She’s right, of course: Bernie, while admirable in many ways, couldn’t even win a majority of Democrats.
To the Editor:
Frankly, Bernie Sanders’ told-you-so message is graceless. It adopts his lone-wolf moralistic tone to suggest that he would have beaten Donald Trump. Mr. Sanders did not attract broad working-class support in the primaries: His base was overwhelmingly restricted to white liberals, especially in the cities and college towns.
Mr. Sanders’ refusal to concede in a timely way as Hillary Clinton won many millions more votes and his constant harping that she was “corrupt” furthered Mr. Trump’s message and contributed to the con man’s catastrophic victory. Mr. Sanders has much to apologize for and nothing to justify dumping on others.
He would make a terrible new major-domo for the Democratic Party.
THEDA SKOCPOL
Cambridge, Mass.
The writer is a professor of government and sociology at Harvard.
I’m so old I can remember when a lot of us praised his “refusal to concede in a timely way.”
Anyway sorry Theda, but democracy is about choices. Bernie helped more than he hurt.
He won over many of the WWC counties Clinton lost to Trump in the general that Obama easily carried two years ago.
As for his post election message, if she hates what Bernie said she must really hate what her Cambridge neighbor and senior Senator said. We bet on stale stay the course centrism, social wedge issues and identity politics and lost. 99% of Sanders voters surveyed in exit polls voted for Clinton. Blaming this on Bernie is graceless.
reality is missing from this letter. Clinton has now blamed James Comey for her loss, and on the heels of that comes this nonsense. No one worked harder to elect a candidate than Bernie. No, he did not bow down and pay homage.
Even though Ms. Clinton got more votes than Trump, she lost in critical states where Bernie won. Michigan and Wisconsin. Instead of sensing this the Clinton team shortchanged resources in those states and their GOTV efforts that were imperative failed. It was taking things for granted in certain areas that was the problem. It’s time for the Clinton team to take major responsibility for their campaign mistakes.
Okay, we heard you, now please leave the stage and shut up. Your way failed. Stop blaming others.
Well aside from the fact that this is the first time I’ve ever heard “the professional class” used, first in the pejorative, and then as a reason to STFU, this very blog in which you’d said this very thing was created by members of exactly this ‘class’: having, as they do, more in common with Theda Skocpol than you, or indeed, me.
I don’t know that a specific outcome we all might decry counts as ‘failure.’ I don’t know that anything about “your way” (whatever it is you think you mean by that) could have been done all that much different and affected a different outcome. That swine trample pearls underfoot isn’t a reason to abjure pearls.
it’s time to catch up. I recommend “Listen Liberal” by Thomas Frank, the same dude who wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” After that, pick up a copy of Twilight of the Elites by Chris Hayes. You don’t know that a specific outcome we all might decry counts as ‘failure.’ Think back to last week. You don’t know that anything about my way could have been done all that much different and affected a different outcome? My way would have not lost Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio.
Maybe Theda would like to comment on this.
Bernie may be wrong, but your comment is also incorrect. Just because one could not win a party primary does not mean one could not win a general election. Yes, Democrats like Hillary. She won the primary. General election voters in the states she needed to win didn’t like her, not enough anyway. Another Democrat may have done better. That is really besides the point, though.
The Democratic party needs to understand why it lost and stop blaming Sanders, or Comey, or fucking Jill Stein because they aren’t the reasons. It’s on the party and how they’ve lost touch with working class voters, and it’s time to change course or we’re looking at a bigger hole in 2018 and 2020.
Even though I disagree with Theda, I don’t really care what Bernie thinks.
Tell me what Sherrod Brown, Kristen Gillibrand, and other, less-well-known Democratic leaders think.
and she lost. End of story.
I’m happy to stipulate that the next chairman of the DNC and the Democratic nominee is exactly who the Hillary-Clinton-Was-Terrible crowd wants. I’m happy to stipulate the massive ground-game and GOTV efforts that we fantasize about (while, of course, rejecting the means to fund all that).
I want to know, quite specifically, what this group would have this party and its candidate TELL the public that is different from what we just finished. Even an ideal communication infrastructure is worthless in the absence of a message to communicate.
What will our message be?
What do any of you propose to tell working-class whites in the rust-belt that is different from our allegedly failed message in this campaign?
“We learned our lesson. We’re ready to listen.”
And then we listen, and go from there.
I’m sorry, but that sounds too much like “the Hatter and the Hare” for my taste.
Our party stands for something. We have someplace we want to go. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m very sure that the place I want to go is VERY different from wherever Donald Trump is taking us in his chaotic wanderings.
So … I got it. We learned our lesson. We’re ready to listen.
When we hear things like “build a wall”, “deport them all”, “jail her”, and so on, then I certainly hope we have some response other than “Got it, whatever it takes”.
What is our message?
Which is Warrens message, Bidens message and Sanders message. It wasn’t a message that Hillary had that really broke through the noise about emails and insider games and Trump says mean things to people.
Trump ran the Obama 2012 campaign against Romney against Clinton and did a fabulous job converting Obama voters who rejected the Bain Capitalist loot and plunder model of outsourcing jobs into Trump voters who would rebuild Detroit.
When Trump fails to help the middle class, and I am under no illusions he won’t fail spectacularly, we pounce! When he offers an ambitious public works program that has enough Republican votes to pass, we play ball and make him make the program bigger and make the program inclusive. When Trump vetoes Ryan’s entitlement reforms, we help him sustain the vetoes. When Trump tries to put racists in the White House and cabinet or wants deportations and Muslim registries we fight back hard! We fight every court pick, and I’m of the opinion Obama should just recess appoint Garland.
How come you and others keep insisting an authentic economic message of populism somehow has to be as racially exclusionary as his? The New Deal wasn’t racist, and that’s what we have to return to and leave the shattered corpse of neoliberalism behind.
Actually, the New Deal was both racist and sexist.
It took several decades and generations of hard work to undo those failings.
How FDR was deliberate in his New deal to purposely oppress any particular race or sex. I’ll wait.
created as part of Social Security in 1935, expressly excluded 2 categories of workers who were predominantly black — farm workers and domestic workers. It was a price that southern states exacted from Roosevelt for their support for establishing the program.
First, racism need not be deliberate to be devastating.
Second, there is compelling evidence that the policy decisions of FDR toward blacks absolutely were both deliberate and intentional.
See, for example, the following:
The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow (emphasis mine):
African-Americans and the New Deal: A Look Back in History (emphasis mine):
For all of its many strengths, the New Deal was both racist and sexist. That is in large part because America at the time of the new deal was both racist and sexist.
Just as America is, today, both racist and sexist.
They needed the yellow-dog Democrats to get the New Deal through, and so there are lots of these.
The National Recovery Administration, which was supposed to set national labor standards, including a federal minimum wage, set a different and lower standard for blacks.
The Federal Housing Administration gave mortgage insurance on residential mortgages in order to help get people into home ownership, declined insurance to neighborhoods that had black people. This one is particularly bad. You know all those stories where Grandpa bought a house way back when, and now it is being sold for 10x+ what Grandpa paid? Not available to black people.
Social security initially excluded agricultural and domestic workers. Guess who had those jobs.
The entire farm subsidy system paid farmers not to farm land, but the subsidies only went to landowners. Sharecroppers who actually farmed the land had no rights and got evicted because the landowner could make more from the subsidy than by having the sharecropper farm.
FDR was rather notoriously opposed to anti-lynching legislation, or to desegregating the armed forces during the war.
I get that, but he needed Dixiecrats to pass those bills that don’t exist today. LBJ fought for racial equality and economic security and did more than anyone before or since to advance those fronts. His liberalism ought to be emulated.
Clinton ran as a Rockefeller Republican. Her website was full of Warren/Sanders policies but her rhetoric was conservative by definition. Stay the course, embrace stability, the status quo is working. She misread that the electorate wanted change, not from Obama but going substantially further than him. And they wanted someone from outside the political class which Obama was when he won, and Clinton through no fault of her own could never hope to be.
We are the party of responsibility; we would not, for example, block a Supreme Court nominee for no reason.
We are on the side of the citizen, not the corporation.
We will modernize and streamline the military, focusing on cybersecurity to protect Americans from modern threats.
We will severely punish employers who hired undocumented immigrants.
We will offer tax incentives to companies that create jobs in depressed areas.
We will shift law enforcement resources away from drugs like marijuana and toward more damaging drugs like heroin.
We will waive college tuition at public colleges for people who will commit to four years as a public school teacher.
We will drastically cut back on government spending on outside consultants at all levels.
Congress will trim its own staff considerably, and we will repeal provisions exempting Congress from such things as affirmative action.
We will KEEP Obamacare, but improve it.
I completely agree.
Please — and I’m really not trying to be argumentative here — isn’t much of this what Hillary Clinton spent the last year advocating for?
But she spoke too much about Trump. That’s not her fault alone, but even in the debates, she turned focus to him instead of to her positive agenda.
were that Trump was a bad man, a very bad man.
If only she had ignored him and focused on her plans to encourage profit sharing with a tax plan that rewarded companies who did so.
But again, as we saw eight years ago and ignored or forgot or dismissed eight years later, she was a poor campaigner.
She is an insider and couldn’t honestly run as an outsider. Trump, while wealthy and connected, has been a pugnacious outsider his whole career. And in a change year she misread the electorate but even her shifts in their direction were viewed as calculations, rightly or wrongly. Experience should be an asset but insiders rarely win statewide here or nationwide.
Wrongly in my own view since I think she finally embraced the liberalism she had to hide from toward the end of the campaign, but it was too late. A liberal from the rust belt would’ve been a better Veep, and maybe she could’ve channeled her Biden and just said “middle class” as many times as she said “Trump”.
Republicans NEVER shy away from calling their opponents horrible people. For once our opponent really was a horrible person and we should point that out. Actually, we shouldn’t have to point that out since it was so obvious, but apparently not that obvious to 59M+ of our fellow Americans:(
Like his tax plan raising the middle income tax burden by about a thousand a year to substantially cut taxes for the wealthy.
She was advocating for Alice Machado and defending her ineptitude on emails. None of those proposals broke through, and saying “go to my website” at th debates doesn’t count.
The next nominee has to be clear and direct. The system is rigged, I will fight to take it back for you. I will fight for Main Street by taking on Wall Street. I will end foreign nation building for nation building here at home. Warren beat the proto-Trump running on that. The proto-Clinton lost to the proto-Trump by writing potential voters off and campaigning on the interest group laundry list instead of fighting in direct terms for the middle class.
We will KEEP Obamacare, but improve it…
The problem with Obamacare is that by design (as originated by the Heritage Foundation) it relies on private for-profit corporations to run things for the benefit of their shareholders, not the health of citizens. How do we “improve” on this?
As the man told me, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.
But I think an opt-out option would help, and improving the exchanges.
A public option is the answer, but to me that sounds more like expanding Medicare, not improving Obamacare.
A state that exceeded the Federal standards would be allowed to exit.
The Feds didn’t want this, because the secondary purpose of collecting nationwide health and family habits information would have been damaged.
Somewhat surprised to see that in the list.
Typically that’s been associated with those hawkish on immigration.
But I’m not typical.
I included it because I worked at a local charity agency that deals with immigration issues, and because years ago I had a rug installed by a large home repair chain. The crew they sent may have been legal immigrants, but I suspect not. (They were subcontractors of subcontractors, and off the books I assume.) Corporate use of immigrant labor is a big problem, and it hurts the working class.
My take is that cracking down on corporations, along with offering a path to citizenship, is the fairest approach.
Politically we have more or less ignored immigration (all talk no action), but I don’t think we can any longer.
And they would be the first to crack down on employers due to wage theft and other enforcement issues. Ted Kennedy and John McCain would’ve ha d adjust and mandatory e-verify program to punish employers. Making it harder for undocumented workers to come in here, harder for employers to exploit them, and easier for those who are here to come out of the shadows and get legal has always been the common sense approach. Even Trump supporters I’ve talked to feel it’s impractical and wrong to deport the people already here. They just want better enforcement and the people making money off this scab labor to be punished.
Anecdotal, I’ll admit, but wealthy Republicans friends of ours have a housekeeper who comes in twice a week to clean, and another gentleman who does minor repairs and heavy cleaning, both are undocumented and of course, our friends complain about those “illegals” getting free health care and welfare….
When my wife asked why they do not have legal US citizens as house servants, their reaction was as expected “Nobody in the country wants to work anymore. They’re all too lazy”.
Of course, this was the case wit many high ranking Democrats as well. Remember Zoë Baird of Clinton fame? She and here husband were raking in the cash but could not see their way to hire an American citizen, instead hiring a cheaper (and easier to exploit) undocumented person.
The approach you’ve sketched (“cracking down on corporations, along with offering a path to citizenship, is the fairest approach.”) is pretty much exactly what Barack Obama and the Democratic Party has been proposing for eight years. It is at the heart of what he’s tried to do by executive order.
This is the plan that the GOP has steadfastly rejected. It is the second part — “offering a path to citizenship” — that Donald Trump and his supporters most vociferously oppose.
I don’t see how you can accurately claim that “politically, we have more or less ignored immigration (all talk no action)”. In fact, we Democrats have been pushing HARD for it for nearly a decade (and we began long before Barack Obama was elected).
The truth is, in this post-truth world, that it is the GOP and its xenophobia that has so far won the day. The laws of the land preclude we Democrats from taking many more actions beyond what we’re already doing.
I remind us that much-attacked Somerville (by some) has been a sanctuary city for a long time, and our mayor has just said we will continue that whatever Donald Trump does.
I ask that we please not overstate whatever weaknesses we Democrats have shown on issues of immigration. While not perfect, we are still the good guys at the table.
Yes, they reject penalizing corporations, and yes, they’ve blocked certain moves.
But it wasn’t that long ago that we had both chambers and the White House. We haven’t always walked our talk on immigration. (Also, Obama decided to do ACA first — for good reason.)
It’s a great documentary on how close we came and how reluctant Obama and spells I were to get the ball rolling. Luis Gutierrez really had to work with Republicans to get the White House’s attention. And once the Tea Party came into being, suddenly his allies all abandoned him. It’s a great look st how the sausage gets made, how lost law makers in both parties actually get along, and how outside pressure is amplified.
I mentioned this on another thread the other day.
Hiring undocumented workers is the chief cause of wage deflation and worker abuse. There is a clear protocol – as an employer, I need to get and file copies of the appropriate documents on any new hire, and this has been the case for many years.
But there are no audits done, and no repercussions for ignoring the law. We need a See Something, Say Something tip off line to punish employers with existing penalties, and stipulate that any infraction means you cannot be used as a sub on any government funded job, including municipal.
That’s Trump’s success among the “working class white” voter stems in any way from his answer to “populist” anger at Wall Street and the financial sector.
It is already clear that cabinet appointments will be drawn heavily from the financial sector, and a priority will be to repeal all regulation of the industry in order to “unfetter the market.” Repeal Dodd-Frank, eliminate the CFPB, eliminate capital reserve requirements and limits on systemic risk.
Doubtless there will be a hue and cry among the white working class– “we didn’t vote for this! We voted for a populist challenge to moneyed interests!” followed by a surge of anger directed at the President for this betrayal.
Actually, no there won’t. Because the “white working class” doesn’t give a fart in a thunderstorm about Wall Street or the regulation of the financial industry. They literally could not care less.
You know what they care about? Deporting Mexicans.
It is not clear how any Democratic change to focus on reducing income disparity or regulating Wall Street will ever change the fact that these voters just do not care about these things at all. The best you can do is to nominate someone with sufficient political skill to “feel their pain” like Bubba Clinton or to simply connect like Obama, and who can peel off juuust enough of them to hang on.
But that was easier to do when very few of them voted. It will be harder to do now that the GOP has figured out a neat new way to get a lot of them to vote– better than abortion or gay-bashing ever was!
n/t
Why did Romney lose the rust belt by double digits to Obama while Clinton lost the same counties by single digits to Trump? This means 20-30% of Obama voters who voted for a black man twice voted for Trump. Romney also ran on massive deportations and deregulating Wall Street. He also told GM to drop dead and everyone in the Midwest-again I’n the only one here other than Jason who has actually lived and campaigned there-remembered Obama saves their jobs.
Trump promised to make cars in America again a ns reopen the mines while Clinton, in Romneyesque fashion called half the country deplorable and bragged about the mines and factories she would shut down. Never once made an ad or a speech about her ambitious plan to rebuild Appalachia with new investments and income supports-something I consistently praised here and pointed to. Instead she trots out all the neoconservatives that endorsed her and ran to Trump’s right on Russia in her only major policy addresss of the campaign in San Diego. The rest of the time she said he mocked women and disabled people which worked so well for Jeb.
Your narrative is self serving and also repudiated by your continued insistence during the primary we could write these voters off. Apparently we can’t. They voted for Obama, they voted for Sanders, they voted for Trump and told Clinton to go back to Wall Street where she belongs. Unfairly in my view, I can’t emphasize that I gave to her campaign and did everything I could to help her succeed. I sent memos to my friends on the campaign. Dan Cohen should come on here since this is what his cross tabs show. It’s the economy stupid! She should’ve listened to Bill.
You’re still talking about Hillary Clinton. I think CMD is (and if he isn’t than I am) talking about something else.
Donald Trump promised to make cars in America again and re-open the mines. He also says climate change is a hoax. His promise to reopen the mines (he is acting on that promise by dismantling the EPA) means that we’ll be burning coal and betraying our commitments to the rest of the world about climate change. Those rust-belts voters don’t care. Should we?
The facts are that neither Donald Trump nor any Democrat is going to “rebuild Appalachia”. Appalachia has been dirt-poor for generations and will continue to be that way, even WITH unrestrained coal mines, lopping off the tops of mountains, destroying watersheds, and all the other things that those working-class people in Appalachia say they want. Appalachia was poor before Barack Obama, it was poor before Bill Clinton, it was poor before Richard Nixon, it was poor before LBJ — Appalachia has ALWAYS been poor. Donald Trump is going to do all those things, and Appalachia will STILL be poor — because he and the GOP lie to them and they don’t care. Are you suggesting that we tell the same lies?
It we want to do something about poverty, suffering, and misery in Appalachia, re-opening the coal mines is at the top of the things we should NOT do. The things we should be doing in Appalachia are investing in schools, feeding the poor, providing free contraception, and a host of similar things — all of them things that today’s Appalachian voters just scorned in favor of Trumpist lies. Things that require substantial federal government investment that in turn requires a substantial increase in taxes on the wealthy. Things that the Trump administration will not EVER do or allow to be done. Things that we Democrats have always stood for, and that the voters of Appalachia just turned their backs on.
As far as I’m concerned, my immediate response is to cut off ALL federal funding for the rust-belt states, so that the net flow of federal funds into them is ZERO, and let them stew in their own frigging juices for the next decade or so. They said they want Trumpism — give them Trumpism. When their blacks complain, tell them to move out or knuckle under. When their women complain, laugh at them and suggest they improve their appearance and get breast implants. I understand that I’m speaking from pain right now, but as far as I’m concerned my personal response to the rust-belt is “You asked for it, you got it”.
Hillary Clinton didn’t just say “he mocked women”, he DID mock women, disabled reporters, and anybody else who came on his screen. Does the fact that Jeb Bush lost mean that we should normalize this crude bullying?
I asked this above — how is that you propose to NOT write off these voters? We are talking about people who knowingly ignored the lies, the scapegoating, the bullying, the mockery and voted for a candidate who as president will only make their suffering worse.
See, I don’t think we can do very much to change today’s voters. I think that best we can do is build towards the future, educate the voters of tomorrow, and do everything in our power to limit the influence of the 60 million Americans who put this incompetent bully in the Oval Office.
I’m not arguing Trump is anything but a liar, I am saying he heard their cries and felt their pain more than our nominee. You can’t deny it after she lost states that were supposed to be in the bag.
Of course the mines won’t reopen since cheap natural gas killed hem, not Obamas EPA. She had a great plan for Appalachia, and she never talked about it. Never once ran an ad on it. Because her advisors said fuck those people they are racists that won’t vote for you anyway. Those advisors should be run out of our party along with that attitude for all time.
We aren’t going to govern and enact the remainder of FDR’s agenda by running another neoliberal campaign, we aren’t going to enact that agenda without 60 Senators, maybe half the state houses instead of a fifth, maybe half the governors instead of just a third, and a real party that’s competitive in 50 states.
Embracing true liberalism in the form of socially democratic economic policies is not enabling racism. Embracing neoliberalism isn’t the only way to fight racism either. I continue to reject your dichotomy out of hand. If LBJ could pass the Great Society and fight for Civil Rights so can our next nominee.
…that you and I saw two very different campaigns. You say you never heard Clinton talk about the middle class while I can’t recall hearing Trump talk much positively about building cars again. Yeah, something about trade deals being bad, but then what? I didn’t hear a concrete plan from him to create jobs (and plenty that cause concern that the opposite would happen). If two people more or less on the same side didn’t see the same campaign, is there any hope for people who start on opposite sides?
I really didn’t have time to pay attention to the primary debates, which was where is where most of her governing agenda campaign came out. Most voters didn’t watch the conventions or her speech at Roosevelt Island. So if your main source is cable and the locals, it was wall to wall emails and Trump bashing or being bashed. Viewing they you either don’t bother since it’s so nasty and “both candidates really suck” or you may gamble on the crazy guy talking about jobs over the stale insider saying whatever she needed to whichever group she was in front of.
…but by that standard you wouldn’t hear much about what you said Trump was talking about either.
…SHE was the one saying whatever she needed to whatever group she was in front of?! That sounds like Trumpian projection to me. I’ve said from the beginning that far from “telling it like it is” he was actually the world’s greatest panderer. You still have not answered to my satisfaction how this is Clinton’s fault or responsibility since try as she might, as you point out the media were more interested in emails and Trump-fighting. She can shout her agenda from the mountaintops, but if the media drown her out there’s not much she can do. That’s precisely WHY she often told us to go to her website; it’s just about the only place those interested COULD get a detailed accounting of her agenda:(
Blaming the voters is a lousy answer to the question and the easiest way to repeat the same outcome.
What did Obama stand for? Hope and Change. The voters needed both after 8 years of Bush. What did Trump stand for? Making America Great Again, aka restoring the country to a bygone era when it was more prosperous for the ‘middle American’ which refers to middle class (Bernie, Warren and I agree) and when it had far more white privilege (Bernie, Warren and I strongly disagree!). But at least it was a message.
What did Stronger Together mean? Which they had to go to after Veep anticipated ‘Continuity with Change‘. I guess it was a rebuke of Trump’s consolidation of white America by consolidating non-white America behind Clinton?
In front of black audiences she was all about BLM and the mothers that were killed. In front of Latino audiences she called herself an abuela and was all about comprehensive immigration reform. In front of female audiences it was all about shattering the glass ceiling.
We will never know how she was in front of white working class audiences, since her advisers explicitly told her not to go to them. Did she gave a speech in front of the UAW vowing to repeal NAFTA? Trump did. No wonder he won nearly half their Michigan membership, and a higher number of African Americans in that state than Mitt Romney.
…was the perfect antidote to Trump’s strategy of divide and conquer. It means turning to rather than on each other like Deval Patrick often said. Of course she tailored her message to her audience of the moment. Everyone does that, including Trump, and they should. As long as the messages are not contradictory it makes no sense to speak to UAW about BLM or BLM about labor. I’m not sure HRC wanted to repeal NAFTA – are you suggesting she pander and make that speech? I blame the media a lot more than I do the voters, but the latter do have to be invited to the website if the former aren’t going to deliver her message for her. Again, HRC said plenty about fighting for regular people; it was the whole premise of not only her campaign, but her entire career. I still don’t know what SHE could have done to make that clearer or more heard.
#ImWithHer
Do you think Stronger Together was a bigger campaign theme than #ImWithHer? I don’t think it was close.
Would’ve been better
Stronger Together was her theme. I’m With Her was a cheer.
Why do progressives insist on giving her and her tone deaf campaign a free pass for the worst failure in modern political history? This was a terribly arrogant campaign that insisted it knew everything and then was given the finger by middle America. Repeating the same mistakes will reelect Donald Trump.
My middle school English teacher Mr. Hutch taught us to Keep it Sinple Stupid for our writing. It’s the same for political campaigns. When I started my CPA campaign inn Chelsea we had a lengthy ten point explanation of the policy on our literature. We switched it up to “Yes for homes, parks and history” and suddenly our campaign was successful. People don’t have time to go to websites and do their homework, especially folks working multiple jobs or juggling child care commitments. You gotta do the work for them with a simple message.
Warren gets this: “the system is rigged, time to make Wall Street pay”
Bernie gets this: “we want to help the middle class instead of millionaires and billionaires”
Al Franken got this: “Wall Street played by its own rules. This was wrong. Now they play by ours”
Trudeau got this: “the middle class does better under Liberals every time. My government will put money in your pocket by making the wealthy pay their fair share”.
These are simple arguments. Voters dislike the rich and want the money spent on the poor and middle class. Hillary’s opulent lifestyle and Senate vote history undermined her push to the populist left. Obama conceded this in a recent post-election interview.
That’s a hot take and I agree.
This shouldn’t have been a close election and it was a loss. Wrong candidate, wrong campaign, wrong time. It was a perfect storm, but it was a perfect storm of our choosing.
Christopher, I urge you and other Democrats to learn the lessons. Our future in so many ways literally depends on it.
I guess we just have to keep going around and around on this awhile longer.
Wrong candidate? Hillary Clinton was the best candidate we had. The others didn’t even come close. Millions of primary voters said so, the party said so, each of the other candidates said so.
Wrong campaign? Wrong time? As we get further away from the loss, several themes seem to be emerging:
1. Donald Trump turned out more of his supporters than we did, especially in rust-belt states
2. Truth and facts matter less to today’s electorate than optics
3. All through America, poll respondents say they prefer Democratic position on nearly every issue that they say matters to them (including the economy, by the way), still vote Republican — especially in local elections
Regarding this (emphasis mine):
Excuse me? That is just bunk. For crying out loud, James, Donald Trump has made his “opulent lifestyle” the central focus of his brand for decades. You keep offering these alleged choices that just don’t make any sense. A voter who doesn’t like Hillary Clinton’s “opulent lifestyle”, and therefore votes for Donald Trump is lying to themselves and exemplifies my item 2 above. More likely there is something else about Hillary Clinton that said voter doesn’t like and won’t admit — most often, in my opinion, her gender.
Donald Trump centered his campaign around anger, bigotry, hate, hostility, and — more than anything else — blind and staggering ignorance.
I profoundly disagree with this attempted summary: “It was a perfect storm of our choosing”.
Here is the most significant choice we made in this, as in every election: we told the truth. We resisted the temptation to pander to bias and prejudice. We lost.
If we ran the “wrong campaign”, then by construction Donald Trump ran the “right campaign”.
The success of Donald Trump’s campaign demonstrates that our fabled “American Democracy” had a massive cerebral hemorrhage and is lying comatose on the floor.
Whatever it is we do next, emulating the Donald Trump campaign is about the worst possible thing we could choose.
But it’s one thing for the GOP nominee to be rich; they usually are.
It’s not that HRC was (is) rich; she showed some humility about that, and I think people get that people in public life eventually get chances to make money, and no one seriously begrudges that.
But certain things, like the speeches for Goldman Sachs, really hurt. I get why GS wants her there (essentially, for its own prestige), but the combination of getting paid big money and not being willing to reveal what you said is a bad one. It’s not fair, it’s a double standard — but we are held to a higher standard on stuff like this.
I won’t agree that the most hated woman in America is the best candidate we could muster. She’s loved by Democrats. Many Americans hate her fucking guts – and yeah, that may be completely unjustified, but they do.
This primary was supposed to be a coronation. The field was cleared for her, and that’s why only a quirky socialist and low name recognition governor entered. Don’t act like this was a normal primary in which the best candidate for a general election won.
Clinton’s tone-deaf ground game likely turned out many Trump supporters.
No shit. That’s why trying to fact-check a monster or tell people to look at your website during a debate is dumb.
Yes. And that’s made much worse when you have the worst possible messenger.
This should have been a historic victory. The fact that it was a loss demonstrates how truly terrible of a candidate and campaign this was.
The funny/sad thing is is that so many of us saw this. Admittedly, we saw it a year or more out and thought it would happen against another Republican but we argued about why she could lose and couldn’t or wouldn’t connect – and many of those things came to pass. I’m pretty sure that even you, Tom, made some of those arguments early on when you were backing Sanders. As it got closer and the polls were consistent, we all thought it was in the bag. I guess we shouldn’t have as those underlying weaknesses never went away. I hope we don’t make those mistakes again.
Ultimately though, the campaign fell on its face misreading the mood of the country. The campaign was built around Clinton’s experience and later around Trump being unfit for office. They missed the anger and hopelessness around the country. Trump saw it and used it in a gross way. Sanders saw it and focused it in the right way. Clinton rejected addressing the anger at all. That lost it for her. Her campaign was not built to say “I feel your pain” and she was not the messenger to deliver that message. This was the year that needed that.
Bernie Sanders LOST the primary, and it wasn’t close. He was never even competitive. His strongest support was from people who usually don’t vote, who apparently didn’t vote in the general election, and who I suspect are unlikely to vote in the future.
Bernie Sanders didn’t “focus” anything. During the primary, at least in its early stages, he successfully kept the discussion focused on the “Warren agenda” of wealth and income concentration. Sadly, from the first debate onward, he clearly had absolutely no clue about what to do about it.
It was Bill Clinton who made “I feel your pain” famous, and the same people who attack Hillary Clinton also demonize him.
I simply reject this entire narrative. I find it self-serving on the part of those who continue to demonize Bill and Hillary Clinton, and I find it completely unhelpful in guiding what we do now.
We apparently agree that Hillary Clinton is “the most hated woman in America”. You seem perfectly ok with saying “Fine, toss her out”, while I think she exemplifies the sexism that grips our culture and the malaise that is killing journalism. The fact remains that, for whatever reasons, there weren’t any other candidates. I don’t think anybody “coronated” Ms. Clinton — I don’t think anybody else had the courage to step forward.
As far as I’m concerned, the more we strive to rationalize and excuse the multitude of abuses of the Donald Trump campaign and those who supported him, the more we guarantee that the America we claim to seek will never happen.
As I see it, the pitchfork and torches mob won this round. They surrounded the jail, broke down the door, dragged out the innocent victim, and hung her up to die. They laughed and jeered the whole way, while recruiting more to join them with lies and cruel taunts towards any who said “no”. I’m being berated because I have no “empathy” towards those who comprised that mob.
Well, the charge is certainly true. I have no empathy AT ALL for anybody who joined that mob, nor anybody who passively sat on the sidelines and watched it happen without stepping in to stop it.
This was a test of American democracy (with lower-case “d”) and we failed it miserably. We elected an incompetent, misanthropic demagogue.
I reject the premise that the arguments I’m seeing here will do anything except discourage any talented young woman contemplating a future in politics right now — especially if that woman is black or Hispanic.
An example of such a young woman is our own Jen Magliore, who ran a fine campaign and lost to an incumbent Republican. I’d like to know, from Ms. Magliore herself, whether commentary like this about “the most hated woman in America” makes her more or less likely to make another run for office.
I think the Hillary Clinton campaign saw the anger and thought they could reach through it to address the suffering underneath it. I think they underestimated the intensity of the pure hatred directed at Ms. Clinton, underestimated how attached America is to that hatred in the same way that Mr. Obama underestimated the intensity of the racism directed at him from the GOP.
I think the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party couldn’t believe just how ignorant, sexist, cruel, and willfully destructive today’s America is. I think Donald Trump read it perfectly and pandered to it.
Bernie Sanders should not have won any state other than Vermont during the primaries. He started with very low name recognition and was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from small donors, won a bunch of states, and stayed around until the summer. It was much more competitive than you like to dismiss (and all with absolutely no support from anyone in the party establishment – and some outright antagonism) and at the very least should have served as a much bigger wakeup call to the Democratic party. Incorporating his message was limited at best – a few policy proposals, but nothing in terms of thematic reach. Stronger Together was the tagline. #ImWithHer was the campaign.
Tom, please be real. This was so damn obvious. This primary was “her time” and almost everyone in the party treated it as such. They told Biden he wouldn’t have any support. And neither would anyone else. That’s why a non-Democrat was the only one who stepped up. No one, not even Sanders himself expected anything different to happen in the primaries. He thought he could get a slightly higher profile for certain issues. Again, what ended up happening should have been a much bigger wakeup call.
I completely disagree. I think they tried to propose policies and an experienced leader to implement those polices that would address the suffering underneath, and that is a very different thing than reaching through. Clinton may have been a good President (she can operate); she was a terrible candidate (she can’t sell).
Trumps opulence was perceived to come from his business acumen which frankly the Clinton campaign didn’t do enough to discredit, while hers is perceived to come at the expense of the taxpayer which has employed her for three decades only to see her use her public service as a way to make private money off of Wall Street.
“They are both corrupt, but at least his corruption doesn’t come at the taxpayers expense” I heard that more than once.
“What’s worse, Trump having politicians in his pocket or the politicians taking his money?”
“She didn’t seem to think he hated women when she took his bribe to come to his wedding”
A lot of anecdotes like this.
Could the View voters button be moved away from the Disapprove button? I was just trying to confirm my surmise about who would downrate that comment. I should have trusted my instincts; it would have saved me from joining him.
n/t
Every campaign is not a blank slate. There is a party that actually prevented the complete collapse of the domestic auto industry, and there is a party that opposed it. Trump promised to keep auto jobs in America by… moving them out of Michigan, to other states where wages are lower.
And they voted for him anyway. Because Mexicans.
You can outreach and feel their pain and make proposals until you’re blue in the face. And you may get two of them, but then another candidate will bark about some uppity n—-r, and then will complain about “political correctness” when called on it, and three million will go charging out to vote.
These folks were all about the New Deal, but only until the New Deal included black people. Never even mind the women and gays. Now, because it is shown that these people will come out in great numbers for some race-baiting, Dems are supposed to “move past” these divisive issues, and return to its roots of supporting “them.”
It is a race to the bottom, in which a party with decency would take a pass. The best that can be done is to find “hardscrabble” roots type candidates like Bill Clinton/Obama, as opposed to those with more of a coastal suburb appeal like Gore/Kerry/Hillary, and hope to take some of the edge off the stampede of these folks to put Muslims into internment camps.
is that in a year or eighteen months, the poor people in Michigan and Ohio and the others see that once again, nothing changes. Maybe then Democrats can take over the senate and gain in the house, turning Trump into an early lame duck which will drive him over the edge and possibly manage to get impeached. Then we can find a real progressive to run in 2020 and win without having to focus on this or that demographic….
Appalachia is a big place, and Kentucky and West Virginia don’t equate to Western Pennsylvania or Eastern Ohio, except – to a degree – culturally.
When I was growing up in Washington County, Pennsylvania, industrial foremen and skilled tradesmen were taking home as much as my father did as an attorney (and more than he did as a county judge).
I’m pretty sure that Mr. Trump wasn’t promising to open coal mines in Washington County.
I invite jconway to clarify the region he meant when he spoke of an “ambitious plan to rebuild Appalachia with new investments and income supports” — I didn’t take that to mean Western PA or Eastern OH.
Remember I like and largely agree with each of you.
When I wrote of “Appalachia” above, I meant something more like the following map:
Distressed counties in Appalachia (2010)
In addition to Kentucky and West Virginia, you’ll note that the map also includes portions of Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
You’ll also note that the “distressed” counties (in red) are concentrated in West Virginia, Kentucky, and (north eastern) Mississippi.
Washington County, PA had none of these “distressed” counties in 2010.
I draw your attention to this 2013 piece from the “The Week” (emphasis mine):
LBJ didn’t solve this problem in 1965, and it was old then. Nobody solved this problem (nor created it) in the fifty years between 1965 and 2015. Barack Obama didn’t solve or cause the crushing poverty in Appalachia.
Donald Trump will not solve it, and Hillary Clinton would not have solved it if elected.
I suggest that Hillary Clinton did NOT have a great plan for Appalachia, and chose to say little or nothing rather than lie.
There IS NO great plan for Appalachia if such a plan depends on “jobs”, on “growing the economy”, and so on.
WHYEVER would they shun a benevolent master like this? They might even not be required to tug the forelock!
is, to me, problematic at best in terms of a way for Dems to move forward, in part because the explanation is probably more complicated than you’re making it out to be. For instance, this Twitter thread makes a good point way better than I could, but the short version is that Clinton was actually quite a bit more progressive on some race-related issues, such as police brutality and systemic racism, than Obama was during either of his campaigns.
…which is generally how Republicans get elected. Almost half the electorate couldn’t be bothered in a race where the stakes are so high:( THAT, and not the promises of a demagogue, is the first sign of an unhealthy democracy.
We know that a great many Democratic voters were prevented from exercising their right by the voterID regulations passed with such enthusiasm by the GOP.
Some Democrats stayed home. Some were prevented from voting.
The real problem is that great big red sea in the middle of the map of state and local government.
Some say it’s because we’re racists and bigots and xenophobic….but to quote Carville (who we all LOVED when he said this about Bill Clinton’s win), “the economy, stupid. People want Mexicans out because they have been told that the Mexicans took their jobs. Of course this is not true, but that’s another matter. It’s economics, not xenophobia.
We never loved Carville. He makes an occasional good point, but he’s kind of a jerk.
Here’s the key phrase in your comment: “Of course this is not true, but that’s another matter.”
No, it is NOT “another matter”. It is, in fact, the very crux of the matter. You admit it’s not true yourself (” Of course this is not true”), and you still promote bigotry by trying to shove it off the table.
It is NOT economics, it IS xenophobia. That’s all. Mexicans did NOT take their jobs. Deporting Mexicans will NOT bring their jobs back. NOTHING they do to Mexicans will make the slightest difference in “economics”.
Instead, when the Mexicans are gone, they’ll go after the next scapegoat offered up. And during the whole time, they’ll fight tooth and nail against every effort to demand that women get equal pay for equal work, just like you argued against that law here.
It’s all rooted in economics. It’s the economy, stupid.
If Hillary ran on the economy, she’d be the president elect, but she running against Bernie who WAS running on the economy so she had to defend the status quo and embrace Obama’s economy and then belittle Bernie as a “single issue candidate” , so she left herself unable to attack the economy. All she was left with was “Trump is a very bad man, I am a woman”.
We all know how that worked out.
Did Sanders ever say HRC was corrupt? I don’t think he did, but I could be wrong.
Trump said it, a lot.
However, her meteoric accumulation of wealth was and remains deeply connected to a corrupt system. She is not alone in this, and neither is Donald Trump, but at least he was upfront about it. She hid from it.
I don’t think Sanders should be the head of the DNC. Is he even a “D?” At the same time, I just don’t blame Sanders (at all) for HRC losing, and don’t get what he has to apologize for. He should have dropped out earlier? And then she would have won? I don’t see it. Sanders had his finger, to a degree, on the same pulse that helped propel the jackass to victory. If Sanders is taking credit for understanding that pulse, he’s correct. HRC, to the extent she even understood it, certainly failed at tapping into it.
the ideas. Hated the campaign.
There are so many factors in Clinton’s loss (of the electoral college) from Comey’s emails to neglecting to go positive sooner to her emails to many Democrats staying home to voter suppression to our sluttish medias love of Trump as a story to Russia to Julian Assange to voters the desire for change at any cost. There’s no single reason for Clinton’s loss, though the changing two or three of these factors might have swung the electoral college to Clinton.
I never felt the Bern. I’m a little pissed that he signed on to the Democratic Party, had a campaign that brought out unrealistic expectations about politics and Bernie’s candidacy (blame asshat Jeff Weaver), brought in Cornell West to write the party platform, and promptly left the Democratic Party. Politics is a team sport. You have to stay on the team.
Skopcol is correct, though I don’t know about the numbers. Bernie’s campaign did a lot of damage to the process. That’s not to say that he didn’t have plenty of help from the DNC and Clinton herself. The entire country fucked up and that includes Saint Bernie, us, the GOP, the media, intelligent, naive voters, the list goes on an on.
How does a spirited challenge damage the process?
I don’t know what is meant by “a spirited challenge” in the context of a non-Democrat who bungee’d into the Democratic primary for the purpose of preaching revolution. Revolution, by definition, seeks to directly damage, indeed destroy, existing processes and supplant them with new. You may argue that he was just making use of a rhetoric altogether more sharply than we are used to. My reply to that is… in most ways Sen Sanders is the anti-Trump except in manner of appeals to a flailing emotionalism — Maybe it’s a New York thing. You can’t really play with that fire and not expect that someone will get.. ahem… berned.
Beyond the primary there is more damage to the procees: there are, undoubtedly, some who voted Sen Sanders in the primary and Trump in the general. They did this because Sen Sanders gave them tacit permission to do this with his driving, oft strident, emotionalism and very personal attacks on Hillary Clinton, calling into question her motives and her abilities. There are, also undoubtedly, some who voted Sen Sanders in the primary and stayed home for the general. They too, received permission, tacitly, because he set wildly unrealistic expectations that nobody, not even he, could meet.
for sluttish
You’re my model
For public service between teaching and being a selectman. You’re very wrong on this particular point.
Vermont does not allow a person to register to vote as a member of any party, so Bernie has always described himself as a democratic socialist who caucused with the Dems in DC. Under no circumstances could he join the Democratic Party as long as he lives in VT. So of course he has not quit the party either and will continue to caucus with the Dems, continuing as the ranking member of the Budget Committee.
He ran for President on the Democratic line as it is almost impossible to qualify nation-wide for the ballot as a member of no party, and he never had much use for the Green Party, recognizing it as a spoiler to electing anyone even slightly left of center.
I place no blame on him for HRC’s loss. Remember she actually stayed in the race against Obama until very late, justifying her presence on the trail as “just in case” he got assassinated like RFK did. At least Bernie was honest enough to acknowledge his desire to shape the Dem Party.
So what? This is NOT a requirement of party non-particiaption for the candidate. Vermont doesn’t outlaw party participation for candidates.
The OTHER Senator from Vermont, Leahy, is a Democrat and so is the Governor and the Member of the House of Representatives. Whether or no the state allows voter registration per party THERE IS A METRIC FUCK-TON of voting by party going on.
There is a lot of very limber mental gymnastics going on to defend an indefensible position.
I never understood the attack ‘he’s not a real Democrat’, since would you rather he run as a third party or independent candidate? Many, many independents joined or rejoined the Democratic party because of his run or at least became active in our primaries. This is a good thing. Bernie made Occupy a force within the Democratic party like the Tea Party is on the right.
A party is not an ideology, legally speaking, it is a cartel that allows candidates to raise money for one another with higher limits. That’s it. This is why in the past we had liberal Republicans and really conservative Democrats. The ideological party system is a 20 year phenomenon, and while it’s hurt the country in some ways, it does make sense that in those 20 years Bernie would find himself more comfortable with a caucus led by Schumer and containing the likes of Warren than one led by Robert Byrd and containing the likes of Zell Miller. He caucuses with the Democrats, let him keep his registration.
.. If I respond to you, as I’ve deliberately not done so in the past day, will you actually read what I wrote? Because you’re off to a really really bad start if you think I said anything close to “being an independent is indefensible.”
But I’m an idiot, so I’ll ask.
What position, exactly, is indefensible?
April fools is that-a-way.
If you ain’t trying to be funny, you should actually read the diary you’re trying to be part of… ask yourself “what’s the topic of this diary?” (or, hell, “what’s the effing title”) Try to discern which positions are being offered and defended… Then ask about the limber gymnastics going (“Bernie can’t be a Democrat because Vermont won’t let him. Therefore he couldn’t have parachuted in to wreak havoc…)
Maybe I’m exhausting because I force you to think.
I see no indefensible positions in this diary. Even you have a case. I disagree with it, but you have one.
OK, maybe Theda’s position is indefensible.
n/t
The foul mouth strikes again.
I forgot that sophistry is the defense counsels dirty little secret not to be discussed in public.
My bad.
Your lack of experience is showing, petr. Sanders has always had a democratic socialist perspective and acted on it. The main thing that matters in his career is how much change for the better he can create, as he has done as Mayor of Burlington, a Member of Congress and as a US Senator. His record is pretty strong on all counts.
You use the phrase “parachuting in” to the Dem Party but let’s be clear that even if the only thing he ever did was caucused with the Dems and gave them their one vote margin in the Senate then that would be enough. But it is obviously not all he has done.
Again, it is your total lack of experience in Congressional politics that allows you to ignore the reality on Congress. You obviously don’t recall Sanders predecessor in the Senate, the very decent Republican Jim Jeffords, who quit his party in 2001 and called himself an Independent but caucused with Dems. And you clearly miss the fact, whether by choice or ignorance, that Angus King of Maine caucuses with the Dems. But I guess you are more interested in arguing than facing the reality of getting an operating majority in any legislative body. Have you ever tried to do that, IRL?
The only people who I consider as “parachuting in” are the people who blog but do nothing in the trenches. A week or two ago you said that I don’t understand politics, despite almost a half century of full-time plus employment in politics and governance on five continents and across the US. I asked you to tell us what gives you your self-professed superior knowledge. This would again be a great time to explain from whence it comes, even one job or one campaign you have been part of.
BTW, your second round of insults towards me, calling me a “defense counsel” is just plain old fucking wrong. I am not and never have been a member of the defense bar. Why did you make that one up? Facts matter. Details matter. Reading, even a lot, is not close to actually doing anything serious. And participating in a lit drop is good, we need more of that, but it is not a substitute for real work.
… for someone who denies being counsel for the defense, you sure do pile on a heapin-helping of pettifogging and legerdemaine. The willingness and dexterity with which you turn the argument to others, not just when you condescend to trash me, is the mark of someone who’s professionally slippery.
Good luck with that.
petr, petr, petr. I go long on details and you go short with the insults, never addressing the substance of my comments.
I have not turned the argument to others. I provided the details that make my point. You made up something about me, your version of truthiness, refuse to even acknowledge that fabrication on your part, and double down with the insults. “Professionally slippery?” Not me. I am accurate, provide the quotes and links where points are in question and am amused by your sputtering denial of the details. Still waiting for you to acknowledge your fabrication about my professional life and an explanation about ANY life experience that leads you to claim that I don’t understand politics. But I won’t be holding my breath.
…but just as a point of information, the parties DO still have nominating processes in Vermont and I believe Sanders has been known to turn down a Democratic nomination. So, yes, even if he couldn’t register as a Democrat, he could RUN as one.
“legitimacy” of the primary by constantly saying things were fixed. There was a major strand of supporters abetted by Jeff Weaver that was saying Clinton fixed the vote in Nevada and Brooklyn. That’s damaging.
“Sluttish media” is offensive? I couldn’t be bothered to downrate you for a stupid reason.
It’s degrading to people who shouldn’t be degraded. The word and very concept has been used to shame and control women (and only women) for far far too long.
If you could be bothered to give it a smidgen of fresh thought, it’s actually not hard to comprehend.
I have a different view, but thanks for answering. Cheers.
What a genius!
how much I enjoyed BMG commentary in my hiatus.
Don’t mind the disagreement. Don’t mind being wrong. Love the cherry-picking.
If anything he brought millions of people turned off by party politics back into the process. Clinton herself said she didn’t have a stronger ally or surrogate for the general election.
What Sanders and Warren are saying about our emphasis on identity politics to the exclusion of class politics is important-and it is the only way in my view that the party comes back to power. I oppose viewing this choice as either/or and strongly believe it’s a both/and part of progressive and Democratic values.
But, if you mean someone who thinks standards for people living in today’s world should be different than they are for people who lived in the 16th century, count me among the cherry pickers.
It can be said with certainty that slut was not poetry to the ears of 15 year old Phoebe Prince when it was the last word she heard from her peers before she took her own life. Where in the world could kids learn such language and attitudes?
That’s a rhetorical question. We know the answer. It wasn’t from Shakespeare, it was from adults living in the modern world who really should know better.
My feelings aren’t hurt. I’m not offended. I couldn’t care less if Scout has a problem my use of “sluttish” at the other end of a metaphor. Maybe I could, but why bother?
I wrote:
Naturally, James wrote, “
I’ve shown citation after citation before and after the election about the growing disconnect between her campaign and that critical demographic. I predicted Trump’s only path to victory was the 64 electoral votes in those states. Paul Simmons has been discussing her poor outreach and ground game both in Western PA and the African American community more broadly. Obama and his team blame Clinton and her team in a recent New Yorker article.
How was this Bernie’s fault? An uncontested coronation would’ve resulted in an even bigger loss for Clinton. He and his team were right to be pissed at the DNC and that’s a self inflicted wound on their part. Where’s your data and numbers beyond a gut feeling that Bernie and West were too uppity to contest this instead of sit it out?
Funny how Bernie voters are always the first scapegoated when they turned out in record numbers for Clinton while the minority voters who were supposed to be in the bag for Clinton didn’t show up. You and others insisted she was the most racially progressive candidate simply because old guard black politicians gave her more endorsements and votes while the prophetic voices in the BLM movement all endorsed Bernie. As soon as West isn’t a toady for establishment centrists he’s discarded as an inauthentic black voice.
Anyway it doesn’t matter. It’s our party now, the Clinton’s are done. Maybe they shouldn’t have backed mass incarceration, the Iraq War, NAFTA and financial deregulation. Maybe we can finally elect some Democrats who aren’t embarrassed to govern as one.
My wife is terrified right now, I did not want this result but I feared it since the politics of caution and safe insiders always results in a loss. People want to vote for big ideas, big promises, and bold change. They have never choosen timid incrementalism. We have to be a working class party again or we will continue to lose.
reading what I wrote?
who have the same fears. Sri Lankan parents on green cards. You saw my FB post on my former student’s experience of anti-semitism from one of her former student’s and her son’s experience Arizona.
You’re not arguing with me, you’re arguing with yourself and using what I wrote as a punching board. I don’t even disagree with you enough to make a difference.
If you want more independents and unenrolled to join the party then give them a seat at the table. Same with millennials and others. They don’t teach us how the DTC and DSC work in schools, and the women of color I worked with this past year told me they aren’t the most welcoming places anyway. Let’s clean our own house first and do it quickly. Open the windows and let the air in. Keeping it an insiders club keeps it out of the winners circle.
I just think people should join the party and stay in the party. Bernie chose not to do so. (See below). I have mixed feelings about Bernie. He did a great job bringing out important ideas and getting people out. He did his best for Clinton. Time will tell if he has a lasting effect. Except for complaining about Cornel West who is not a Democrat either, I don’t know where I said we should keep the same people in the party establishment.
The Best Defense may be right about party registration in Vermont, but it hasn’t prevented the state from having a Democratic state committee. It hasn’t prevented Patrick Leahy from being a Democrat. It hasn’t prevented people from running as Democrats in the Democratic Primary.
Here is the language from the VT Secretary of State’s website, point #8
…if Civics, when taught at all, included the nuts and bolts of participation! My experience is that the degree of openness among party committees varies widely. I for one do want more people in, of course, but there’s something to be said for institutional integrity which I don’t believe to be mutually exclusive. The new caucus rules we adopted on Monday allow for new registrants including party switchers. Maybe it will work as advertised, but part of me still prefers having a little stake in the party first.
Nobody worked harder than him or his supporters and his movement is the party’s electable future while her movement is the parties past. The DLC disbanded a few years ago, but its ethos finally died last Tuesday. We don’t have time to lecture communities destroyed and left behind by an economy that isn’t working for them on the finer points of the Ivory Tower. But we can promise them jobs and hope. Obama did that and won. So did Trump in a very twisted and vile way. We can reject his bigotry while embracing class politics that actually lifts all people up instead of tearing others down.
in my mouth. I never said Bernie was responsible for Hillary’s failures, which were consequential. I never said anything about lecturing communities destroyed and left behind by an economy that isn’t working for them.
I’m not blaming you, James, but I’m not seeing much value in the repetition of pre-campaign truisms. That’s why I’ve been mostly on radio silence. I dipped my toe into the conversation and now regret it. Maybe I’ve missed something, but I’ve yet to see much wisdom on the results of the election. I’m going back to waiting until I find some before getting more conversational.
But that is what the original post did, and you blamed his campaign for the loss above. The original post attacked Sanders for no real reason and with no data. I don’t see the need for that. I’ve tried to be careful separating the candidate from her campaign in my analysis, I just don’t understand that we have been using data to warn against this possibility and our concerns were waived off, and now that the nightmare scenario happened, it’s our fault for being insufficiently pro-Clinton? Fuck that. I gave her time and money I didn’t have on a campaign that ultimately didn’t succeed.
At least nobody who has been trained to trust actual data. The Clinton operation is smart enough that if polls had been pointing to what turned out to be the result there’s no question her campaign would have recalibrated. Electoral-Vote.com, 538, and other sites that aggregate polling models all pointed to a comfortable Clinton victory. Any rational strategist would conclude that they must be doing something right rather than try to fix what does not appear to be broken.
I agree wholeheartedly! We have an even better data set now which is the actual election results and we should fix what clearly was broken on Election Day. I can agree that the Clinton campaign ran the best campaign they could with the projections they had, but there is no way we should run that same campaign again when exit polling and the actual results show that a more populist message would’ve kept those 64 electoral votes in the Democratic fold.
I was just starting to get the feeling we were blaming the Clinton campaign for not having the benefit of 20/20 hindsight which didn’t exist yet.
Primarily because Clinton’s ground game was garbage, as was her infotech operation. Per the Huffington Post:
I won’t go into the flaws in the polling models, but I will say – again – that, had Clinton not rejected warnings from locals (including local electeds), she would have won.
n/t
…but I meant the polling rather than anecdotes. There were a lot of Obama alumni on her campaign who should have known data and targeting better. As I recall, there was exactly one day post-conventions when it looked like Trump was winning.
…and they were getting plenty of that.
Unfortunately they ignored it. “Anecdotal” in the context of the article refers to interviews with volunteers, not the data they supplied. More to the point, the lists supplied to canvassers were shit lists.
Finally Clinton had a piss-poor voter targeting algorithm, whereas the Trump folks used the psychographic analytic firm Cambridge Analytica to reinforce field operations. For what it’s worth, there were Democratic voter data shops that warned the Clinton campaign not to be over optimistic; the warnings were ignored.
Insofar as polling is concerned:
While Clinton over targeted (and shrunk) her contact universe, Trump expanded his. It’s that simple.
Link
No apologies are needed from anyone, it was up to Clinton to run her campaign and she lost. The one ugly part of the Sanders campaign was inflaming the conspiracy doofus contingent and giving it legitimacy. Sanders never tampered down these buffoons and allowed the stupidity to continue. When every primary as rigged when he lost, to asshats running the stage making a mockery of the primary process. That greased the skids within the Democratic party helping Trump with his message. At the end of the day it was up to Clinton to deliver and she didn’t but you are you kidding me when these comments?
Enough with the agonizing over this loss. It’s over.
Here’s the thing though. For me, at least for the time being, when people come to me and say “I didn’t vote”, my response now is “Then enjoy your time in Donald Trump’s America”.
When you speak of “opening the party to outsiders”, here’s my current feeling about that: If you didn’t pull a ballot in the 2016 general election, then I don’t want you participating in my party planning. The exception I’ll make for that is people who were prevented from voting by bullshit voterID restrictions. I’m eager to welcome converts from other parties. I have absolutely ZERO patience with spoiled brats — of any age — who whine “But I don’t like either candidate, the whole system is corrupt, I’m not going to participate”.
I think we need to change our culture, from the bottom up. I think it’s time for us stop trying to be everything to everyone, especially at the national level, and instead double down on putting progressives in each and every local election.
I’m with Harry Reid about Donald Trump’s new cabinet. America has said it wants Jeff Sessions as AG. Great. America can then live with the results.
Shocked at the number of people who didn’t vote or wasted it on patently unqualified third party candidates and write-ins. Clinton was the responsible choice, and too many Americans wanted to roll the dice.
They were just to nauseated to vote for either main choice.
And be careful what you wish for – if Donald Trump’s America is successful in getting the underground economy cleaned up, health insurance premiums reduced, and the Federal Departments created by Carter shut down returning the power to the states, they just MIGHT be happy in Trump’s America.
None of Donald Trump’s ideas or proposals are new. They’ve never worked in the past, and they won’t work now.
Half of America says it can’t afford health insurance premiums in excess of $100/month. I suggest that anyone who seriously thinks that repealing the ACA will REDUCE health care premiums is smoking too much recently-legalized pot.
I note that Mr. Trump only proposes to return SOME power to the states, and only threatens to shut down SOME federal agencies. It certainly sounds like the agencies that harass and prosecute immigrants (illegal or otherwise) will be growing like gang-busters, as will whatever agencies are used to register and harass Muslims.
I invite you to enumerate specifically what departments you think Jimmy Carter created, and who you think will be helped (and who will be hurt) by shutting them down.
Heard him make the speech announcing the new Cabinet appointments. Was in New York, as a seminar run by R. Buckminster Fuller.
And you think that shutting down the energy and education departments will help? Interesting.
Might be better in its own diary, though.
Donald Trump has appointed Betsy DeVos as secretary of the Education department. Is this how he shuts down Education, or is he doing something else?
I ask because my read of the career of Ms. DeVos is that she has spent a very large part of it working to destroy public education as we know it, in favor of voucher systems transparently designed to allow parents to enroll children in private “religious” schools that coincidentally happen to ALWAYS be all-white.
I was castigated here earlier this year for suggesting that the push for charter schools was nothing more than a thin veneer over the same racist voucher proposals that the racist right (with the full support of the GOP) has been making for as long as school integration has been the law of the land.
It certainly looks to me as though Donald Trump, in appointing Ms. DeVos, agrees with my take on charter schools. Of course, he supports them.
So … is Donald Trump shutting down “Federal Departments created by Carter”, or is he instead putting a racist bigot in charge of it?
…there are plenty of parochial schools that are a far cry from being all white, and in many cases you’ll find high levels of support for charters among non-white parents looking for an alternative to their local public schools. To be clear I’m opposed to both vouchers and charters because I believe the overarching purpose of public money should be to fix the public system, but we shouldn’t always be looking for racial motives, especially when the facts would suggest the opposite as they appear to here.
Democrats ran a candidate with negative ratings only bested by the Republican who was running. Neither party has delivered as promised to the working class. Many people voted twice for Obama and then once for Trump. My guess is some voted for Bush prior to that. It’s Burger King or McDonald’s to many, and some have given up, deciding to just eat at home. I can’t blame them. I blame the Democratic Party and its leadership in particular.
There are no wasted votes. One thing in talking to people it has become clear there were quite a few who decided no more Clintons/no more Bushes. It was why Jeb did so poorly.
And if there were only two people to vote for Donald might have won the popular vote also.
… Lemme see if I got this straight: your contention is that it is entirely straightforward and legitimate to vote for a man who
— offered no substantial policies beyond racism and vanity
— is a demonstrated liar
— who’s confessed to (indeed bragged about) sexual assault (when newly married to his third wife)
— received no major endorsements from any newspaper of note.
— received the endorsement of the official news rag of the Ku Klux Klan
— has a large number of pending lawsuits outstanding…
… Because Hillary Clinton has done the job? Is that your contention? That It’s ok to vote Trump because Clinton has experience and is married to a former President?
I think, honestly, that’s a pretty straightforward admission that you neither know how to make a good decision nor can recognize a bad one when it’s before you.
…that scott12mass agrees with the observation he made in others regarding their attitudes toward Clintons and Bushes.
I voted for Johnson, for someone who was on the ballot in every state. The idea that he wasn’t even invited to the debates shows how rotten the current system is. You may not have considered him qualified in foreign affairs, but I want the US to be more isolated and isolationist, little experience necessary.
I keep hearing how bad it is to support racism, mysogeny, xenophobia, and intolerance for religious freedom. Then why do we support and prop up Saudi Arabia? Why did the Clinton foundation take so much money from countries where people can be stoned to death for being gay? I know on here the teflon Clintons made all their millions legally, but it was curious how they’re rich now and broke when they left the White House. If I handled e-mails like her I’d be in jail. Don’t re-hash these, why bother.
I cringe every time Donald opens his mouth. I thought he would burn out long ago but it just shows the disdain most people in the red states have for Washington. I can understand the disdain, but Donald was a poor choice to lead the fight against the system. But he was the choice many made and that led to my original comment, what I have heard from many, post-election.
no more Bushes/ no more Clintons
If Gary weren’t on the ballot I might have left that choice blank.
There is nothing “positive” about a vote for Gary Johnson.
It is clear that many made a similar choice. It also is clear to some of us that the result will be a learning experience, whose consequences our children and grandchildren will have to live with.
As an example, more than half of Americans say that they cannot afford to spend more than $100/month on health care insurance premiums. Many of those people chose to vote for Donald Trump. What are the consequences of that vote?
Just as a data point, family health insurance premiums were well over $1,500 a month in Massachusetts in 1989 for small startups who provided health insurance for employees. By the metrics of this survey, health care has been grossly unaffordable for decades.
Those who think that repealing the Affordable Care Act is going to reduce their health insurance premiums are in for a very big surprise. The New England Journal of Medicine uses wonderfully terse language to convey reality in a piece published last week:
Like it or not, the stark reality is that Obamacare lowered health care costs for Americans in comparison to what those costs would have been in the absence of Obamacare. Repealing Obamacare will cause health care costs to increase for virtually every Donald Trump voter.
Perhaps the best that can be said about this approach is that it may make it easier to join the first world and pass single-payer government-sponsored universal health care. An ENORMOUS amount of human suffering is going to precede that increasingly unlikely outcome.
It is much easier to be against something than to be for something else. The GOP has been exploiting this reality for generations. Donald Trump is their latest and best demagogue.
A vote is ALWAYS a vote for something or someone. A decision not to vote is a decision to leave that choice to someone else.
Your second paragraph is irrelevant. We have chosen to empower a man, a team, a political party, and a portion of the electorate who made racism, misogyny, bigotry, scapegoating, bullying, and sheer incompetence the centerpiece of their campaign.
That is what America has voted FOR, admit it or not. We can make all the rationalizations and defenses and excuses we want, and it doesn’t make a bit of difference.
America has voted FOR misanthropy and incompetence. God help us all.
On its own I think Johnson is a legitimate vote, though I strongly disagree on the merits, such as wanting to be more isolationist. I wish our electoral system didn’t make third candidates automatically spoilers and since you live in MA I can’t get too upset. I also think the debate threshold should have been for any candidate on either all ballots or at least enough to theoretically hit 270. (In a just world, Trump would be the one sweating the 15% polling threshold, but I digress.)
I for one have long wished we weren’t officially so chummy with Saudi Arabia (and others similar), for the very reasons you cite, though I’m less concerned about them giving money to do good works in the world.
And there is a developing push to get that in MA. I strongly feel
we need it in our primaries (it’s unlikely Joe Boncore would be a Senator, Clark won with a small plurality, whether Berwick or Grossman spoiled the other, etc.).
And it would help with third party competition, which I do think may be needed in MA if the monolithic supermajority continues to be so regressive. Moving to this model for primaries and general elections would really open up our legislature to new people.
Until we adopt it, we will just have to focus on contesting more primaries locally and moving the national party in a more populist direction.
You make a well argued point we have to take into consideration instead of dismiss.
Personally, I think Johnson and Stein should’ve been in the debates since it’s unlikely they would’ve drawn as much support from Hillary in comparison.