In 2008 lots of people ridiculed Hillary Clinton supporters who were coming up with bizarre theories about how she was really “winning” and ahead of Obama despite being well behind in both pledged delegates and raw vote totals.
At that time she finally concede she was closer to Obama than Bernie is currently to Hillary and her supporters were being more obnoxious than Bernie’s supporters currently are(or at least more vocal about sitting out or switching sides).
They came around and fell in line behind Obama.
Why shouldn’t Bernie supporters now receive the same sort of criticism her’s did then and what makes you think they won’t come around the same way her’s did then?
Isn’t it about time you told us what the Democratic Party could do that *would *make you feel sufficiently groveled to? Short, that is, of hanging Hillary and crowning Bernie. Or maybe that is what it would take?
I “supported” Hillary early on because I underestimated our people, I could not convince myself they would vote for a black liberal/centrist. As a pessimist, there are few things I enjoy more than being wrong.
Just what did Clinton promise that Obama didn’t deliver?
On the other hand, Clinton has pretty much come out and said that a lot of Sanders’s ideas - free public college tuition (which, I am convinced, is the primary reason he did so well in college towns in the primaries), for example - aren’t feasible, at least the way he proposes to pay for them.
Actually a couple times she was ahead in popular vote totals, even midway thru the campaign. But Obama clobbered her in caucuses, just like Bernie did.
So, Hillary was much closer to winning but still conceded. Even graciously.
Clinton and Obama were both Democrats and I suspect it was much easier for Clinton supporters to come around to Obama than vice versa, due to Obama’s heavy youth vote. It doesn’t take much for young voters to stay home. I’d bet that a lot of them have no interest whatsoever in the Democratic Party and were looking to start a revolution. If it fails, they go home and wait four years.
It’s weird it’s even being seriously considered, I mean Clinton was running the same exact strategy in 2008–win California (which would mean she won most of the large states, most of the swing states, and actually won in the popular vote overall during the 2008 primaries) and that basically is reason for the superdelegates to anoint her, since Obama really only won because he was much better at organizing in small caucus states with uber low voter turnout. By this point I remember virtually no one who was serious thought Clinton’s plan would work, and while it’s almost like that vis-a-vis Sanders’ plan, it feels like his plan still has a surprising number of vocal advocates at this late date versus Clinton’s, who I think no one other than her and Bill really believed in at this point.
I also continue to find it weird that Sanders is making the “corrupt nominating” system a big part of his stump speech, and that so many of the folks over in Bernie Land believe a corrupt nominating process is why Clinton has won. The reality of course is the only way for Bernie to win would be for the 700+ undemocratic Superdelegates to flip to him. The reality of course is that in primary elections, Clinton tends to do better than Bernie, and that he’s mostly only even still in the race because he does so well in caucuses–which are extremely undemocratic. FiveThirtyEight did a pretty good analysis showing that if all the states used primaries, and even open primaries Bernie would still be losing (he’d have done better than he did in some of the closed primary states, but Clinton would’ve likewise done better in some of the larger states that held caucuses, like Washington, in a normal election.)
Some choose the tack that since many of the primaries are closed, that makes the process corrupt. Which is frankly, very strange to me. These are party primaries, and to be honest more populism in the primary selection process doesn’t appear to me to be ideal. In fact we’re alone in the democratic world in giving random voters so much say in who the candidates are, and to be frank I wouldn’t be too proud of the typical candidate we put forth, on either side of the aisle, at any level of politics, versus say Australia, Britain, or Germany where the party makes the choice (or the party membership–but party membership is usually low in absolute numbers in those countries because unlike in America, it’s not just how you “register” to vote, it instead is more like joining a “club”, there are membership dues and responsibilities, so while many people are loyal to a certain political party in those countries very few are involved enough to be full members.)
I think the lessons of a demagogue like Trump should give the Democrats significant pause when it comes to deciding if they want to do things like dump superdelegates. While they’ve never been necessary, having a relatively large (14-15%) of the delegates be party elites is a nice firewall against a truly dangerous candidate.
At the end of the day the claims of a “corrupt system” levied against Clinton really just sound like a loser’s whining. The system isn’t corrupt, Clinton is just a better politician, she has made more political allies and generated more votes. Sanders appears to be upset that Clinton has more political allies than him–but that’s politics, that isn’t a systemic problem that’s a personal problem. Sanders appeal is in large part based on his outsider status, and he has steadfastly refused to join the Democratic party for his entire career (until now), and yet he seems to think it unfair that a deliberate political outsider has less political clout than a deliberate political insider.
IIRC his specific plan is to pay for it via a tax on Wall Street of some sort? Maybe a transaction tax? Yeah, that is very dumb. But a smarter plan would be to convert the $70bn or so we spend on higher education at the Federal level to tuition subsidies, instead of being used to service the student loan program, and to make various price control schemes mandatory for any college that wishes their students to receive those tuition subsidies. My understanding is our total spending on Federal support of higher ed (primarily Pell grants, subsidized loans) is almost enough to cover total “student share” of tuition nationally (it wouldn’t cover the share of costs that are currently paid for by State taxes, which vary considerably from state to state and college to college–with some states being more generous and many states allocating more as a percentage of budget to community colleges than flagship public universities which tend to have a lot of alternative funding sources.)
Look, I was raised a Republican and a free trader. I’m not all that het up about NAFTA, for example. I do think TPP is too anti-democratic, though.
But your problem as a party is that you’re nominating a free trader, and you’ve been with your actions all this time essentially telling all those old labor-oriented Democrats that left to vote for Ross Perot 20 years ago that a) they’re wrong about their issue of major concern, b) the party is all about “minority rights” now, and c) you now don’t even consider them Democrats nor even want their votes.
A lot of working-class Americans will vote for the guy who says “tariffs” and says he’ll protect their jobs from going to Mexico, China, Vietnam, and India.
Bernie was going to have an uphill climb, being an old Trotskyist. But I wonder if he’s the last gasp of both Great Society and New Deal social liberalism, as the Democratic Party has gone nearly fully into neoliberalism.
Here’s what scares me. The future messaging:
Clinton is pro-gay. Great! If you’re gay.
Clinton will send your job to foreigners. Not great!
Black people love Clinton. OK?
Clinton despises regular white people like you. What?
The likelihood is that white working class people will* continue* to see “Democrats” as the enemy, and to see the minority groups that suck up to them as a sort of anti-American fifth column.
Clinton now pretends that she’s against TPP, because she thinks voters have the memories of goldfish. But a lot of people won’t vote for Mrs NAFTA.
And now you want to alienate the idealistic progressives that are even still around, by insulting Bernie?
What’s wrong with expecting your candidates to share your values? I don’t vote for every Republican. I’ve voted for exactly two for President: John McCain and Mitt Romney. If the candidate isn’t right, you don’t support them. Rationalizing why you should anyway is a great way to insure that you’ll get fewer good candidates.
If Republicans defect in large numbers, either by staying home, voting for Clinton, or voting LP, that sends a message. If we all just salute and get behind Trump, that means more Trumps.
And now it’s over for Bernie. I imagine his remaining campaign staff are sending out resumes.
It’ll be interesting to see if he concedes tonight gracefully. I’d imagine the first demand from
Hillary is to knock off all, “The system is rigged.” crap. No need to continue to stoke his supporters. Not all of them will come around for Clinton but as long as she can get the ones who identify as Democrats or lean that way, she’ll be fine. The anarchists/Greens/Ron Paul types can safely be ignored, regardless of how loud they scream on social media.
Okay, if your assertion is “the issues Bernie has been advancing in this campaign could not possibly be characterized as Trotskyist”, I agree. But are you going to assert that none of the stuff he said in the '70s and '80s could qualify?
Democratic socialists loathe, despise, and abhor Soviet style Communism, and the horse upon in which it rode. Communists regard Democratic Socialists as wimps, content to move their agenda forward by democratic means, rather than rely on the revolutionary cadres to instruct the proletariat argle bargle, argle bargle. They recoil in shock, horror and dismay from Lenin’s brutally inhumane approach, as it inflicted massive suffering on the very people it purported to favor.
It appears, despite your conviction of certainty, that you actually know very little about the Left. Perhaps you’ve never even met a flag-waving, red-blooded all American radical lefty. Well, OK. Hi, my name is 'luc. I assert that I exist. Disagree if you choose.
And not only am I American, I am a Texan, and you can’t get more American than that!
My father was an anthropology professor who had more books by Marx on his shelf than most people would guess even exist. He was fond of communes, hung out with black radicals in the '70s, literally ate sprouts daily, and dreamed of a society incorporated along the lines of B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two.
My mother is a little less radical, perhaps. She was raised by an old-time socialist (my grandfather, with whom I spent a lot of time until he died in his nineties, when I was well into my twenties) who participated in general strikes and such way back in the day. A professor of sociology and lifelong Unitarian, she caucused for Jesse Jackson in '84 and '88, voted for Nader multiple times starting in '96 (when few people even knew he was running), and is a firebreathing Bernie supporter now. Here is an excerpt of an email she sent many of us in the family (including a few like me who support Hillary) just a few days ago:
So I’d have to beg to differ with your contention that I “know very little about the Left”. Sometimes I *wish *I knew a little less! :smack: (I do love my parents, but it gets wearisome.)
P.S. And I still think the Bernie of the '70s and '80s was Trotskyesque if not Trotskyist.
Sometimes I *wish *I knew a little less! :smack: (I do love my parents, but it gets wearisome.)