I don’t equate the “Bernie Bro” behavior with Sanders, but I do the “Clinton cheated” and the “Democrats have a conspiracy against me” message that made it harder to coalesce behind the nominee after it was over. You don’t try to push voter fraud.
As for Biden, I think he has stuff that tanks him with everyone. The gaffes, “creepy Biden,” losing before (after Clinton just reminded us of how bad that can be), being “establishment”, being associated with Obama, being seen as too centrist and Republican-lite, being old. There’s just something to attack him for that would resonate with everyone.
And I’m totally against the idea we had last time that even a lesser candidate could beat Trump. We need the strongest to stop him.
And Bloomberg is the same age I believe, and Sanders a year older. I think they are all very energetic, but I also agree that they are really old.
I have known some 79-year-olds with remarkable stamina, excellent cognitive abilities, and all those other things you want in a president. But getting into your eighties seems to sap people’s strength and cognition; I have known few if any 86-or-87-year-olds about whom I’d say the same.
Plus which, we’re looking ten years down the road, after the rigors of a two-year campaign and eight years of a job that ages everybody prematurely. I guess we’ll see what happens, but choosing any of the three seems like a risk to me!
“I apologize to any woman who feels like she was not treated appropriately,” which was his first attempt, really doesn’t cut it. It’s a politician’s apology all the way. Too vague (“any” woman? let’s address the real people here), too dismissive (“who feels like,” as though the women were misinterpreting things and being overly sensitive), too euphemistic (“not treated appropriately” is a very strange way to refer to allegations of being forcibly kissed, among other things).
It didn’t help that he issued the apology in a very perfunctory way, as though it was merely some unfortunate distraction. Mistreatment of people should never be a “distraction,” but his voice and body language made it evident that he wanted to get off that topic as quickly as possible and back to his policies.
Second, it was his campaign and it’s his business to know what’s going on. And in addition the burden’s on him to hire people who won’t go around harassing other workers. He SHOULD apologize for being unaware and for hiring people who were looking for opportunities to treat women badly.
And it’s appalling that he said he didn;t know what was going on because he was “a little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case” for the nomination. Way to diminish the issue again. Passing a new Glass-Steagall Act and putting further regulations on Wall Street = important. Making sure that women working for me are “treated appropriately” = not important. Hard to escape that conclusion.
He could have tried “I apologize to the women who were harassed by members of my campaign” and followed that up with “I wasn’t giving the attention I should have to the inner workings of the campaign, and in retrospect, I hired some people I should not have hired.” But he didn’t, till afterward, till it was clear that this rather graceless “sorry if they were offended” semi-apology wasn’t going over well. It’s hard for me to see Sanders’s apology as something that speaks well of him; I think the way he handled it suggests the opposite.
How about a cite or else a retraction to support your claims about Hillary buying the DNC or Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (fixed your typo) rigging the primaries?