill, or on drugs, or has a sub-normal IQ. Rather than argue right vs. wrong, the battle is the smart vs. the stupid.
This puts off and alienates a majority of people. Most people didn’t make good grades or even like school. Most people don’t work in jobs with a clear ladder to climb based on educational and professional qualifications. Most people kind of like to see the experts shown up (think of clickbait that begins “Doctors hate this.”) In every movie, the slobs beat the snobs. Most people resent being talked down to, and are more keenly aware of it than the person doing the talking down.
...
However, there simply aren’t enough success-driven educated professionals with lives similar to Hillary’s. Careerist ambition is not always an appealing personality trait to those who do not share it. Even white women, who would be expected to most see themselves in Clinton, did not vote for her in a majority.
Sexism, is of course, to blame for a lot of this. Ambitious women are not trusted or liked, and while this is unfortunate, it is a well-known social phenomenon. The campaign’s attitude seemed to be “well, they’ll get used to it.” The sexism of the public was not something to be countered with a different narrative, to be persuaded away, but rather something to be triumphed over. Those deplorable idiots would be proven wrong rather than won over.
...
In the end, the snobs lost to the slobs, but true to the character of the well-educated, they simply will not hear criticism that does not come from the similarly credentialed. The loss is the fault of every stupid person. The voters were racist and sexist, those stupid hippy millennials didn’t turn up, morons believed fake news. The front of the class don’t need to change a thing, they’ve made good grades their whole lives, they’re never wrong, and they’re going to just keep on being right and losing fights.
After reading that I have no idea what the author suggests as an alternative.
I see it as a call for strategic change. Things like:
-Don't base your campaign on how much of an idiot the other guy is. Focus on how you're going to help your constituents.
-Nominate a candidate who empathizes with the majority of voters. Ideally, someone who's been in their shoes, and can speak from lived experience. Try to avoid nominating people who come across as "the elite."
-Don't talk down to the voters or insult them. Take their views seriously and when necessary, present a competing narrative that will come across as plausible to them (the sexism thing is a good example of this.)
-Focus on ideas, not credentials, language, or social cues.
And so on.
literally the opposite of how Trump won
A lot of stars aligned just how they needed to when he collapsed across the finish line, shocked at his own victory
You're sure not going to win elections with any reliability by pulling from the DJT playbook
I made a game! Hotline Maui. Requires mouse and keyboard.
The whole thing is worth reading (its short), but some excerpts:
The candidate should win by qualifications alone. Political office is compared to brain surgery. Look at this study that shows that members of the other party are less educated. Watch this video of a supporter saying something laughable. The other candidate is pathologized; he is mentally ill, or on drugs, or has a sub-normal IQ. Rather than argue right vs. wrong, the battle is the smart vs. the stupid.
This puts off and alienates a majority of people. Most people didn’t make good grades or even like school. Most people don’t work in jobs with a clear ladder to climb based on educational and professional qualifications. Most people kind of like to see the experts shown up (think of clickbait that begins “Doctors hate this.”) In every movie, the slobs beat the snobs. Most people resent being talked down to, and are more keenly aware of it than the person doing the talking down.
...
However, there simply aren’t enough success-driven educated professionals with lives similar to Hillary’s. Careerist ambition is not always an appealing personality trait to those who do not share it. Even white women, who would be expected to most see themselves in Clinton, did not vote for her in a majority.
Sexism, is of course, to blame for a lot of this. Ambitious women are not trusted or liked, and while this is unfortunate, it is a well-known social phenomenon. The campaign’s attitude seemed to be “well, they’ll get used to it.” The sexism of the public was not something to be countered with a different narrative, to be persuaded away, but rather something to be triumphed over. Those deplorable idiots would be proven wrong rather than won over.
...
In the end, the snobs lost to the slobs, but true to the character of the well-educated, they simply will not hear criticism that does not come from the similarly credentialed. The loss is the fault of every stupid person. The voters were racist and sexist, those stupid hippy millennials didn’t turn up, morons believed fake news. The front of the class don’t need to change a thing, they’ve made good grades their whole lives, they’re never wrong, and they’re going to just keep on being right and losing fights.
After reading that I have no idea what the author suggests as an alternative.
I see it as a call for strategic change. Things like:
-Don't base your campaign on how much of an idiot the other guy is. Focus on how you're going to help your constituents.
-Nominate a candidate who empathizes with the majority of voters. Ideally, someone who's been in their shoes, and can speak from lived experience. Try to avoid nominating people who come across as "the elite."
-Don't talk down to the voters or insult them. Take their views seriously and when necessary, present a competing narrative that will come across as plausible to them (the sexism thing is a good example of this.)
-Focus on ideas, not credentials, language, or social cues.
And so on.
literally the opposite of how Trump won
A lot of stars aligned just how they needed to when he collapsed across the finish line, shocked at his own victory
You're sure not going to win elections with any reliability by pulling from the DJT playbook
yeah, trump didn't so much win as clinton lost
he's going into his own inauguration with late-GWB approvals
and mind you, i don't think the loss was completely clinton's fault. it's pretty clear now that they're been a large-scale failure of messaging for the entire past eight years, from individual dems fleeing from the left for fear of the tea party, to the obama white house inadequately taking control of messaging and folding to republican demands with too little negotiation
The nominee of the party whose platform explicitly sets out to curb the influence of lobbyists takes (personally takes, not in the form of campaign donations) over half a million dollars from the bank most associated with profiting off of the great recession. Her campaign also takes more money from the financial sector than her opponent's. How is this defensible, either ethically or from a strict optics standpoint? The only defense I can see is expediency (we needed the money to win), and that crumbles when you see the results of the election.
You know the phrase "be the change you want to see in the world?" She did the opposite of that.
Yeah, it's not a good look and yeah the Dems need to hold Wall Street to the fire more than they do - but it's not that simple.
First, money - the Dems need lots of money to fund their group or they'll become a regional party and the GOP monopolizes national politics for the foreseeable future.
Connections, having allies in those places make it easier to know what's going on and to get experts who know what're talking about for regulations. Dems are pro-regulation.
Change occurs over time in small bursts, politics isn't altering everything instantly for various reasons. Unless you're Trump, but it's a lot easier to pull something down than to build.
Rising medical costs on top of a generation of stagnant wages are going to guillotine the head right off the middle class, and the utter failure of 2008-2010 to stem the loss of wealth from most of the country lost a lot of investment by the very voters Hillary was counting on to vote for her.
Why should someone in Detroit fight their boss for their 2 hours of time on election day when they're pretty sure Hillary isn't going to fight for their wages to get better? Why should someone in Flint give a shit about voting for president after Obama came by and said things were fine, when they're still boiling water every day?
The sad truth is that for a lot of folks in the country, they can look back after 8 years of Obama and say that they weren't better off. Now you're politically savvy, you know that's because it was the Blue Dogs, it was obstruction by congressional Republicans, it was a concentrated effort by the Koch brothers to prevent action. So why wasn't the DNC selling that as a reason to vote blue? Why was Hillary's campaign out there trying to separate Trump from the Republicans, instead of tying them all to the failing policies of the previous 6 years?
Frankly we know why: because the assumption was that poor voters, black voters, were going to show up regardless because Trump was so scary, and what she needed to do was split off suburban whites from Trump to win.
You want to bales anyone for that, blame the GOP - Obama and the Dems tried to fix that with Obamacare and other acts. Their competition unfortunately was a 800lb gorilla.
Hillary was going to raise wages to $12 and was going to work on programs for colleges to make it cheaper IIRC. Presidents aren't kings, if you don't think Obama would have loved to do that I don't know what tell you.
Yeah, they were getting screwed by the GOP. Funny how when things get bad it's all the Democrats fault, and the Republicans are nowhere to be seen. Then they vote for them ad get screwed more.
I agree the Dems need to do a better job of making the public blame the Republicans, except when they do do that - like Hillary did in her campaign they didn't listen to her. She can't win.
popular vote win or not, i'm not gonna accept any scenario that results in a president trump as anything resembling a good performance
Why? That's what happened.
running up the vote count doesn't count for much when you still lose nearly ever swing state, and a couple of major reliably democratic states. like yeah, a bunch of stuff chipped away at her margin, but her margin absolutely should never have been so tight that states that have gone reliably dem for like, thirty years actually flip. you may as well complain about a few little hull leaks as the rest of the titanic breaks in half.
I bring that up because too many critic her for not having any accomplishments at all during the election and that Trump basically curb stomped her - which wasn't true. The devil is in the details. Yeah, she failed everyone does. Obama failed at things too.
Are you sure all those states in the Rust Belt were going Dem for thirty straight years? I'm positive that wasn't the case.
The little details matter, and when the margin of error in thin it can lose elections - like Hilary did.
there were bigger problems than a few unhappy berniebros and stein voters
But they were problems and they'll continue to be problems unless we get them on board. I don't think they'll magically be our friends if the next Dem nominee is Booker, do you?
Rising medical costs on top of a generation of stagnant wages are going to guillotine the head right off the middle class, and the utter failure of 2008-2010 to stem the loss of wealth from most of the country lost a lot of investment by the very voters Hillary was counting on to vote for her.
Why should someone in Detroit fight their boss for their 2 hours of time on election day when they're pretty sure Hillary isn't going to fight for their wages to get better? Why should someone in Flint give a shit about voting for president after Obama came by and said things were fine, when they're still boiling water every day?
The sad truth is that for a lot of folks in the country, they can look back after 8 years of Obama and say that they weren't better off. Now you're politically savvy, you know that's because it was the Blue Dogs, it was obstruction by congressional Republicans, it was a concentrated effort by the Koch brothers to prevent action. So why wasn't the DNC selling that as a reason to vote blue? Why was Hillary's campaign out there trying to separate Trump from the Republicans, instead of tying them all to the failing policies of the previous 6 years?
Frankly we know why: because the assumption was that poor voters, black voters, were going to show up regardless because Trump was so scary, and what she needed to do was split off suburban whites from Trump to win.
To continue: Why should anybody bother to vote when they have been stuck in a dead-end, no benefits and barely any worker rights Uber job for years after the recession?
Also, trying to separate Trump from the Republicans was a really big mistake, given that Trump not being a standard Republican was his biggest selling point. The Republican base really didn't want to vote for yet another Bush, specially Jeb!, and the Republican party got to the general without having to answer for 8 years of obstructionism while getting all the benefits from it, like the SCOTUS seat.
The whole thing is worth reading (its short), but some excerpts:
The candidate should win by qualifications alone. Political office is compared to brain surgery. Look at this study that shows that members of the other party are less educated. Watch this video of a supporter saying something laughable. The other candidate is pathologized; he is mentally ill, or on drugs, or has a sub-normal IQ. Rather than argue right vs. wrong, the battle is the smart vs. the stupid.
This puts off and alienates a majority of people. Most people didn’t make good grades or even like school. Most people don’t work in jobs with a clear ladder to climb based on educational and professional qualifications. Most people kind of like to see the experts shown up (think of clickbait that begins “Doctors hate this.”) In every movie, the slobs beat the snobs. Most people resent being talked down to, and are more keenly aware of it than the person doing the talking down.
...
However, there simply aren’t enough success-driven educated professionals with lives similar to Hillary’s. Careerist ambition is not always an appealing personality trait to those who do not share it. Even white women, who would be expected to most see themselves in Clinton, did not vote for her in a majority.
Sexism, is of course, to blame for a lot of this. Ambitious women are not trusted or liked, and while this is unfortunate, it is a well-known social phenomenon. The campaign’s attitude seemed to be “well, they’ll get used to it.” The sexism of the public was not something to be countered with a different narrative, to be persuaded away, but rather something to be triumphed over. Those deplorable idiots would be proven wrong rather than won over.
...
In the end, the snobs lost to the slobs, but true to the character of the well-educated, they simply will not hear criticism that does not come from the similarly credentialed. The loss is the fault of every stupid person. The voters were racist and sexist, those stupid hippy millennials didn’t turn up, morons believed fake news. The front of the class don’t need to change a thing, they’ve made good grades their whole lives, they’re never wrong, and they’re going to just keep on being right and losing fights.
After reading that I have no idea what the author suggests as an alternative.
I see it as a call for strategic change. Things like:
-Don't base your campaign on how much of an idiot the other guy is. Focus on how you're going to help your constituents.
-Nominate a candidate who empathizes with the majority of voters. Ideally, someone who's been in their shoes, and can speak from lived experience. Try to avoid nominating people who come across as "the elite."
-Don't talk down to the voters or insult them. Take their views seriously and when necessary, present a competing narrative that will come across as plausible to them (the sexism thing is a good example of this.)
-Focus on ideas, not credentials, language, or social cues.
And so on.
literally the opposite of how Trump won
A lot of stars aligned just how they needed to when he collapsed across the finish line, shocked at his own victory
You're sure not going to win elections with any reliability by pulling from the DJT playbook
Most of the Republican playbook is not gonna work for left-wing voters.
Ivanka and Jared Kushner already held a fundraiser for Booker and I presume he saved their phone numbers, so that takes care of the money problems Harry is worried about.
Ivanka and Jared Kushner already held a fundraiser for Booker and I presume he saved their phone numbers, so that takes care of the money problems Harry is worried about.
This right here is the reason I'm not worried about Booker as a potential candidate at all.
President Trump's right hand Son in Law threw him a fundraiser.
This isn't vaguely worrisome speech income, it's a political endorsement from Palpatine. Booker's cooked.
You want to bales anyone for that, blame the GOP - Obama and the Dems tried to fix that with Obamacare and other acts. Their competition unfortunately was a 800lb gorilla.
Hillary was going to raise wages to $12 and was going to work on programs for colleges to make it cheaper IIRC. Presidents aren't kings, if you don't think Obama would have loved to do that I don't know what tell you.
Obama walked in with a majority of the vote and congress. Any amount of "but but but" doesn't cut it. Dems had a mandate, dems controlled the rules, dems decided the policy. Somehow all those houses were still foreclosed on, somehow the rich kept consolidating wealth, somehow wages stayed stagnant, somehow medical costs kept getting higher, and somehow, the Obama coalition didn't show up in 2010 to keep the blue dogs in congress to maintain the majority.
Trump is going to walk into office with a minority of the vote and already they have legislation lined up to keep their most hardcore base happy. Worth thinking about.
and, none of this stuff with clinton came out of nowhere. there were signs. we knew about her unfavorables. everybody cheered when trump got the nom because hey, at least his unfavorables were shit, too. i certainly wasn't convinced that her financial policy was going to go where I wanted it. and yes, that's not a little bit in part because she was taking their money. i'm not going to trust the guy with a sweet side gig consulting for BP on environmental issues, either. i watched the debates too, and her answer to the e-mail questions? terrible. she was evasive, avoided taking responsibility, and was left just looking shady and political. and i'm seeing this, and i don't even care about the e-mail! it was a moment where she had the attention of millions, an uninterrupted moment to do something to put it to rest, and she didn't, and it wound up being one of the nails in the coffin, fake scandal that it was.
Ivanka and Jared Kushner already held a fundraiser for Booker and I presume he saved their phone numbers, so that takes care of the money problems Harry is worried about.
Not really, he can still win the nomination - all he needs is rivals who are too weak to stop him then the Far Left has a choice - president Booker or president Trump for another 4 years. They need to choose wisely.
If the Far Left doesn't want Booker getting the nomination they need a candidate who can take the nomination from him. They need to get started on this now, Booker already has. Don't repeat Bernie's mistakes by coming unprepared for the big fight.
Another thing to remember, there will always be another Booker and Hillary.
It's really hard to overestimate the level of connections and pull Clinton had within the party. Booker is nowhere near that. If he runs, and can somehow get over the fact that he happily took money from a Trump, he's still just another dude in the race. Not the assumed candidate for a decade running.
Harry you seem addicted to emphatically rejecting whatever a perceived political enemy happens to have just said and to have a very broad definition of political enemies
I made a game! Hotline Maui. Requires mouse and keyboard.
Everybody arguing the "Far Left" (which is inexplicably capitalized now) side of things has been vocal and consistent about how things need to be worked on right fucking now, and not in 2/4 years.
We really do not need to be told to get to work. It just sounds condescending and like you haven't been listening to a word we've said; you only respond to make big long line-by-line analysis posts so you can preach at us.
It's really hard to overestimate the level of connections and pull Clinton had within the party. Booker is nowhere near that. If he runs, and can somehow get over the fact that he happily took money from a Trump, he's still just another dude in the race. Not the assumed candidate for a decade running.
Booker needn't be as connected as Hillary to be persona non grata with the left. He's an establishment dem with access to big donors and connections to Wall steer plus Republicans. It's not him who need to get over this when he's in a primary, all his bad deeds are going to come back to haunt him in the primary and the general if he makes it.
Harry you seem addicted to emphatically rejecting whatever a perceived political enemy happens to have just said and to have a very broad definition of political enemies
What are you talking about? I've stated many times that the Far left are not the entire reason Hillary lost, I've made sure to include criticisms of Hillary/the party/DNC for balance and no one here is my political enemy - the Republicans are.
Can you be clearer with your last sentence? How am I being broad here?
Everybody arguing the "Far Left" (which is inexplicably capitalized now) side of things has been vocal and consistent about how things need to be worked on right fucking now, and not in 2/4 years.
We really do not need to be told to get to work. It just sounds condescending and like you haven't been listening to a word we've said; you only respond to make big long line-by-line analysis posts so you can preach at us.
I'm not talking about the people here when I say the Far left, guess I should have been clearer.
I've listened to your side for a very long time but it appears we're still in the square one stage on both sides- no one is going to change anyone else's opinion. We'll see where the party is in 2 years to see whether this is still the status quo.
Btw it gets really difficult not to preach when I've been preached at constantly since the primaries by the other side.
Ivanka and Jared Kushner already held a fundraiser for Booker and I presume he saved their phone numbers, so that takes care of the money problems Harry is worried about.
This right here is the reason I'm not worried about Booker as a potential candidate at all.
President Trump's right hand Son in Law threw him a fundraiser.
This isn't vaguely worrisome speech income, it's a political endorsement from Palpatine. Booker's cooked.
I really want to like Booker but he's just ... he's got bad connections and statements.
It's really hard to overestimate the level of connections and pull Clinton had within the party. Booker is nowhere near that. If he runs, and can somehow get over the fact that he happily took money from a Trump, he's still just another dude in the race. Not the assumed candidate for a decade running.
Booker needn't be as connected as Hillary to be persona non grata with the left. He's an establishment dem with access to big donors and connections to Wall steer plus Republicans. It's not him who need to get over this when he's in a primary, all his bad deeds are going to come back to haunt him in the primary and the general if he makes it.
I'm really, honestly unable to parse this as a response to what you've quoted.
You want to bales anyone for that, blame the GOP - Obama and the Dems tried to fix that with Obamacare and other acts. Their competition unfortunately was a 800lb gorilla.
Hillary was going to raise wages to $12 and was going to work on programs for colleges to make it cheaper IIRC. Presidents aren't kings, if you don't think Obama would have loved to do that I don't know what tell you.
Obama walked in with a majority of the vote and congress. Any amount of "but but but" doesn't cut it. Dems had a mandate, dems controlled the rules, dems decided the policy. Somehow all those houses were still foreclosed on, somehow the rich kept consolidating wealth, somehow wages stayed stagnant, somehow medical costs kept getting higher, and somehow, the Obama coalition didn't show up in 2010 to keep the blue dogs in congress to maintain the majority.
Trump is going to walk into office with a minority of the vote and already they have legislation lined up to keep their most hardcore base happy. Worth thinking about.
Obama had a fillibuster proof majority for a few months. On top of that a handful of Dem senators are basically Republicans anyway.
Reid was a fool and thought the GOP would work with them
Obama walked in with a majority of the vote and congress. Any amount of "but but but" doesn't cut it. Dems had a mandate, dems controlled the rules, dems decided the policy. Somehow all those houses were still foreclosed on, somehow the rich kept consolidating wealth, somehow wages stayed stagnant, somehow medical costs kept getting higher, and somehow, the Obama coalition didn't show up in 2010 to keep the blue dogs in congress to maintain the majority.
Trump is going to walk into office with a minority of the vote and already they have legislation lined up to keep their most hardcore base happy. Worth thinking about.
Obama had to rebuild the regulatory state from almost scratch. People still don't realize just how much damage Bush did. I still say Molly Ivins wrote the definitive source on this, Bushwhacked. Plus because she's a great writer it's a quick read. Fucking Scalia's kid ran the Civil Rights Division at Justice. Holder had to reconstruct entirely after that.
Meanwhile, yes, the Democrats lack ideological coherence. For them to get 50 votes in the Senate, if they had two Senators from every state based on how liberal it was, the 50th vote would be from Ohio, the 51st from Florida. It's hard for actual liberals to win statewide election in those states. That Sherrod Brown does it is a damn miracle. Plus they didn't, because Maine sent two Republicans, Ohio one, so even before we're getting to the filibuster we're counting on Senators from states like Montana (Tester) and Missouri (McCaskill). For them to vote for liberal legislation is brave and risking their job. Now they're both pretty savvy and were fortunate to draw utter morons as their opponents, so they're still in the Senate, but the point stands. They're also pains in the ass.
In both cases note that it is easier to destroy that to create. Especially if you want to be effective. Maybe the old regs were outdated and we need new ones. They have to pass muster with your lawyers, you need to hire people to implement them, they need to figure out their jobs, you need an enforcement mechanism... In contrast all Bush had to do and all Trump has to do now is get rid of their budget and fire people, to hell with the consequences. And since people fundamentally resist change, it's easier to defend a no vote, especially if a shitty economy makes the President unpopular and his party fails to back him up. And it was even easier because the GOP had two Senators from Maine and later one from friggin' Massachusetts so that their key vote had to come from like Lindsay fucking Graham to block things. From a state with a Cook PVI of R+7. Not hard.
Now, there's one major point where you're absolute right, which was that they fucked up homeowner relief. HAMP existed, by most accounts of economists I trust it was a disaster and the relief went to all the wrong places. They also fucked up by appointing Arne Duncan. Sometimes they made mistakes, but overall this administration was working to make like dramatically better for all kinds of people. The Paris Climate Accord was the single most important thing they did and by itself would be a tremendous legacy... if we stood by the damn treaty.
Democrats and liberals need to learn to take a victory. And then keep working to make it better. The Obama Administration was a victory. That could be made better. The platform fight was a victory for liberals. That could have been improved upon. But to do those things you need power and to get power you need to show up. And that's both an institutional flaw (run candidates everywhere) and a flaw we suffer from on an individual level (show up in November).
enlightenedbum on
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
Posts
Yeah! Her answer on pay-to-play donations during the presidential debate was VERY clear... remember when she said uh....
er... i forgot what she said.
what'd she say?
Even when the 2008 primary reached it's peak I don't think Obama ever said Hilary Clinton was fundamentally unfit for office or anything. Never once do I think he suggested he wouldn't support her if she won the nomination. not once.
Sorry, but this remains not an answer to my question or the point at large.
Are you claiming that being paid to give a speech was a form of bribery?
"Hillary Clinton. She’ll say anything, and change nothing. It’s time to turn the page. Paid for by Obama for America."
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm not saying it was a bribe. I'm saying it looks exactly like a bribe and no one should be surprised at how easily a grossly misinformed public could be manipulated into thinking it was a bribe.
It was a series of colossal missteps to give the speeches in the first place, charge a huge sum of money, keep the money instead of giving it to a charity other than your own and then act evasive about the content.
It only "exactly looks like a bribe" if you are predisposed to viewing any monetary transfer from GS as such. Part of the reason people like Clinton do these speeches is to push different worldviews out to these organizations, as a way to push them to look at their thinking. And her honorarium was within the standard for a speaker of her caliber.
I think he's negging you.
It doesn't matter why someone believes it. The only thing that matters is that a lot of people did believe it and the Clinton campaign did nothing to staunch the bleeding which I believe was a colossal misstep.
You know the phrase "be the change you want to see in the world?" She did the opposite of that.
How do you staunch the bleeding when the cause is totally outside your control? You can't (and shouldn't) forcibly stop fake news from spreading. No politician, hell no human being, is so squeaky clean that they are immune to this tactic.
I'm starting to think that HRC was particularly vulnerable to this because she is a) a woman and b) not charismatic, at least in the way society thinks a woman should be. She is simultaneously the best and worst candidate the Dems had.
Also that she has the last name Clinton and the press hates her guts.
When I talk to people all it really boils down to is this: they don't like her. It's nothing specific - not the emails, or hints of corruption, or ties to Wall Street, or political stances. They just don't like her or trust her from some vague reason. Those certainly help reinforce their biases, but ultimately, they just don't like her and everything else is justification for that fact.
More or less she ran not as Obama's third term, but as Bill's, and all of the baggage and frustration that comes with that.
Both are true. She did run a strong campaign, that she simply needed a few thousand voters to vote for her in the right places means she did tremendously well, that's not something to be ashamed of. She won the popular vote, for God's sake. The campaign was flawed, yes, but it did many things exceedingly well, too.
Focusing on the few that lost her victory is important so the next time it doesn't happen again, and we'd be looking at the next Democrat being president rathe tan Trump.
This is why it's important to have solid coalition, which Bernie weakened in the primaries and why it's vital new and low information voters know what happens when they fail to show up.
That serves the Republican side more than the Democrats, I fear.
Unfortunately this won't go away by ignoring it. It certainly won't when Bernie takes shots at Hillary post-peelction, either. It'll take time to heal wounds, and it's important to know what went wrong so it won't happen again.
I disagree, but staying in the race Bernie continued and exaggerated the conflict, he chose to go to war despite the fact he lost in May. had he chilled out back then, and conceded when he actually lost I don't think the factions would be as heated as they are now.
Personally, I think they took the wrong message of Hillary losing and failed to recognize that Bernie had flaws that weren't going to do him any favors in the general. Him winning was not guarantee by a long shot. The fact that he did lose to Hillary is ignored since it's inconvenient to the narrative that he'd do better than she could. It's underestimating Trump, and the GOP, which too many people still do - it's difficult to get into the mindspace that it's all Hillary fault when she's against one of the most dangerous political machines in the world + Donald Trump, someone who acts like a fucking psyker during election because nothing stops him. He was not an easy opponent to beat, and he only won due to a technicality at that.
Which was too little, too late.
True, but what else can we do? Both sides aren't going to go for hugs and agree 100% with each other, especially when the general was over recently.
Why should someone in Detroit fight their boss for their 2 hours of time on election day when they're pretty sure Hillary isn't going to fight for their wages to get better? Why should someone in Flint give a shit about voting for president after Obama came by and said things were fine, when they're still boiling water every day?
The sad truth is that for a lot of folks in the country, they can look back after 8 years of Obama and say that they weren't better off. Now you're politically savvy, you know that's because it was the Blue Dogs, it was obstruction by congressional Republicans, it was a concentrated effort by the Koch brothers to prevent action. So why wasn't the DNC selling that as a reason to vote blue? Why was Hillary's campaign out there trying to separate Trump from the Republicans, instead of tying them all to the failing policies of the previous 6 years?
Frankly we know why: because the assumption was that poor voters, black voters, were going to show up regardless because Trump was so scary, and what she needed to do was split off suburban whites from Trump to win.
Yeah, the centrists can be dicks. However, the far left aren't exactly angels during this primary, and didn't I hear that they actually shouted at Brazille before walking out? Both can be wrong, y'know.
The centrists aren't going to give up their power by asking nicely, no faction in power who knows what they're doing does that. The Far left has to take that, and if they can't get organized to do that they're stuck with the centrists in charge.
An implosion of the Dems would be a worst case scenario, and we have no other left party ready to fill that void. It'd make things worse, not better in the long run.
Not every politics is Obama, you can't replace him with just anybody. There were a lot of factors at play that allowed him to do that, and near the end of his term that was slowly fading anyway. He can't govern like an idealist, but he can campaign like one. It also weakened him when it came to negotiation time since he had to keep that peaceful persona up.
Except it did work, she won both the primary and only lost the general from the EC. She got many, many factions on board even the Far Left. Pretty sure her campaign and the DNC did reach out to Bernie's campaign, as well. Yet people act like she gave him the cold shoulder after the primary was over, which won't true. he got more concessions than he deserved when he went alls coached earth on the DNC and Hillary when he was negotiating his endorsement via Alinsky tactics, which kept tensions at a boiling point. This came months too late IMO.
All that rigged stuff was encouraged and promoted by Bernie's campaign.
No, we can't. But it's not all the centrists fault for why the primaries were a train wreck, the question is did the far left learn not to repeat Bernie's mistakes? The centrists don't get off lightly either, they need to stop screwing around as well.
1. Which the media and Bernie's camp tried to sink her with, deliberately. That was not an accident. And she did try to be authentic and warmer, that's why she got many liberals and progressives on board in the first place. '08 Hillary wouldn't have gotten Elizabeth Warren to be her Huckleberry. But it went enough to sooth all the Far Left. Yes, optics fucked her with this.
2. Because she was being screwed with from all sides, she was partially weakened from the primaries and Trump voters are terribly easy marks to fool if you're a conman.
3. She still won the popular vote, ran a campaign that was further left than the Dems ever had, and only lost due to the EC.
running up the vote count doesn't count for much when you still lose nearly ever swing state, and a couple of major reliably democratic states. like yeah, a bunch of stuff chipped away at her margin, but her margin absolutely should never have been so tight that states that have gone reliably dem for like, thirty years actually flip. you may as well complain about a few little hull leaks as the rest of the titanic breaks in half.
there were bigger problems than a few unhappy berniebros and stein voters
How would you fund the party and political candidates then? That operations aren't cheap to run.
You can do both at once, too but since Hillary never got elected we'll never know.
Both are true.
I disagree.
A lot of stars aligned just how they needed to when he collapsed across the finish line, shocked at his own victory
You're sure not going to win elections with any reliability by pulling from the DJT playbook
he's going into his own inauguration with late-GWB approvals
Yeah, it's not a good look and yeah the Dems need to hold Wall Street to the fire more than they do - but it's not that simple.
First, money - the Dems need lots of money to fund their group or they'll become a regional party and the GOP monopolizes national politics for the foreseeable future.
Connections, having allies in those places make it easier to know what's going on and to get experts who know what're talking about for regulations. Dems are pro-regulation.
Change occurs over time in small bursts, politics isn't altering everything instantly for various reasons. Unless you're Trump, but it's a lot easier to pull something down than to build.
She was the change we needed, and America failed.
You want to bales anyone for that, blame the GOP - Obama and the Dems tried to fix that with Obamacare and other acts. Their competition unfortunately was a 800lb gorilla.
Hillary was going to raise wages to $12 and was going to work on programs for colleges to make it cheaper IIRC. Presidents aren't kings, if you don't think Obama would have loved to do that I don't know what tell you.
Yeah, they were getting screwed by the GOP. Funny how when things get bad it's all the Democrats fault, and the Republicans are nowhere to be seen. Then they vote for them ad get screwed more.
I agree the Dems need to do a better job of making the public blame the Republicans, except when they do do that - like Hillary did in her campaign they didn't listen to her. She can't win.
Why? That's what happened.
I bring that up because too many critic her for not having any accomplishments at all during the election and that Trump basically curb stomped her - which wasn't true. The devil is in the details. Yeah, she failed everyone does. Obama failed at things too.
Are you sure all those states in the Rust Belt were going Dem for thirty straight years? I'm positive that wasn't the case.
The little details matter, and when the margin of error in thin it can lose elections - like Hilary did.
But they were problems and they'll continue to be problems unless we get them on board. I don't think they'll magically be our friends if the next Dem nominee is Booker, do you?
To continue: Why should anybody bother to vote when they have been stuck in a dead-end, no benefits and barely any worker rights Uber job for years after the recession?
Also, trying to separate Trump from the Republicans was a really big mistake, given that Trump not being a standard Republican was his biggest selling point. The Republican base really didn't want to vote for yet another Bush, specially Jeb!, and the Republican party got to the general without having to answer for 8 years of obstructionism while getting all the benefits from it, like the SCOTUS seat.
Most of the Republican playbook is not gonna work for left-wing voters.
Ivanka and Jared Kushner already held a fundraiser for Booker and I presume he saved their phone numbers, so that takes care of the money problems Harry is worried about.
This right here is the reason I'm not worried about Booker as a potential candidate at all.
President Trump's right hand Son in Law threw him a fundraiser.
This isn't vaguely worrisome speech income, it's a political endorsement from Palpatine. Booker's cooked.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Obama walked in with a majority of the vote and congress. Any amount of "but but but" doesn't cut it. Dems had a mandate, dems controlled the rules, dems decided the policy. Somehow all those houses were still foreclosed on, somehow the rich kept consolidating wealth, somehow wages stayed stagnant, somehow medical costs kept getting higher, and somehow, the Obama coalition didn't show up in 2010 to keep the blue dogs in congress to maintain the majority.
Trump is going to walk into office with a minority of the vote and already they have legislation lined up to keep their most hardcore base happy. Worth thinking about.
Not really, he can still win the nomination - all he needs is rivals who are too weak to stop him then the Far Left has a choice - president Booker or president Trump for another 4 years. They need to choose wisely.
Thats not how primaries work, and you know it.
If the Far Left doesn't want Booker getting the nomination they need a candidate who can take the nomination from him. They need to get started on this now, Booker already has. Don't repeat Bernie's mistakes by coming unprepared for the big fight.
Another thing to remember, there will always be another Booker and Hillary.
I don't know if that's how you mean to come across but it's definitely how I'm reading it.
It's really hard to overestimate the level of connections and pull Clinton had within the party. Booker is nowhere near that. If he runs, and can somehow get over the fact that he happily took money from a Trump, he's still just another dude in the race. Not the assumed candidate for a decade running.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
We really do not need to be told to get to work. It just sounds condescending and like you haven't been listening to a word we've said; you only respond to make big long line-by-line analysis posts so you can preach at us.
Booker needn't be as connected as Hillary to be persona non grata with the left. He's an establishment dem with access to big donors and connections to Wall steer plus Republicans. It's not him who need to get over this when he's in a primary, all his bad deeds are going to come back to haunt him in the primary and the general if he makes it.
What are you talking about? I've stated many times that the Far left are not the entire reason Hillary lost, I've made sure to include criticisms of Hillary/the party/DNC for balance and no one here is my political enemy - the Republicans are.
Can you be clearer with your last sentence? How am I being broad here?
I'm not talking about the people here when I say the Far left, guess I should have been clearer.
I've listened to your side for a very long time but it appears we're still in the square one stage on both sides- no one is going to change anyone else's opinion. We'll see where the party is in 2 years to see whether this is still the status quo.
Btw it gets really difficult not to preach when I've been preached at constantly since the primaries by the other side.
I really want to like Booker but he's just ... he's got bad connections and statements.
I'm really, honestly unable to parse this as a response to what you've quoted.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Obama had a fillibuster proof majority for a few months. On top of that a handful of Dem senators are basically Republicans anyway.
Reid was a fool and thought the GOP would work with them
Obama had to rebuild the regulatory state from almost scratch. People still don't realize just how much damage Bush did. I still say Molly Ivins wrote the definitive source on this, Bushwhacked. Plus because she's a great writer it's a quick read. Fucking Scalia's kid ran the Civil Rights Division at Justice. Holder had to reconstruct entirely after that.
Meanwhile, yes, the Democrats lack ideological coherence. For them to get 50 votes in the Senate, if they had two Senators from every state based on how liberal it was, the 50th vote would be from Ohio, the 51st from Florida. It's hard for actual liberals to win statewide election in those states. That Sherrod Brown does it is a damn miracle. Plus they didn't, because Maine sent two Republicans, Ohio one, so even before we're getting to the filibuster we're counting on Senators from states like Montana (Tester) and Missouri (McCaskill). For them to vote for liberal legislation is brave and risking their job. Now they're both pretty savvy and were fortunate to draw utter morons as their opponents, so they're still in the Senate, but the point stands. They're also pains in the ass.
In both cases note that it is easier to destroy that to create. Especially if you want to be effective. Maybe the old regs were outdated and we need new ones. They have to pass muster with your lawyers, you need to hire people to implement them, they need to figure out their jobs, you need an enforcement mechanism... In contrast all Bush had to do and all Trump has to do now is get rid of their budget and fire people, to hell with the consequences. And since people fundamentally resist change, it's easier to defend a no vote, especially if a shitty economy makes the President unpopular and his party fails to back him up. And it was even easier because the GOP had two Senators from Maine and later one from friggin' Massachusetts so that their key vote had to come from like Lindsay fucking Graham to block things. From a state with a Cook PVI of R+7. Not hard.
Now, there's one major point where you're absolute right, which was that they fucked up homeowner relief. HAMP existed, by most accounts of economists I trust it was a disaster and the relief went to all the wrong places. They also fucked up by appointing Arne Duncan. Sometimes they made mistakes, but overall this administration was working to make like dramatically better for all kinds of people. The Paris Climate Accord was the single most important thing they did and by itself would be a tremendous legacy... if we stood by the damn treaty.
Democrats and liberals need to learn to take a victory. And then keep working to make it better. The Obama Administration was a victory. That could be made better. The platform fight was a victory for liberals. That could have been improved upon. But to do those things you need power and to get power you need to show up. And that's both an institutional flaw (run candidates everywhere) and a flaw we suffer from on an individual level (show up in November).