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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Hillary Clinton was perceived to embody government as a self-sustaining industry rather than a representation of the people, a sentiment that has been festering for decades. And that's crucial to the "both sides of the same" narrative that undermines the substantive differences between the two parties, that fuels the ridiculous political nihilism and apathy we see across the country.
Now, you can tear that down as complete bullshit all you want. The Clinton campaign certainly tried to for the better part of a year, and failed, though not without some outside help.
Isolated personal anecdote time: I know a white, roughly middle-aged therapist who considers himself a middle-of-road kind of guy. Has somethings he's liberal about, some he's conservative about (as a therapist, he looks at it as helping people vs. getting people to help themselves). Doesn't pay too much attention to politics beyond what pops up on Yahoo news.
He did not vote for president in the 2016 election (note this is in California, which does effect the belief that "my vote doesn't matter," but let's delve into the mindset here). Because he considered both options the worst that either party could offer. And the fact that they were not equal levels of "worst" was completely overshadowed by his overall disgust (something he only now recognizes in retrospect)
When he was younger, he spent several years in England, where he got turned off to "socialism." He still would've rather voted for Sanders in a heartbeat, if he was an option.
Again, this is only one example, but I find it reflective of a lot of the ideas that a lot of Americans hold, especially "independent" ones who eschew both parties and make up a large, growing chunk of the electorate.
edited 22nd Mar '17 12:40:13 AM by Eschaton
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Which, as someone who doesn't in the US, I can only see as an utterly terrifying mindset for a democracy. Or even without that particular bit of context, when let you 'being experienced and qualified' become a reason not to give someone an extremely difficult, demanding and important position, that's a good way to ensure that the position will be filled by someone who's terrible at the job.
edited 22nd Mar '17 12:40:13 AM by Gilphon
That's not completely true. The Democratic Party has super-delegates to chose who they want to win.
I'm also not advocating that they should've picked Bernie over Hillary.
She didn't say anything about federally legalizing it and I didn't see it on her platform so I have to assume that it wasn't something that was a priority for her and back in 2014, she said she was good for medical marijuana legalization but that she had to take a wait and see approach for recreational use.
I thought this was widely agreed upon. I mean you have her campaign hiring Debbie Wasserman Schultz after the DNC scandal that did nothing to help win Hillary points. It actually made her look corrupt that she willing to give Debbie a position on her staff after she left as head of the DNC. I know why she did it but most people don't.
Then you have Bill, Obama and Sanders' campaign telling her tocampaign in the Rust Belt and all three sides offering their services to her to campaign there in the very states she lost but her campaign batted it away.
I mean there was a large amount of hubris there. You have the assumption that moderate Republicans should be appealed to because they want to jump from Trump, that WWC can be safely ignored and that Berniecrats would support her because it was between her and Trump.
And going off on a tangent, I think picking Tim Kaine as her VP was another mistake. It helped her with Virginia but it was only given to him because Hillary offered to him long ago so he'd drop off as DNC chair so Debbie could have it. And the way the election played out, a progressive might have helped her out more.
edited 22nd Mar '17 12:44:08 AM by MadSkillz
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Populism with its anti-elite rhetoric doesn't help either.
Concerning the super-delegates...didn't Sanders' supporters try to push the super-delegates into picking him over HRC once it became clear they wouldn't be able to win with actual votes?
edited 22nd Mar '17 12:43:21 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedBy being the establishment.
But what do I expect from a country of traitorous taxdodgers?
Continue writing our story of peace.@Mad: You're committing a huge 'hindsight is 20-20' sin there, is the thing. Like, she lost, so of course there are going to be things that in retrospect we can were problems. If there weren't any problems, she would've have lost. Remember that during the campaign, nobody thought Trump had a chance. Remember that people mocked him for bothering to campaign in Michigan, like he thought he had a chance of winning there.
Not being psychic isn't the same as being incompetent. And we've had this argument before, most certainly not reaching consensus.
edited 22nd Mar '17 12:50:20 AM by Gilphon
Well why is that a bad thing?
You know railing against a white establishment that's trying to suppress minorities in one way or another is also anti-elite rhetoric.
Hell, I think Sanders was trying to push for that himself(or at least his campaign) when he saw he couldn't win that way.
However, I'm also with M84 in saying that Sanders' campaign was badly run, because they lost, because they should have known just how much they were at a disadvantage. Not to mention how criticizing superdelegates and then appealing to them was completely undermining.
Because the elites in charge right now sure as fuck aren't intellectual.
edited 22nd Mar '17 1:14:44 AM by Eschaton
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Funny that they created a white establishment that exists to oppress minorities.
Well it depends on who you listened to during the campaign. There were definitely people giving warning signs but no one was listening to those guys and some of them were even ridiculed like Nate Silverman.
I hear Uncle Ben is a really good neurosurgeon. You know it's just everything else that he's not so good at.
@Eschaton
Concerning Sanders' voting record and what he actually did as a Senator for Vermont...frankly, the only people who really should be totally 100% happy voting for Sanders as presidential candidate are Lockheed Martin employees.
edited 22nd Mar '17 1:07:53 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
If you're referring to Mad's "Uncle Ben" comment, that's probably a reference to Ben Carson. Good neurosurgeon but bad...everything else.
If you're referring to my post, I'm just referring to Sanders' consistency in supporting his state's military industrial complex as a Senator.
edited 22nd Mar '17 1:11:17 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
The Russian tropers who post in the General Russia thread would likely cast doubt on this being an assassination attempt since the guy is still alive. When the Kremlin wants someone dead, they usually don't leave it to chance. Awfully convenient for the Russian mob, either way.
I'd suggest x-posting this in the Russia thread to see what they have to say.
edited 22nd Mar '17 1:20:19 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedYou know it's actually the NRA that made Bernie a senator. That's one of the only positions that Hillary could actually attack him from the left.
“The gun vote brought us down,” said Judy Shailor, Smith’s 1990 campaign manager. She said she had warned gun groups that, in the long run, Sanders would prove too liberal for them.
“The gun groups would say to me, ‘We are going to put him in office for one term and teach Peter Smith a lesson. Then we’re going to vote [Sanders] out,’ ” Shailor said. “I said, ‘You won’t get him out.’ . . . He’s one of the best master politicians I’ve ever come across.”
“It’s an issue I do not feel comfortable about,” Sanders said after one debate, according to a memoir about the race by a former aide, Steven Rosenfeld.
Sanders couldn’t very well rail against Smith for his views on assault weapons when they were the same as his own. Instead, the aide said, Sanders wanted to let others “do our dirty work for us.”
Instead of talking about guns, then, Sanders talked about honesty.
“Unlike some people, I won’t change my views on the subject,” he told one pro-gun group.
It worked.
“Bernie Sanders was upfront with us,” an NRA official wrote to one of Smith’s constituents after the race. The letter ended up in another official collection of Smith’s papers. “He was viewed as the lesser of two evils.”
As the election approached, the socialist’s good luck kept getting better.
“In some ways, I’m happy that it happened. And in some ways I seriously regret it,” said Cutler, of the Gun Owners of Vermont. “I’m happy I did it, because it sent a message around the state that the gun vote really does count around here.”
But now, Cutler said, when he calls Sanders’s office to ask for a meeting, he never gets one. “I regret that it happened,” he said, “because, realistically, we have no input with him.”
edited 22nd Mar '17 1:29:59 AM by MadSkillz
There's that too, but Bernie Sanders also has a record of supporting his state's weapons manufacturers. One of his detractors in Counterpunch of all things once claimed that Sanders was "a technofascist disguised as a liberal" who never opposes any defense spending bill.

I mean, if you look at the end results, then it's easy to claim that her campaign was badly run since she lost. But as you already mentioned earlier, then we can go back and claim that Sanders' campaign was also very badly run since he lost the primaries to her.
Disgusted, but not surprised