Sorry, I’m too busy blaming the, on average, 50% of eligible voters who simply don’t bother to vote, either in Presidentials or mid-terms. Even 2020, the highest turnout in a century, barely got 2/3rds turnout. So I don’t feel it’s enough to blame the Bernie Bros, because I think most of them did hold their nose and vote for Her Nibs. I’d rather scream at the stupid MFer’s who don’t show up to mid-terms because “Who cares?” If Congress truly represented the demographic political makeup of the country, McConnell would never have been in a position to cut Garland off.
Hillary is a small part of the equation, OP. Look at the whole picture next time.
Wait wait wait, you think the current set of circumstances somehow vindicates the pro-Clinton faction? Why in the fuck would you think that?
We told you that Hillary was a terrible fucking candidate because she has 20 years of built in hatred against her, whether justified or not. You’re the one that forced us to run one of the only candidates who could possibly lose towards Trump, completely misreading the zeitgeist of the moment, because it was her turn and also because wouldn’t it be awesome if we had a woman president even if it means not actually having a woman president and having the worst possible fucking guy elected instead?
This shit is not on us, it’s on you. You forced a horrible candidate and gave us Trump. You supported the whole “let’s not offend the republicans or play hardball or ever win at any political strategy ever” nature of the democratic party. You supported the “third way” democrats that keep the party captured by the rich elites and never actually rock the boat.
Despite it’s brevity, this is an incredibly stupid OP. If I was the sort of douchebag who created call-out threads, I would’ve wrote the exact opposite. Clinton/neoliberal lovers, how do you feel now that you got Trump elected, supported a gutless and incompetent democratic party that did nothing while the country burned?
You got your way, it was a terrible fucking strategy, we warned you, we were vindicated, you’re the ones that should be called out and shamed. Fuck you.
Progressives have to admit to this. I don’t believe Sanders could have won. I don’t believe that anyone believes that Sanders could have won; that’s pure wish-fulfillment fantasy. The Republicans would have hung the socialist label around his neck like an albatross. Worse, the label would stick to every Democrat running for any office for the next generation. They try to leverage it today, but only the true crazies believe it; if Sanders were the head of the party instead of an outlier, it would cover Republican thought like kudzu.
Maybe Clinton shouldn’t have run. Maybe you forget she was the overwhelming favorite of the party. Maybe you forget that up until the minute he won, nobody, including Trump himself, thought he could win.
Hindsight is cool, but Clinton was the best candidate because nobody else with the slightest chance stepped up. If you don’t want the best candidate to win, then the best candidate probably won’t. Slip that into your hindsight.
It’s as if, at some point in the past, the Democratic Party stopped hand picking their candidates and allowed their, hopefully real party member, voters to pick among the candidates actually seeking office.
Crazy as it sounds, it’s true!
Oh look: Kamala Harris, destined to be the erstiest of erstwhile presidential candidates, made a strongly-worded but largely ignored speech about the Roe overturn at some YMCA in Illinois. The Democrats are really wedging out on this one, mark my words.
Bernie was a uniqiuely good candidate to run against Trump. The zeitgeist of 2016 was sick of the establishment. People (correctly) had the sense that everything was getting worse and that our politicians weren’t working to improve that. People wanted a change. Trump tapped into this - he was very much outside the normal political establishment and that was a big part of his appeal to a lot of people. In that way, Clinton was the absolute worst person to run against them. In a an anti-establishment zeitgeist, democrats ran the most establishment politician in the country.
Bernie, despite being a lifelong politician, had obvious outsider cred, too. He was not part of the establishment, he was different, vocal, passionate, uncorruptable, and was proposing real change. Bernie completely undercut Trump’s critical outsider, middle finger to the establishment vibe, because he matched but wasn’t a corrupt moron. There were a lot of people who aren’t normally interested in politics who came out for Bernie, and you lost a lot of them when you told them to suck it up and eat a shit sandwich and acted like you were somehow entitled to their vote just because Bernie happened to be a democrat. Being a democrat was not what appealed to them about Bernie, and so just casting him aside and assuming everyone who personally wanted to vote for him would then vote democratic is a foolish assumption. And classifying them as somehow being petulant is also stupid. No one who was inclined to vote democrat anyway withheld their vote from Clinton, the only people who might have done so is because they were uniquely interested in Bernie and had no interest in the democratic party. The vast majority of people who supported Bernie did vote for Clinton.
They do that to everyone, this is a foolish thing to be afraid of. Anyone who uses “socialist” as the worst possible scare word is already going to vote republican anyway. It’s clear that the whole boy who cried wolf thing about the word socialism is wearing very thin. The concept (at least the misused American version of the concept) is polling much better in recent years especially among young people. They know it’s full of shit, and they’re thinking “if socialism means I can afford my rent and see my doctor and not keep getting squeezed like I’m a serf, bring it on”
Quite the opposite. Bernie tapped into support that brought new people into the democratic sphere. There were a lot of people who were disinterested in politics because they didn’t think anyone from either party would actually make a difference in their lives who nonetheless supported Bernie. Featuring Bernie would’ve actually earned a lot of new democrats among young, otherwise disinterested politics voters. Instead, you told them to go fuck themselves for another generation, and they’re responding by not wanting to be part of your shitty party.
You’re right. I regret now having any part in this thread. Just another attempt to vilify progressives and those most vulnerable dems who live in red states.
You are pathetic. You come to a discussion board and refuse to discuss and act like that somehow makes you right. Fuck you too.
Edit: Also, yes, there can absolutely be rational refutation of fantasy. What a fucking stupid thing to say. “rational refutation of fantasy” is a significant part of discussion and education. You’re just lazy and don’t have anything of value to say.
Anyone can win an election in america, providing that people buy in. We had 2 celebrities as president, so to say that an old guy that looks like einstein couldnt be it either is ludicrious.
The problem with bernie was that he had no real backing outside of young people and young people are too broke to have an influence on politics. The youth are never going to have an huge effect on politics since not only are they not experienced enough with life, but they just dont really care in general. I didnt care much about politics at 18 nor do I know much about it and that is pretty common in young people.
A candidate is as electable as people believe them to be in that, you could in theory, take some homeless guy off the street, hype him up as the next jesus and have him be the president, IF, people believe in this person. And with americans, they can believe in all sorts of BS, hence how we got Trump. We literally had a guy running saying he would shoot people on 5th avenue. You could get anyone in office if people rallied behind that.
Your thesis seems to suggest that we have ever had the luxury of purifying the Democratic Party before we eradicate the Republican Party. THAT is Job #1, and it has been at least since the 1994 mid-terms got us Speaker Gingrich’s Contract on America.
If Bernie had been on the ticket in November, btw, he would have had my vote. Because I recognize what Job #1 is.
Virtually not one word of your long post corresponded to any reality that I’m familiar with. There. A rational refutation.
I know the real issue, though. You’re angry because I want to get progressive policies enacted into law rather than use them as a club for resentment of liberals and centrists. My bad.
Respectfully… If that was the case… if Clinton’s particular awfulness as a candidate was what brought us Trump… then shouldn’t we have seen a Biden landslide in 2020?
After all, in 2016, it was easy for some to think of Trump as an outsider who would shake up the system… but by 2020, everyone had had the opportunity to witness his performance in office. And yet, here were the results in 2020:
Electoral vote:
Biden 306
Trump 232
Percentage of popular vote:
Biden 51.3%
Trump 46.9%
That’s nobody’s idea of a landslide.
Plus, there’s the insane but undeniable fact that 74 million people watched Trump try to govern for four years and still said, “Yes, I want four more years of this!”
So can we really saddle Hillary Clinton with responsibility for Trump?
I think your underestimating Biden a little bit. He won a campaign by barely campaigning and sat in his basement until 2 months before election day. Considering that the DNC half-assed a campaign and still walked away with the popular vote and a decent electoral college strategy, thats kind of impressive.
But I do agree that the people thinking that its all Hillary’s fault are being stupid since had hillary won (and she did win the popular vote), the conversation ends up being completely different. Hindsight is 20/20. Its easy to look back and say something was wrong. But what happened is called an UPSET. Trump had ran hotter than the sun and got super lucky to win the way that he did. The conditions for a republican to win like that will probably not happen again for a few decades. It was probably one of the biggest upsets in political history, especially in an era to where politics have become extremely predictable.
Fair point. OTOH, Biden wasn’t a particularly strong candidate, either.
Also, what I stated in the quote which you snipped was what I had believed to be true in 2016, and that was previous to Trump spending four years working to further metastasize the GOP and conservative voters, and transform a large swath of it into his own personality cult.