Massive and historic landslide victory for the Democrats in opposition to Donald Trump. What does CBS Evening News do? They -yet again – focus on voters who still support Trump.
They wouldn’t want to do something like interview the voters who supported the transgender candidate who won an upset victory in Virginia right? That would be a crazy idea.
That’s okay. They were utterly unaware of the masses that would show up yesterday to take back their country from the crypto-fascist incompetent, but we showed up and quietly started a democratic – and Democratic – revolution.
Please share widely!
“The Democratic Party is the ONLY institution that can prevent total rightwing control. If you’re trying to destroy it, YOU own the outcome.” Peter Daou
Daou is absolutely one of the worst guys out there. His quote is an attack on those that would dare criticize the DNC or the Clinton campaign.
And a socialist endorsed by Bernie beat the State House Majority Leader. That proves my consistent point about both/and.
The Petr’s and Peter Dous of the world would have us reject all the new passion, excitement and activism that Bernie has brought into the party from outside of it. The John T May’s and Andrew Sullivan’s of the world would have us downplay cultural liberalism and focus solely on class. I think we gotta do both. I reject picking one or the other since yesterday was proof both strategies are absolutely competitive in flipping red districts blue.
The James of the world would throw out the nearly 66 million votes with the election bathwater… all for some fickle ‘passion, excitement and activism’ that didn’t get us 66 million votes in the first place. Let’s just call those 65+ million people –who did the right thing — an accident. And then we’ll go fellate those who made the wrong choice, so that we’s can has us a warm fuzzy.
“Oh lawdy! Lawdy!! Hep us from gitin nearly 66 million votes agin!!!” isn’t a very good strategy….
Hones3tly, crowing about the popular vote is a bit like the criminal defense lawyer who thought he had a great day when the jury acquitted on 3 of the 4 counts of the indictment. Votes that run up the score in blue states are about as useful as [cough] on a bull.
I’m not ‘crowing about’ anything in the past. I’m worried about the future and the cavalier attitude taken as well as the insistent refrain that we have to do a complete about-face on everything that was done that resulted in those 65+ million votes
This entire sub-thread references another thread when I pointed out that Greenberg accused Governor-elect Northam of VA of the same ‘malpractice’ as Hillary Clinton. That’s what worries me. Northam did good. We all know it. We see it. Greenberg, however, EXPLICITLY stated that Northam was doing a bad thing. Anybody who listened to Greenberg would have dismissed Northam, the tactics he used and the campaign he ran,
How many other Northams are out there? People who want to run a rational campaign in the mold of Hillary Clinton….? How many of them are going to be talked out of it by someone like Greenberg? How many of them aren’t going to be allowed to run because they don’t fit the angry old-man schtick we’re now told to expect?
And how many of those 65+ million votes are we going to alienate by enlisting everybody as groupies for the Sgt Sanders Grumpy Hearts Club Band? How many of those 65+ million people vote rationally and don’t want to be swept away on a passionate tide of anger? How many are repelled by Uncle Cranky’s revolutionary utopian rhetoric?
Not many. He’s the most popular politician in America right now. The real question is when he and his supporters transform the party back to its Rooseveltian roots from its Clintonian centrism will you and Tom vote for him against Trump? I think the answer is yes. You can reject racism and unfeterred capitalism with the same vote. If he was so unpopular Clinton wouldn’t have adopted all his rhetoric and platform or enlisted him as her top surrogate. His candidates dominated city council elections in Somerville and Cambridge and apparently won some major upsets in PA and VA.
I have no patience for the purists who say Bernie or bust and shit on awesome progressives like Harris or even Warreb and I have even less patience for people who think the Clinton’s are the best people our party produced and they can do no wrong and we can do no better. The energy and momentum is with progressives. Period.
@ He’s the most popular politician in America right now:
I think that’s pretty much meaningless. It’s easy to like a politician that isn’t your own state’s senator, isn’t running for president, and still speaks in generalities and (or stokes anger). That’s great for building popularity, and does little beyond that.
None of us will vote for Mr. Sanders against Mr. Trump because Mr. Sanders is NEVER going to run against Mr. Trump. It’s pointless and distracting to talk about it, because it’s never going to happen.
I’d like to see some evidence that the endorsement of Mr. Sanders had any influence on any of the last election in Somerville. What do you mean by “his candidates”? My candidates won in VA and NJ. Does that mean that I’m a power-broker in Democratic politics? Of course not.
Somerville is proudly left-wing and liberal. We love Denise Provost. We love Elizabeth Warren. We love Bernie Sanders, we voted for him over Ms. Clinton in the primary. We also voted overwhelmingly for Ms. Clinton in the general, and sent a crystal-clear message to Payton Corbett in this week’s election.
I just don’t buy the argument that Mr. Sanders had any significant influence on this week’s Somerville election at ALL. Somerville voters are fully capable of promoting and demanding a progressive agenda without the help of Mr. Sanders. We were doing that long before his 2016 campaign began, we continued doing that after last year’s devastating loss, and we’ll continue to do that now.
The 2016 campaign is over. I think we ran a credible campaign and we lost. As I said elsewhere, yes of course we should review the game films and work very hard to not make the same mistakes again.
One easy step that Mr. Sanders could have taken if he is serious about being a leader of the new Democratic Party is to actually JOIN the national party. He rejected that path.
Elizabeth Warren is a MUCH better example of what our future looks like. She speaks in specifics before and after she speaks of generalities. She speaks powerfully about economic issues, She speaks powerfully about women, minorities, gay, lesbian, and transgender people. She empathizes with anger yet never panders to it. She is easily and proudly affiliated with the Democratic Party, nationally and here in Massachusetts.
I think it’s counterproductive to continue to talk about Mr. Sanders when we talk about our strategy for 2018 and 2020. It only rubs salt and lemon in wounds that are not nearly healed.
Let’s PLEASE move on.
Sanders is headlining a large fundraiser for the Vermont state Democratic party TONIGHT. Like literally right now.
The anger at him for not joining the party or the claims that he refuses to help the Democrats is seriously stupid.
No, it’s not at all. You may not like it, but he is directing the grassroots (inside and outside the party) more than any other individual leader.
“Most popular politician in America”? Wanna guess who that was four years ago?
It’s a total bunk measure.
@CMD: I didn’t hear petr “crowing about the popular vote”.
I instead heard him correctly rejecting what is to me a dangerously incorrect meme — the claim that Ms. Clinton was a “terrible candidate” or that she ran a “terrible campaign”, etc. I also don’t think this was about “votes the run up the score in blue states”.
This is about a razor thin election.
There were 93,724,157 votes cast for the top two candidates. The election was decided by MI, WI, and PA and the vote spread in those states was as follows:
PA 68235: 20 EC votes
WI 27257: 10 EC votes
MI 43875: 10 EC votes
TOTAL 139,367 votes: 40 EC votes
So 0.149% of the voters determined the outcome of the election. Or, to spin it a slightly different way, 0.149% of the people who voted determined 10.81% of the EC vote.
There are a HUGE number of factors that might have caused those 139,357 votes in those three states to turn out the way they did.
To stay with your sports analogy, 2016 reminds me of a highly-favored professional football team that was expected to crush some underdog in a big game. In the final outcome, the favorites won on time of possession, won the number third-down conversions, won the total yards gained, one the number of turnovers, and lost an unexpectedly close game in the final 17 seconds because a hail-mary pass was completed for a touchdown — after an official pushed the defender out of bounds. Yes, the game was lost. Yes, the game shouldn’t have been that close. NO, the team did not suck. NO, the game plan did not suck. NO, the losing quarterback was not a loser. NO, the losing coach was not a loser.
Two professional teams played an unexpectedly close game. The underdog won. Johnny Unitas was not a bad quarterback after losing to the New York Jets in the Super Bowl on 12-January-1968. Don Shula was not a bad coach because the Colts lost.
I think it is crucial that while we plan future campaign strategies, we avoid repeating canards about what just happened. Watch the game films. Figure out what needs to change and change it.
The Democrats played an excellent game in 2016. It is agonizing that we lost. We do not need to fire the team, fire the coach, and start over from scratch.
I think both of those things can be true. It’s tremendously unfair Hillary isn’t president for a multitude of reasons. The first being that she won the election, the second being the manner in which she lost it to a patently unqualified oaf. The third being the substantial role racism and sexism play a huge role. The fourth being Comey and the fifth being Putin.
Those things can be unfair simultaneously with the many forced errors she and her team committed and the unfair process she set up with the DNC. Even if that process didn’t change the outcome it tainted it, much like inflating footballs wasn’t necessary but triggered an unnecessary investigation and blowback.
I think all of those things and a poor campaign contributed to why she lost. I think the poor campaign is the one thing a future Democratic candidate and the DNC can control and learn from and that is why it’s something I harp on. I think citing the popular vote is a cheap defense mechanism to cut that necessary debate short. We are stuck with the EC in 2020 and our party hasn’t made progress in the states we lost we thought we had in the bag.
Harris, Warren or Gillibrand won’t have Comey. They will still have racism and sexism and still have Putin. They will still have a white working class increasingly convinced our party doesn’t give a shit about them. They will still have a dysfunctional DNC. They will still have centrists telling them they are going too left and leftists calling them sellouts. They will still have a Midwest firewall that realigned to the right.
I once used a quote he had as a signature file. It was about the blogosphere having an integral part to play in amplifying Democratic and progressive news and messaging, a role similar to what talk radio once was. I can’t remember it now, but it was an excellent observation.
I don’t know he’s always been a complete tool, but he’s God awful now and has been that way for a while. Early in the primary, I used too look at his site, Blue Something(?), but it was so bad. Like The Onion, but not on purpose: “Wherever Hillary Clinton Has Walked Flowers Now Grow.” His latest venture Verrit is a website no one can read for information they don’t need.
With that said, I have no problem with his quote as such. You break it, you bought it. Of course, he begs the question of who would be trying to destroy the party.
I don’t know Peter Daou from a hole in the wall but his quote jumped out at me.
I did not take it as a denunciation of those who criticize the DNC or the Clinton campaign. I’m all for free and open debate between the different wings of the party and lessons that can be learned from the Clinton campaign. I don’t believe that critics are trying to destroy the party.
I do believe that there are forces, both foreign (Russia) and domestic, that sow division to sabotage the strength and unity of our shared mission.
I also believe that the anti-Trumpist Democratic Revolution is the only POWER that can put these Fascists out of business.
I’m sorry if I implied anything about you in my comment. I just wanted to point out how bad Daou is now and the context in which he is working. The quote makes sense on his own, but in the context of his current work, it is an attack on those who don’t fall completely inline with the establishment of the Dem party.
No apology needed. We’re all family here. Indeed, these are times that try men’s souls.