Fwiw, in terms of posturing and policy, I can’t think of many concerns HRC is not to the right of the UK PM, and the UK PM is a Conservative.
You have working class Americans re-registering to vote Republican because that candidate speaks to them. In a sense that’s all you need to know.
People feel the effects and consequences of globalisation and neo-liberalism viscerally: and the Democratic Party has deserted them.
Your declaration notwithstanding - Measuring whether some things are racist is far from an objective fact. The metric you’ve chosen (are people of color disproportionately negatively affected?) is one available measure, but not the only, and not necessarily controlling. Frequent and/or unfounded calls of racism weaken response to actual incidence of racist actions.
It’s a mistake because economic interests or whatever interests you are identifying can be weighted differently by different people. A person may evaluate 100 or maybe 2 individual criteria when choosing whom to vote for. That you may think item #1 is most important, perhaps to the voter item #89 is really their biggest focus point. If they choose #89 in lieu of #1, that’s the opposite of voting against their interests. Their interests in totality may be different than yours.
Someone asked how Bernie would accomplish anything.
“FUCK BERNIE VOTERS. FUCK THEM ALL. GO TO HELL.”
Douche bags, twat, swamp donkey, retarded cunts.
“Didn’t know you were special needs.”
I asked followers to support Bernie delegates.
“Are you and your friend old enough to use the restroom?”
“We don’t need you or Bernie.”
“Bernie Bros go home!!! We don’t need you!!! #ImWithHer”
“We don’t need you. We want REAL Democrats!”
And just know that this is an extremely small sampling of the constant barrage of filth Bernie supporters were subjected to on a daily basis for a year.
And this is in addition to the campaign and its surrogates insulting us at every turn. Deeply. Relegated to Hell.
If anyone wants to dismiss the damage this caused as “hurt feelings,” then I contend you should expect to lose a lot more elections.
I find myself again stepping up to speak for Shayna, who I want to point out is (a) extraordinarily capable of speaking for herself; (b) not shy about doing so; and (c) is not awash in love for me anyway. So I apologize in advance if this is not correct, Shayna, and please believe it is a good faith effort to say things that are true:
I suspect Shayna understands quite well that at the end of the day, no candidate or campaign will precisely mirror her goals, and that sacrifices must be made to ensure broad appeal and support, the nature of which may cause reasonable people to differ.
But I think she’s hinting that nothing in that understanding explains or excuses the smug abuse heaped on her.
You just literally could not be more wrong.
You did not watch this primary unfold from my perspective as a Bernie supporter following the Bernie groups on social media, so you didn’t see what I saw. And the poll numbers prove my perception actuate and yours buried deep in the establishment trenches.
The testimonials of disaffected Republicans, Independents and other party voters who flocked to Sanders was astounding. The hope and the joy they expressed at finally having a candidate not beholden to banks and Wall Street and the war machine, and who was speaking to core values like health care as a human right and jobs that pay a thriving wage and an end to unfair trade agreements spoke to people from every political perspective you can imagine. Even Libertarians.
You have got to come down from your ivory tower and actually listen to what people who don’t share your philosophy are saying.
In every poll during the primaries, Bernie beat Trump by double digits and Hillary barely made the margin of error. Ultimately, Trump won. So where do you think those voters who made up that margin in the double-digit range who supported Bernie in the primaries and then Trump in the general came from? I’ll give you a hint: Not Democrats!
And those voters are the ones who would have meant a Democratic victory over a Republican one.
You and the rest if the establishment Democrats do not understand what people are clamoring for and that’s why your candidate lost the entire middle of the country and the election right along with it.
Again correct, but there’s much more, as I answered above.
I also understand something xenophone and establishment Democrats do not: You don’t sit down at the negotiating table asking for what you want. You start by asking for the sky and the moon and settle for the ozone layer.
I don’t know how many negotiations you participated in Shayna, but that’s not how you start. In a good faith negotiation, you start by identifying the outcomes each party envisions or desires (depending on what you’re negotiating). After the perfect world is described, then you can start talking about means and methods and the tradeoffs each party requires to produce or acquire the means or to pursue particular methods. It’s when you talk about those tradeoffs that you can ask high and offer low, within the parameters you’ve strategized beforehand. But good negotiators don’t offer anything they’re not prepared to give up, and they don’t ask outside the bounds of plausibility. If the other party owns little pieces of the troposphere, no you don’t start off asking for the moon (although you might demand construction begin on a rocket).
So, then, it necessarily follows that smug abuse heaped on any other poster is equally wrong? Even if such a person were, say, a lawyer, or a tighty-righty?
Such selfless and non-partisan generosity is much to be admired, good thing you pointed it out to us so we can. Otherwise, we might have missed it.
She sounds kind of stupid, frankly. Is it her preference that the U.S. to go to war with Saudi Arabia and Qatar?
By the way, I’m kind of weary of hearing from expert empathetic convincers and negotiators telling Democrats post-election how they shoulda coulda woulda. Margins were very close in the swing states taken by Trump and are accounted for by low turnout among traditional Democratic voting blocs. If you think it was because of some smug treatment from establishment Dems toward Bernie I guess I won’t be able to change your mind; it definitely explains why some Dems didn’t vote.
But that wave of Republican / other party voters you insist were flocking to Bernie in the primaries (via social media, because it damn sure didn’t happen via voting booth) and would’ve flocked to Bernie in the general as well is a fantasy for which I can only sit in amazement. You talk about my ivory tower and about listening but I think you need a good dose of your own medicine here.
This certainly shows that there are a number of assholes on facebook, but I wasn’t aware that was in doubt. And the Berners gave as good as they got, too. “Shrillary,” “Killary,” and “Fat Pantsuited Bitch” were phrases I saw a lot of, and not just coming from the right.
Doesn’t the real lesson of this election boil down to:
The U.S. two-party system has reached near-equilibrium. with the voters more-or-less evenly divided, with a huge number of citizens who don’t bother to vote, or who may skip voting if not sufficiently enthused.
If a candidate wants to win, it’s a wasted effort to try to win over voters who will probably go for the other party - better to try to inspire the voters who will probably go for your party, but who may not bother to vote if they find you uninspiring.
If you had a charismatic rival during the primary process, adding that person to your ticket can help enthuse them to vote. You are not their preference, but at least their preference can be vice-president and positioned for a future run. Also, bitter rivalries within the party between the camps of supporters get blunted.
Therefore, if Clinton’s veep candidate had been Sanders, they would have won.
With you on 1 and 2 Mr. Ekers, but I think 3 might assume too much. It’s not always personalities that inspire, and the Dems did very little to fight the media focus on personalities and allegations - which everyone knew from the start was poor ground for Hillary. Better for Trump; even though he is repugnant, many of his most ardent supporters kinda like the moral repugnance.
So I’d amend 3 to “sell your strong suits.” And in this election, like most, we were never going to get help in that effort from the media, so it really was up to the party, and they sucked at it.
Well, while Kaine would be a sane choice for sane times… these weren’t that. A significant chunk of Dem voters really liked Sanders and seemed offended by Hillary, and I’m guessing it was mistake to assume their hatred of Trump would beat out their disappointment over Sanders. Losing even, say, 5% of potential Dem voters meant the loss overall.
I don’t disagree that a significant chunk of Dem voters liked Sanders and were disappointed he didn’t get the nomination, but it’s too early to say how many of those Dems are the ones who stayed home. Stands to reason that the committed politicos vote even when they didn’t get the right pony, and the larger mass of voters who don’t follow and discuss politics need to be inspired. HRC was never going to do that with her personality, but again, most of us who voted for her knew that but loved the policy wonk aspect of her career and thought the party platform was an easier sell. That salesmanship didn’t happen. We sold anti-Trump instead of starving that dumpster fire of oxygen like we should have.
I know; shoulda coulda woulda. And I’m not actually convinced that we “coulda” in the media environment we have. But we “shoulda” tried.
Well, this wasn’t a year for policy, just shouting.
A whole lot of word that prove you know nothing about politics.
If the country is clamoring for a $15 an hour minimum wage (and you know it’s being passed in city after city), you don’t campaign on crushing everyone’s hopes by telling them they have to be pragmatic and settle for $12 before negotiations even start!
This is so basic, it astounds me that you don’t get it.
You tell people you will fight for Medicare for All, even if you think the best you might be able to wrangle out of Congress is a public option added to Obamacare. And then you fucking fight for it! Few will be mad when they know you gave a damn and put forth the effort, even if you came up short.
You don’t tell people the very realistic proposal to put tuition-free public universities back on the table when the voters know damn good and well we had that for decades until Reagan tore it down, that it’s nothing but a pie-in-the-sky fantasy while using right-wing arguments against it!
Hillary Clinton campaigned on a No You Can’t platform.
It was a horribly run campaign riddled with errors in judgment of cosmic proportions.
You need to figure that out, because the party is in the process of moving on without you. Seriously. The shakeout at the DNC will be massive. A truly Progressive candidate will take the helm and redirect it from the center/right atrocity the Clintons turned it into, into a 21st century FDR party of the People. Get on board or get out of the way.
Against the candidate, not Hillary supporters.
There’s a difference. That’s why I didn’t share any of the Tweets calling Bernie a black-lives-matter-loving Nazi Jew. And believe me, there were many.
I don’t know how to make this simpler: You don’t run a campaign in which you make it a tactic to denigrate your opponent’s supporters. Unless you want to fucking lose a not-insignificant portion of them.
Her campaign started the hideous “Bernie Bros” myth.
Her campaign started the viscous lie that Bernie supporters were violent.
Her campaign made up the ugly lie that Bernie supporters called for “English only” at a Nevada caucus site, then got their celebrity bitches to make it go viral.
Her campaign said we were silly little girls only into Bernie for the boys.
Her campaign though it was funny as all get-out that we should go to Hell for not voting for her.
Her campaign came after us horribly, which, exactly like Trump has done and liberals gnash their snobbish liberal teeth over, incited her followers to do the same.
Here’s a good a lesson from this campaign: Don’t condemn in others what you tolerate from your own. Or to turn that around, don’t **do **that which you condemn in others.
Get it yet?