I had low expectations. It was worth a shot.
Biden, probably. He’s has that “man of the people” image that few presidential candidates can master. Tim Kaine? No way-- too milquetoast. Trump would eat his lunch (probably literally). Where folks get the idea that Elizabeth Warren is an electable presidential candidate is beyond me. That’s total bubble-think. I want to see a Democrat in the WH soon. Please, please let’s not go down the Elizabeth Warren road.
The fact it worked in his favor doesn’t mean it was rigged in his favor.
But you’re missing the point. The system wasn’t “rigged” for him, because even had he won ALL the caucuses, the total percentage of delegates available that way wasn’t enough to seriously threaten the nomination. Only 561 out of 4051 pledged delegates were available by caucus. Sanders would have had to take EVERY ONE of those delegates just to negate the advantage Clinton had from the Super-delegates. And since the Democrats don’t let you have winner-take-all results, that was always going to be impossible.
Face it: Sanders was screwed from the start. That was the plan of the Democratic Party, which learned a lesson from McGovern in '72. But anointing a favored candidate (Clinton) over a populist upstart (Sanders) and ensuring that the upstart cannot seriously threaten the golden-haired heir presumptive doesn’t help that person hone his/her candidate skills for the fall mud-wrestling competition.
Sorry to do this in two posts, but I hate long-ass interleaved quotes. :o
You’re putting the cart before the horse. The Super-delegates were NEVER going to have to change their position, unless the wheels so totally went of the Clinton campaign that Sanders started totally waxing her. Which is what he would have had to do to overcome the inherent advantage she was given by those same Super-delegates. Since they existed, the Bernie Bandwagon never was able to do much more than squeeze out a few wheezy notes like a rusted calliope.
I never said it was “rigged” for him and don’t think it was. That was DigitalC not me.
What I disputed was your assertion about there being “so few” caucuses.
The fact is that caucus states because of all they require among voters have extremely low voter turnouts and are wildly unrepresentative of the states since they mainly cater to people who have lots of time on their hands.
No, Sanders wasn’t. Obama faced all those issue in 2008 and won anyway. Are people seriously going to try and argue the the system can be “rigged” against a guy like Sanders but not against a black man with “Hussein” for a middle name?
Also, the DNC didn’t “anoint her”. Nobody was forced to vote for her, she was better able to convince Democratic voters that she was the candidate for them.
She beat Sanders for the same reason Obama beat her.
Were I a Sanders supporter what I’d do is find out why he lost and find ways to adapt his message rather than beginning and ending my analysis with “the DNC screwed him!”
Here is a Washington Post article about Trump’s approval being awful. But: (the poll was conducted Apr 17-20)
The new survey finds 46 percent saying they voted for Clinton and 43 percent for Trump, similar to her two-point national vote margin. Asked how they would vote if the election were held today, 43 say they would support Trump and 40 percent say Clinton.
I don’t criticize the Clinton campaign for not realizing this at the time because criticizing them would be hypocritical of me-- I didn’t realize it at the time.
But as you say: with hindsight, it’s clear that all those ads demonstrating what an awful bully Trump is were a mistake–too many GOP voters tend to admire bullies. Of course they don’t say what they admire is bullying; they call it “strength” or “never backing down” or “decisiveness” or some other positive-spin term. But what they admire is men (and only men) who do as they please, all the time–no matter who gets hurt; no matter how much damage they do.
It’s aspirational. It’s the toddler lurking in all our brains: 'me do what me want!!!’ Many people enjoy identifying with the bully who does whatever he pleases. Pointing out that Trump was a selfish pig simply reminded voters that he was an asshole who did as he pleased–and that they thought that was pretty cool.
The ad budget should have gone, instead, into demonstrating what a poor excuse for a “businessman” Trump actually is. He inherited a pile and hasn’t done much to increase it beyond what simply investing it in a good mutual fund would have done, and he’s screwed a hell of a lot of people in the process.
The number one rationale* for Trump voters was ‘I know he’s kind of a jerk but he’s a brilliant businessman and that’s what this country needs.’ Clinton’s campaign needed to shine a very, very bright spotlight on the “smart businessman” claim and show it up for what it was: a hollow and false image.
Wish I had a time machine. I’d go back and tell them.
There’s a hell of a lot of guilt floating around the USA; people look at Trump and remember they didn’t vote for the one person, in our two-party system, who could have stopped him. And they feel…really, really bad.
No one likes to feel guilty. We seize with light-speed on any theory that lets us side-step responsibility: a book that says Hillary was 100% to blame for losing the election! It wasn’t my fault, after all! I’ll buy ten copies!!!
*I don’t have a citation that proves the claim; it’s my opinion (based on paying lots of attention to polls and interviews of Trump voters).
Yes they will – the claim will be that after 2008, the Peace Terms between the Establishment Machine and the Obama Organization within the DNC included smoothing the way for Hillary to be next. And how during the Obama years the Democrats kept losing all sorts of seats everywhere but many of the survivors in key leadership places were Establishment Machine people.
However… it’s one thing to be a prohibitive establishment frontrunner and another to have things outright “rigged” in your favor – we can’t seriously think that somehow fairness requires that said prohibitive establishment frontrunner deliberately refrain from using her advantages. Insurgencies are *supposed *to be hard longshots.
But there WERE so few caucuses. Look at the number of states/territories that had caucuses, vs. the number which had primaries. THEN, look at the relative delegate counts for those states. The original assertion was that the caucuses rigged the system for Sanders. My reply was that was not true, because there were so few caucuses. That statement is a true statement, despite your assertions to the contrary.
Obviously, you may disagree, but I think just about any generic Democrat would have cleaned Trump’s clock.
The converse is that any generic Republican would have destroyed Clinton. Trump was really the only won she could beat.
The thing to remember is just how unique Clinton’s situation was in having been in the public eye for nearly 25 years and having such high unfavorables. The same of course was true for Trump except he’d been in the public eye even longer and was even more unpopular.
When you haven’t been in the public eye that long, like say Sanders, who wasn’t well known outside of Vermont and political junkies a high or low approval rating isn’t as telling because it can change but when you’ve been in the public eye as long as Clinton, or for that matter Trump, it’s really hard to get people to change their minds.
The claim that the caucuses “rigged” the system for Sanders is a dumb statement I’ll grant you, though not as dumb as the idea that the Super delegates rigged the election for Hillary because she’d clearly have won without them, whereas without the caucuses it’s wildly improbable he’d have done remotely as well.
What I would say is true is that the caucuses were a huge advantage for him based on the huge advantage he had among young college students who are a huge factor in caucuses and who seemed mainly attracted to him because of his focus on one narrow, economic issue. Student loans. However, he failed to capitalize on this and get beyond it.
He basically attracted the same type of people who’d gone for Jerry Brown, Bill Bradley, Dennis Kucinich, and Howard Dean in previous elections.
He just created the illusion of a close race the same way Clinton did vs. Obama in 2008 by saying in till close to the end but just as Clinton never really threatened Obama after Super Tuesday he never was a threat to her after Super Tuesday either.
I agree with this view of Sanders, in general. But what you cannot say with such certainty is that he wouldn’t have polled better in primaries had there been a sense that he actually stood a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the nomination. Why did no one think he had a chance of winning? Because anyone who could do basic math realized he was never going to win, no matter how hard he tried. Why? Super-delegates, that’s why.
Remove those, level the playing field, have the Democratic Party establishment stay neutral (hello, Donna Brazile!), and who knows what Sanders would have achieved. It’s still more likely than not that Clinton would have won. But I think she would have had to actually sharpen up her campaign, rather than just act as if Sanders was an annoying housefly. And Sanders himself might actually have decided he WANTED the nomination; he always felt a bit like he was just going through the motions in order to give voice to those who felt Clinton was a bit too middle-of-the-road.
No that’s not true. The Super-delegates didn’t stop Barack Obama.
Again, are people seriously going to argue that if the game could be “rigged” against Sanders it couldn’t be “rigged” against a Black man with the middle name of Hussein?
The Super-delegates in 2008 weren’t set-up to nominate Clinton. The Democratic Party hadn’t decided to anoint Hillary that year. Indeed, the comparison between the two years shows that, had the Party stayed out of the Sanders v Clinton fray, Sanders might have done quite well.
The qualifications her supporters talked about were (contrary to what you say) largely just her experience. As your post itself shows, the rebuttal of her undoubted experience was largely just a bunch of non sequiturs.
The real issue was that HRC’s supporters bit back when Trump’s supporters accused her (with no justification whatever) of not having the necessary qualifications. Doing so just made her seem (a) like a wonk and (b) like part of the establishment that voters don’t like.
“Lack of qualification” was actually just code for “a woman”, I think. Not sure what she should have done about this.
A rational post ie one that bears no resemblance to how most people think. Blood is thicker than water. We have all experienced the brother or sister who holds their sibling in absolute contempt, right up until a stranger does so, at which point they defend their sibling unto the death.
People who don’t want a woman in power will find any reason that sticks true. But, the questions on her “qualifications” were frankly pertinent. For all the offices she held, there was a distinct lack of accomplishment. As SecState she was overshadowed by Biden’s foreign policy experience and the fact the Obama team saw her as a defeated adversary who had to be accommodated.
As Senator she did little of note; except vote for the Iraq war, mostly stayed out of controversial issues, saving her powder for her 2008 run.
She is undoubtedly a capable lady, but calling her (as people did) the most qualified candidate ever, she was not even the most qualified person in 2016, that would be Jeb (!). More qualified than Trump? Sure, but you and I are more qualified than him, and we are not even American citizens.
I disagree, obviously. Consider the rest of your own post:
Consider what I’ve seen countless times on this board: if someone opposed something done by Obama – well, that’s presumably because he’s black and they’re racist. Does someone reply to a claim that “Black Lives Matter” by saying “All Lives Matter”? Yeah, that’s racist. A guy calls for enforcing the law against people who are here illegally? People hereabouts doubt that he’s talking about whites; and assume that he only cares about persecuting nonwhites; and sling accusations that he’s racist. Call for a white actor to play a white comic-book character in the movie? Racist.
When a Democrat says that someone is “racist”, I have no idea what that means. It could mean that person engaged in what’s arguably cultural appropriation. It could mean that person is opposed to affirmative action. It could mean they called the President a liar when the President was (a) lying, and (b) black.
It could mean pretty much anything. It can mean ‘I assume he speaks in code.’
I have to guess at who Hillary Clinton was referring to when she said half of Trump’s supporters are deplorable and irredeemable – because “racist” can, and does, get applied to “that generally unobjectionable person who I wouldn’t actually say is ‘racist’.” It’s less a word that does useful work and more a catch-all sneer.
Did you have a point? It’s not obvious.
Well, when Hillary Clinton said that half of Trump’s supporters were deplorable and irredeemable because they were racist or sexist or xenophobic or whatever, I had to guess at which individuals she was railing against. Because “a racist” really just means “someone that person thinks should be called a racist,” and “a sexist” really just means “someone that person thinks should be called a sexist,” or whatever.
I have a relative who’s a Trump supporter; is she lumping him in with the half that’s irredeemable and deplorable, or with the other half? I don’t know. I mean, the guy is generally unobjectionable – well, apart from being a Trump supporter, but as per Clinton’s remarks half of them are in the other category. But would she say he’s racist? Or sexist? Or xenophobic? I don’t know. You explicitly think folks are using comments as code for “a woman” – much as plenty of people seem to use “racist” to mean “said stuff I’m assuming is racist, if you read between the lines.”
So for any given Trump supporter, how am I to know whether she’s lumping him in with the irredeemable deplorables, or whether he’s one that she isn’t insulting?