That was maybe a bad analogy or somewhat in poor taste, but how does that impugn her statements?
I saw the interview, and my eyebrows raised up quite a bit when she said that. Apparently, she was really frustrated with having to have everything cleared with the Hillary Campaign when she was trying to help out the whole party, including the state-wide races. This was especially an issue with trying to use funds for non-Hillary purposes.
But yeah, that was a really bad analogy, even if she hails from Louisiana. Especially since she hails from there.
Isn’t that kind of what Brazile’s book (and thus ostensibly this thread) is about?
Jim Webb stood up. He’s a moderate, serious guy, the kind of middle-of-the-road Democrat a lot of people say they want. The party didn’t seem to want what he was selling.
Martin O’Malley stood up. Now, he has a terrible executive record on civil rights which prevented him from winning the nomination, but he was still acting like a serious candidate and getting completely ignored.
Lincoln Chafee seems like a good guy. But he was mocked and ignored.
It seems like maybe the party organizations wanted a fight between one Democrat and one outsider, for whatever reason. It may have been less a matter of Bubba and Hilly owning the party; and more a matter of maintaining a unified front against progressives—who vote Democrat, and who wanted an actual progressive social democrat, and were flocking to Bernie. But making that one candidate HRC was a great way to shoot themselves in the foot. They’d probably have been better off drafting Bill Richardson than making themselves look like a bunch of Clinton sycophants.
The anti-Clinton progressives have largely been surprised to see Donna Brazile jump ship. She wasn’t one of ours, you know. We figured Brazile was playing the book-selling game and full of crap, but it’s interesting to see someone from the centrist Clinton Democrat wing act like a rat fleeing a sinking ship. There’s a bit of bemusement, Schadenfreude, and just plain shock.
I see “Lost-Causers” is now being applied as the new term for “Bernie Bros.” Did it finally sink in that Bernie’s supporters weren’t actually all sexist males? Is that just on this board or will it catch on elsewhere? Isn’t it ironic that a camp with its roots in pro-business Southern Democrats are using that term for the largely working-class supporters of a Jewish Northern Trotskyist? Please, keep it up. As if Hillary weren’t a lost cause at this point. :rolleyes:
[QUOTE=foolsguinea;20584001It seems like maybe the party organizations wanted a fight between one Democrat and one outsider, for whatever reason. It may have been less a matter of Bubba and Hilly owning the party; and more a matter of maintaining a unified front against progressives—who vote Democrat, and who wanted an actual progressive social democrat, and were flocking to Bernie. But making that one candidate HRC was a great way to shoot themselves in the foot. They’d probably have been better off drafting Bill Richardson than making themselves look like a bunch of Clinton sycophants.[/QUOTE]
The prevailing wisdom at the time was that TPTB in the Democratic Party were concerned about the lack of competition during the primaries, and that Clinton wouldn’t be tested enough. But I doubt the engineered thee specific match-up with Bernie. He as a true grass-roots candidate. The other thing about HRC is that she’s sort of a walking, self-fulfilling prophecy. Her name recognition propels her into solid, front runner status even before she decides to run. That’s not really her fault, so it’s hard to blame her for that, but she could have done with a lot more humility. (Yeah, humility from someone running for president, I know…)
Democratic Party leaders can nudge the nominating process in a certain direction, but they aren’t puppet masters, able to choreograph the fine details of how the primaries play out. Had it not been for the miracle of Obama in 2008, we might have seen this whole thing play out then, too.
You really don’t understand how this works, do you? Hillary wasn’t coronated; she was elected. And no amount of kicking and screaming “It was rigged” is going to change that fact. But like a Trump voter, Sanders voters want to believe in their own little version of truth. I think it’s important for Sanders voters to understand how elections are actually won and how democracy actually works, rather than just screaming “It’s rigged” and throwing chairs at people when they don’t get their way.
And the anti-Bernie-voter crowd should learn to quit stereotyping them as spoiled brats. There’s a very large chunk of Democratic voters who weren’t enthusiastic about Clinton. That was not their fault or Bernie’s fault-- that was Hillary’s fault. Alienating and/or ignoring the Bernie supporters is a recipe for continued Democratic losses.
Who cares if voters aren’t enthusiastic? Honestly, the voters are THE problem.
Absolutely NO ONE is advocating for Clinton to run in the future. Not even her most fervent supporters from last year are. The woman is done. Leave her the fuck alone already. I’m tired of people lying about her.
Hellova Dem slogan there. asahi 2020! 
2008: Change you can believe in
2016: I’m with her.
2020: Actually, you’re the problem.
The Democrats electoral strategy in a nutshell. “The problem is never the candidates, it’s just that the voters were wrong.”
She excels at lying about herself. Tell me the story again about how she flew into a war zone in the Balkans and then had to dodge sniper fire on the tarmac. Or how she was named after Edmund Hillary after he climbed Everest. That’s always a good one.
Wait, asahi, you were being sarcastic, right?* Because you are smarter than this.*
We elected Trump. Obviously lying wasn’t really a problem (unless you’re trying to say she didn’t do enough of it).
I don’t know if asahi is being sarcastic or not, but I really have seen that exact “blame the voters” response from the left. And those people were definitely not being sarcastic.
The dems problem is that the morons keep trying to defend her. The same as the repub morons keep trying to defend Trump. They are both utterly and unrecoverably hoorible people and horrible candidates. The people blindly defending their primary vote for the failed piece of Miasmic shit that is Hillary candidacy are not substantially different than the people defending their vote for the failed pile of putrescent filth that is Trump. People voted for Trump because you dumb-asses put someone a huge portion of the population swore they would never vote for. You can’t blame anyone else for having their heads up their asses when your was that far up yours. Blind ignorance of reality is the same sin for you as well. Bernie was a very bad candidate for president, but he is like a menu item of boiled spam with Strawberry frosting, compared to the plate of dog shit and pitcher of hyena vomit the other two were.
Do you goddamn morons really think that every reasonable Dem candidate backed out of their own independent choice? Or maybe the corrupt machine that the Clinton’s have been building for 3 decades threatened great vengeance and furious anger upon all who had the temerity to challenge the great destined Hillary like Obama did in 2008. Every word out of every mouth that defends Hillary, or one supports Bernie for that matter, hurts the dems, and hurts the country.
Sanders? Trotskyist? Well, sure, and Pete Seeger was heavy metal, Saul Alinsky was pretty much Che Guevara. Given flexible parameters, I suppose so.
Quoted for truth.
The Democrats would rather lose with an establishment candidate than win with a progressive.
I never said that the candidate wasn’t a major part of the problem - she was. But I’m pushing back against the idea that she was coronated or anointed, as many people on the radical left like to believe. It’s just not what happened. She received nearly 17 million votes in the primaries, or 3 million more than Bernie Sanders. Bernie could have been more like Obama and planned a real campaign instead of a political insurgency, but he didn’t, and that’s probably why he lost. Again, he lost because he didn’t get enough votes.
I personally wish the Dems had used the Republican ‘deep bench’ strategy, but in 2012 they were feeling confident about their chances and felt that Clinton was a strong candidate (before Bengazi really became a thing). And they also expected that Joe Biden might make a run. The Dems fatal errors were 1) not cultivating a stronger state and local strategy, which has dogged even through the Obama years, and 2) not drafting enough candidates to challenge Hillary. Hillary was seen as inevitable, and too many in the DNC just went along with that notion. I don’t disagree.
But sorry, all of that aside, nobody in their right mind should have even for a moment believed that Donald Trump was even remotely qualified. To that extent, I absolutely blame voters. And I blame voter ignorance for a lot of the problems we have in our political system and culture. Moreover, I’m afraid the problem just keeps getting worse. Voters are not informed. They’re just voting out of frustration, and they just keep making things worse. When your possible candidates for senate and the presidency include Kid Rock and Mark Cuban respectively, Democracy has a serious problem. No disrespect to them personally - they’re accomplished in their own right. But the idea that it doesn’t matter whom we select for public service is a road to authoritarianism, paved brick by brick with the ignorance of uninformed voters.
Beyond all of that, it seems that when Donna Brazile was actually asked hard questions about some of her more sensational claims, she didn’t really have good answers. I’m guessing all of this was a giant “Don’t blame me for 2016” book project.