Is she planning to run for Governor again?
replies(2):
Nope. HRC was unlikeable. It’s all her own fault.
Sanders did better in primaries that allowed people outside the Democratic Party to vote and was throughout the election seasons (and remains, as of the last pollI saw earlier this year) the single most popular national political figure in the country. Every objective indication is that he would have done better than Clinton in “the states that mattered”.
In any case, much as one might prefer policy ideas to be decisive, elections are less about policy ideas and more about soft personal factors than people like to think.
Look up "wikileaks piedpiper candidate" and decide whose fault is it
>Sanders’ 1985 trip to Nicaragua, where he reportedly joined a Sandinista rally with a crowd chanting, “Here, there, everywhere/ The Yankee will die.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
I don't know how it's gonna happen, but I think the Dems really need to get to a point where they could accept someone with a history like GWB and his "youthful indiscretions" as a candidate. Purity is a hard thing to find in the world.
Plus, Bernie wasn't attacked because of his policies because HRC's were similar. He would have been in the general election.
And about purity and electability, I thought someone like Mitt Romney was pretty pure but see where that got him.
I'll ask the same thing I ask when people claim homeless citizens voting steals elections: why do you think opioid addicts do not have the right to vote? If they registered legally, why shouldn't they have the right to vote like everybody else?
Or, maybe, I was using colloquial language to describe 'a significant portion', in which case:
1) Didn't happen in our lifetimes? That makes willfully supporting and idolizing such blatant revisionism and racism _markedly worse_ than the example against Bernie, supporting my point quite resoundingly...
2) You are incorrectly presupposing that Republicans need to be from the south to wax poetic about the fictional "South"... The recent comments by General Kelly, born in Mass, about General Lee show otherwise. That identity came part and parcel with the Republican Southern Strategy, and has been a part of the right wing cultural identity ever since. This should be news to no one.
3) I listen to myself just fine. What are you even trying to say? ... Secessionists who killed Yankees and tried to destroy America are openly revered in public by major players in one party with little consequence, while incidentally being involved in _a_ chant _one_ time with a _hint_ of the same beliefs is seen as a death blow in the other party [aaaand this only if you completely ignore Americas contemporaneous relationship with the Contras, and who was behind that fiasco].
Mitt Romney is not a Democrat, which was the entire thrust of my (now down voted, because... facts...), post: Republicans gladly swallow things about candidates for the sake of their party that Democrats refuse to.
Roy Moore, for example, or Trump, or GWB (etc etc), continue with sustained polling numbers that 'The Left' would never provide after their scandals and behaviour. It creates asymmetric competition, and a massive disadvantage in terms of policy creation.
This is verifiable behaviour, and comes out quite clearly in the polling numbers between political demographics.
Yeah, I don't think most people (esp those who actually vote thinking that huge changes will happen to make their lives better by electing someone else and are on the fence) will look at some random smear piece on Their Candidate™ through this lens. If only we covered more of US historical/present foreign policy (and the perspective of the different powers/peoples at the time on issues) in public schools, though one would suspect that if lecture notes were posted online, some may get labeled as fake news, nor that the dog and pony show would have become what it is…
>Republicans gladly swallow things about candidates for the sake of their party that Democrats refuse to.
I think that in the most recent presidential election, it was the case that the DNC was already swallowing clinton, and had no space for sanders except to use him to attract those who couldn't swallow clinton, to swallow clinton.
How inconvenient that the minority vote of states without mass populations centers is valued.
> Johnson & Stein
I voted for Johnson, it was not a "Nader." If we don't like the system, then we must force pressure upon it.
Yes he was, from the right, by Clinton—that was a key part of Clinton's primary campaign—and, no, they weren't that similar. But I agree that there would have been more focus on policy in a general election campaign with Sanders as the nominee, which would have been bad for Trump.
Similarly, yes, all those things you mention were part of the context in which the 2016 election occurred but they were decisive only because that Democrats picked the weakest possible candidate, with higher unfavorable ratings than any previous major party nominee, firm unfavorability because of decades of national political exposure, and relatively little experience as a candidate in electoral politics (having only served a couple terms as a Senator in a heavily-selling state coming in onethe coattails her husband's Presidential popularity; she'd never been in a campaign where she needed more than the approval of the Democratic establishment to win.) Clinton had the worst negatives that can come with long political exposure, without the strengths that come from long and relevant electoral politics experience.
And, no, it's not her fault, it's the Democratic establishment's fault. Clinton didn't have the choice to be herself or be someone else, the Democratic establishment did have the choice not to decide to go all in for Clinton even before other candidates were declared.
Robert E Lee is a part of a confederate heritage fondly opined about by significant numbers of Republicans. That heritage has more than a little "Kill the Yankee" sentiment to it, right? That's a pretty objective fact, hence the double standard in the opposition research against Bernie, hence its use as an example.
To your secondary point: the verifiable fact that said heritage has been overtly reshaped into a modern fantasy by racists and racist organizations, its correlation to Jim Crow, its disingenuous hand-waiving about slavery, and its tight ties to the [Republican Southern Strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) kinda sorta do mean that supporting, aggrandizing, or selectively portraying it beyond the limits of its historical boundaries is pretty darned supportive of racism. I think describing the common fellating of this anti-history from otherwise anti-minority, anti-immigration, anti-democracy, fundamentalists as 'waxing poetic with a glint in their eye' is putting is kindly and mildy.
Right wingers showing fondness for the Confederacy is hardly a secret... I mean, who signed all those bills and built all those statues?
I mention the opioid addicts specifically because their poster child Rush Limbaugh is a hard core fruit cake. I believe, but cannot yet prove, that pickling the brain turns people “conservative”, by which I mean absolutist and authoritarian.
And any viable new third party must be grown from the bottom up. That’s just how it works. If you want more choices, I encourage you to advocate for Approval Voting (as I do). First a little, than a lot.
re HRC and the DNC... That’s just not how it works. There is no monolithic “Democratic Party”. Just loose coalitions of power centers, big and small, that brand themselves as “Democrats.” And 1/2 of “party politics” is always the candidates parasitic relationship with the various interest groups, making promises to earn endorsements and contributions, to be forgotten once elected. Use them and then disgard them. There is nothing (comparable to the right) on the left where elected are held accountable to their constituents.
If voters want more choices, then they have to lower the barriers to entry, by (greatly) reducing the cost of campaigns. Public financing, restore fairness doctrine, time box campaigns season, universal voter registration, compulsory voting (most campaign money on the left is spent on GOTV), etc.