Which makes you a Millennial.
GREAT way to crystallize it. The impression given is “Castro and the Sandinistas had the right idea, but made some mistakes, so I will fine-tune their approach, avoid making some of the same mistakes they did.” And in fact this is exactly what his most hardcore supporters want! But it’s not what the majority of Americans want, to put it mildly.
Looks like you need to work on your analogies. This is what I wrote about Buttigieg last March, and I never became more favorable toward him:
Note that I didn’t say he was a bad candidate because his position on this or that was wrong. I think that’s a naive way to look at politics, beyond the broad scope of choosing one party or the other based on which one has policies you like better. Once you do that, you look for the ones you can most easily market to the low-information chumps who swing back and forth from election to election based on anything but a deep, sober, evaluation of the issues.
You’re just wrong. You can go all the way back to the Nineties, when I adored Bill Clinton because he was so good at snowing the rubes. You could see that Republicans knew he was full of shit, but they couldn’t convince swing voters of it, and it drove the GOP up the wall with frustration. I loved it!
To sum up: you are vastly underestimating my cynicism about politics. But it’s not a bitter cynicism, at least not when the Democrats are being smart politically: it’s a gleeful, opportunistic cynicism. (When they give in to idealistic naivete, it does shift to frustration and bitterness.)