The White House has called on Congress to approve aid to Israel and Ukraine, but Republicans oppose any measure that excludes provisions to address security on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Honestly, even if the DNC was completely even-handed in '16, I still think he would’ve lost. In '20, it was only some clever politiking (which, I must emphasize, is not illegitimate and quite literally part of the job) and Warren doing whatever the fuck she thought she was doing that sank him.
The evidence shows the opposite of what you think. All polling at all times showed bernie beating trump by a much bigger margin than hillary.
And the country was itching for someone who would shake up the status quo. Hillary was the epitome of status quo, while trump and bernie were very much the opposite.
All evidence shows bernie would’ve done very well against trump.
Hey, man, I’m not disagreeing with that assessment of the general election. But unfortunately, he needed to win the Dem primary to get to that point, and in 2016, it would have taken Hillary dropping the n-bomb on live tv to get Bernie over the finish line. She had a lot of name recognition and organization, her reputation hadn’t been completely cratered by losing to America’s biggest loser at that point, and Bernie was borderline taken by surprise by his success in '16. Man had been preaching the same thing for 30 years and suddenly, almost out of nowhere, interest surged like a wave.
He was much more prepared in '20 (and had more name recognition to boot).
I don’t disagree with Clinton coming in with more weight but I don’t think she was ever that ahead of Sanders. The system in place, the DNC and other big players just preferred Hillary and that edge resulted in her win.
In a more fair race where the DNC was equally kind to Sanders or hostile to Clinton I think Sanders would’ve won it and we’d be such a different political landscape.
Clinton had a lot of shit that would’ve taken anyone out of the race but was granted extra lives by (what I see as) annoying shitty politicking bullshit.
She had all those advantages in 2008 and Lost to Obama when more people voter for him than her. Quite simply Bernie received less votes than Hillary in 2016, and the endless list of excuses weren’t unique to him. There is a massive bias online that Bernie was more popular than he was. He never beat Hillary in nationwide polls and had major holes in his strategy and campaign that he never over came. He’s a great person, not a great politician.
But who gives a flying fuck about that? The primary isn’t supposed to be anything more than a means to an end. Winning the general election is the part that’s actually important!
Unless you think Bernie could’ve run as a third party candidate and won in the general election, the primary is still incredibly important in any consideration of a realistic scenario of Bernie’s candidacy.
The second half of your comment does not follow from the first half – that nonsense about Bernie running as a third-party candidate is nothing but a dishonest strawman argument.
Anyway, nothing about that abosolves the DNC of culpability for tipping the scales to run a candidate without enough across-the-aisle appeal to win the general election. They only have themselves to blame for Trump.
That goes double when you consider the fact that the people who would’ve provided Bernie’s margin of victor in the general election – those who liked him for his anti-authoritarianism, not his leftism – most likely couldn’t vote in the Democratic primary because they were too busy voting in the Republican one for somebody like Kasich in hopes of keeping Trump off the ballot in the first place.
The second half of your comment does not follow from the first half – that nonsense about Bernie running as a third-party candidate is nothing but a dishonest strawman argument.
But… what? How?
My point is that winning the Dem primary is important unless you think Bernie can win as a third party candidate. Which is true, because that’s how party nominations work??
Because Bernie was entitled to the nomination? There’s a ton of authoritarian shit coming from Bernie fans. Between this, wanting to change the rules of primaries when he lost, wanting to ignore the popular vote to make him the nominee etc.
Are you claiming that wanting to make antidemocratic rules more democratic is authoritarian? Who wanted to ignore the popular vote? And how, exactly, does the comment you replied to suggest that Bernie was entitled to the nomination? The voters are entitled to get the candidate they want.
I understand why some people think that, which is why I mentioned it as the other possibility, but I honestly think it was simply a stupid mistake. People don’t get into politics unless they’re willing, to some degree, to make bets on long odds and embrace their inner ego. Sometimes, as with Warren’s refusal to drop out, that ends poorly.
Warren claims that Bernie said something sexist to her, and I’m sure that played into it. At the end of the day, the 1% were able to get their people to drop out and unify behind a single candidate and the 99% weren’t.
Hate is a strong word. It’s more that she made a decision that made no strategic sense, and was not a stand on moral principles or anything like that. It was just either a dumb choice, as we all make sometimes, or a conscious attempt to crater Bernie. It doesn’t really have a third option that I can think of.
In either case, it was senseless, and any time the issue comes up, I draw attention to it, because it was fucking disastrous.
Oh, sorry, not dropping out on Super Tuesday. She was stayed in as a spoiler candidate on Super Tuesday despite the fact that polling showed that she hadn’t a chance in hell of actually making any progress towards the nomination, and all the other moderates had simultaneously dropped out to support Biden.
Bloomberg wasn’t a moderate, he was a straight-up right-wing twat. But in any case, that doesn’t really take away from the core problem I’m pointing out?
Warren should have know it was Sanders turn, amirite?
Man, if you’re at a point in your support and with the polls opening soon and realize you’re gonna be a spoiler candidate, then you have to either accept responsibility for cratering someone, or nut up and drop out to avoid cratering the candidate you’re closer to. She didn’t do the latter, so she has to accept the former.
She said that she has a Native ancestor. Which a DNA test can’t disprove because:
Not all of someone’s DNA gets passed on each generation.
Native Americans have a pretty widespread dislike of DNA tests, so DNA tests don’t really know what to look for.
Also,
Native Americans focus their community on culture, not DNA
Because of #3, anytime someone from outside their culture talks about ancestry, a bunch of tribes release boilerplate statements about how a DNA test doesn’t make anyone a Native or not a Native.
I can’t remember how far back she said that ancestor was, but I think it was so far back that statistically the most likely result was going to be no native ancestry. People think DNA is all stamped with ethnicity of origin or something, it doesn’t work like that. There’s just certain mutations that can be tracked to specific isolated populations.
Most DNA is just ambiguously human.
So you take that slim chance of an identifiable mutation getting passed down every generation, and the low sampling rate among native populations, and yeah, lots of people will get negative results.
However, it was extremely disappointing that she hired that ex Clinton campaign worker, and then took their advice and immediately started attacking Bernie. That was never about helping Warren, they were kamikazing her campaign into Bernie’s.
I can’t remember how far back she said that ancestor was, but I think it was so far back that statistically the most likely result was going to be no native ancestry.
That’s not how DNA tests work. The experts consulted were confident she had Native ancestry, but it was unclear how far back. The 1/1024th isn’t a chance, it’s people who don’t understand DNA incorrectly converting “on the upper end of 6-10 generations” to 1 out of 1024 ancestors and then to 1/1024 chance. The statistics of it being true were very high even though the proportion of her DNA from the ancestor was small.
Also, I feel like most of these people are either too young to know life without the internet, or they forget, but this was something white, suburban, middle class people used to say all of the time. It was usually some story (true or not, I don’t know), passed down from their great grandparents or some shit, and probably altered like a game of telephone, until you’ve got a person telling their friends about how they’re “1/32 Cherokee” or some shit.
There was never any way to check, and nobody really cared. It was a different time.
I’m not defending what she said, it was a dumb thing to say. But it’s probably just based on some story she was told as a kid that may or may not be true.
Not to mention, I’ve never heard a person- whose basically white, with no apparent native culture- use “I have Native American ancestry” as anything other than a cudgel to insist they can’t be racist.
Usually while being racist. (Example: my grandfather.)
The vast majority of “old family” Appalachians have natives somewhere on their family tree, it’s just most people never really talk about it.
At most it’s offhand mention at family gatherings, which was exactly the context Warren said she heard. Her grandparent or whoever could very well had it and shown up on a test, but it gets exponentially harder the more generations go by
Warren just happened to mention it on the campaign trail, and a bunch of people jumped on it.
At most it’s offhand mention at family gatherings, which was exactly the context Warren said she heard. Her grandparent or whoever could very well had it and shown up on a test, but it gets exponentially harder the more generations go by
it stopped being family history discussions when she mentions it on the campaign trail or on job applications. (I understand there’s conflicting evidence as to the Harvard thing, but, lets be honest here, it’s probably true).
such things coming up in the context of family history makes sense and wouldn’t (necessarily) be racist. But Warren went beyond that… when it’s usually pretty evident if someone’s family is Native American when they’re talking about it. the handful of soundbites I caught were very much in the manner my racist grandfather used to justify his angry bullshit screeds against Native Americans. that said, DNA tests are definitely never going to be conclusive about that. it’s patently ridiculous to think one’s heritage is genetic- heritage is a matter of culture; and culture is learned… distilling your heritage to a percentage based on DNA is a scam to get your DNA.
People used to say shit like this all of the time before the internet. It was usually just someone trying to sound cool, or set themselves apart from other kids in some way.
If they weren’t just making it up whole cloth, It was usually some story passed down from their great grandparents that they’re repeating (probably inaccurately) about how someone x generations ago had a Cherokee father or some shit, then they do the math to claim that means they’re 1/32 Cherokee or whatever.
Back then, I don’t remember it being used in any way as an argument against being racist. It was usually just people trying to be cool or different, or telling a boring story about their family that they think is true.
I’m not excusing what she said, it was a stupid thing to say. I’m just not sure if it deserved the criticism it received.
Honestly, even if the DNC was completely even-handed in '16, I still think he would’ve lost.
Right. They pulled all the fuckery they pulled when they didn’t even need to and alienated voters they needed. Then didn’t even try to get them back. I worry they’re repeating the same “write off voters you need because you can blame them later” mistake now.
In '20, it was only some clever politiking (which, I must emphasize, is not illegitimate and quite literally part of the job) and Warren doing whatever the fuck she thought she was doing that sank him.
He got outmaneuvered in 2020, yes. The field narrowed to his disfavor and Biden got a key endorsement in South Carolina. This was probably due to some shrewd politicking on Biden’s part and I very much doubt it was the massive conspiracy that some of my fellow progressives allege.
There are other factors, like how the press hated Sanders. I remember the lead up to South Carolina. They were just openly asking “how do we stop Sanders?” There was CNN’s “how did you feel when he said you couldn’t win because you’re a woman” at that one debate. May as well have just spat on him and called him a liar. You had Chris Matthews saying a Sanders presidency would result in public executions in Central Park. He sounded like he was on Fox News and not MSNBC. Chuck Todd’s “brownshirts” comment was disgraceful. He was kinder to the January 6 insurrectionists than he was to Sanders and his supporters.
I think the party had its thumb firmly and unapologetically on the scale in 2016, but not 2020. Sanders just got outplayed in 2020.
The press consistently put out interviews during the prelims about people wanting Sanders but voting for Biden because he’s more likely to win. Bernie could have generated a ton of public and young support. I do think the corporate Dems didn’t want him to take power.
Hands down. He had the populist vote of independents and many Republicans too. The right of center DNC torpedoed him. They weren’t going to allow a center left candidate through. Wasn’t the first time either. At the 1944 Democratic National Convention, conservative party leaders defeated a very popular Henry Wallace’s bid for renomination. I canceled all donations to the DNC and became an Independent.
He had the populist vote of independents and many Republicans too.
To put a finer point on it: he had the margin of victory over Trump that Clinton did not, and it came from precisely the sorts of people who don’t vote in Democratic Party primaries (which is why the “but he couldn’t even win the primary” rebuttal is nothing but dishonest horseshit).
Not really. It benefited Republicans to not attack Bernie to make Clinton look worse. Had Bernie won that would have changed. They had a ton to attack him on, and we’ll never know how well it would have worked. The kind of bullshit they got people to believe about Clinton was insane. I still hear some of it today.
This makes me laugh. You all whine about how unfair the DNC, the Media, centrists Democrats were to Bernie, and that caused him to lose the Primary. But you assume had he won the Primary that the Republican Party and Donald Trump would not have made all of that look like absolute childs play? If you can’t defend yourself against the DNC and CNN, you’re fucked when you go up against people that will just straight up lie about you. Using polls from when the GOP hadn’t said anything about Bernie is pointless. It was to their advantage to act like Bernie was perfect, it hurt Clinton.
Ummm hi… I enthusiastically supported Bernie in the primary, and then voted for Hillary in the general. Because Bernie lost the primary.
You may have your anecdotal evidence, but my experience has been the opposite. That the people who complain the most about Bernie losing, are people who did not vote in the Democratic primary.
The primary is the time for progressives (and young people, who are notorious for not showing up to vote in anything but the general, if they vote at all) to vote for progressive candidates.
Who the fuck is talking about progressives? We’re talking about all the other people who liked Bernie better than Trump, but who otherwise tended to like Republicans better than Biden. Specifically, the people who liked Bernie for his anti-authoritarianism and who held their noses for the leftist stuff. They can’t vote in a Democratic primary because they’re too busy voting in the Republican or maybe even the Libertarian one instead!
More concretely: they couldn’t vote for Bernie because they were too busy voting for (probably) John Kasich.
Our people prefer charismatic liars that tell us we can get moooore than our neighbors if we play the rigged game and work against one another.
Our people would much rather have a 0.1% chance of lucking into a lifestyle of perverse gluttony than have a 100% chance of everyone having a roof, a bed, and a full belly at night.
Our people are selfish and cruel.
I haven’t and won’t vote for any Republican ever, but I will admit, Donald Trump is the perfect reflection of the United States of America. We couldn’t ask for a mascot more reflective of our practiced values. He is the USA personified. All the toxic, antisocial traits we celebrate about ourselves: proud Greed, proud willfull ignorance, vanity, arrogance, all the - isms, unearned confidence, cruelty, gluttony, schadenfreude, nepotism, you might as well run him up a flag post and sing the star spangled banner while eating apple pie at a baseball game.
Our people would much rather have a 0.1% chance of lucking into a lifestyle of perverse gluttony than have a 100% chance of everyone having a roof, a bed, and a full belly at night.
Doesn’t hurt that most Americans probably can’t even conceptualize what this even means, and have no understanding of just how big of a difference there is between those two percentages. They don’t even know what an order of magnitude is, let alone the implications of several.
Dude is a failure who can’t even garner the support of his own party, let alone the entire country. Not too mention, you can’t complain about the age of Biden and Trump while naming a dinosaur like Bernie.
He has great ideas but that’s about it, he’s as ineffectual as far as politicians go. You want to beat Trump, find someone who can win an election, not Bernie.
Democrats, he’s a democrat. I’m not sure what you’re trying to bait.
He couldn’t win the party nomination, which is step one to winning the presidential election.
I’m not American so I can look at this from the outside and realize that no matter how right Bernie’s ideas are, he’s not gonna win it, and at his age he shouldn’t try. Y’all need to start looking for younger people, Bernie was a nice experiment, move on.
He almost always votes with them, caucused with them for most of his house and senate career, and ran for the DNC’s presidential nomination twice (2016 and 2020).
He may not call himself one but that’s where the differences end.
It’s not his party. He used the party to run for President, and people whine about how the party didn’t fall in love with him. Maybe he should I don’t know, join the fucking party and build a base of support. Otherwise he’s just mooching off them.
Common Bernie W
He should have been president.
Twice.
Honestly, even if the DNC was completely even-handed in '16, I still think he would’ve lost. In '20, it was only some clever politiking (which, I must emphasize, is not illegitimate and quite literally part of the job) and Warren doing whatever the fuck she thought she was doing that sank him.
The evidence shows the opposite of what you think. All polling at all times showed bernie beating trump by a much bigger margin than hillary.
And the country was itching for someone who would shake up the status quo. Hillary was the epitome of status quo, while trump and bernie were very much the opposite.
All evidence shows bernie would’ve done very well against trump.
Even wildlife knew Bernie had their best interests in mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc2TVLoxsDA
the GOP never unleashed their attacks on Bernie, so those polls don’t mean much.
Against Trump. My point is that he still would’ve lost the Dem primary.
Bernie won swing states which would be Hillary’s downfall.
There was a push by the system for Hillary. The DNC ran shit past her campaign to give her the ups and who knows what else, Bernie was grassroots.
Hey, man, I’m not disagreeing with that assessment of the general election. But unfortunately, he needed to win the Dem primary to get to that point, and in 2016, it would have taken Hillary dropping the n-bomb on live tv to get Bernie over the finish line. She had a lot of name recognition and organization, her reputation hadn’t been completely cratered by losing to America’s biggest loser at that point, and Bernie was borderline taken by surprise by his success in '16. Man had been preaching the same thing for 30 years and suddenly, almost out of nowhere, interest surged like a wave.
He was much more prepared in '20 (and had more name recognition to boot).
I don’t disagree with Clinton coming in with more weight but I don’t think she was ever that ahead of Sanders. The system in place, the DNC and other big players just preferred Hillary and that edge resulted in her win.
In a more fair race where the DNC was equally kind to Sanders or hostile to Clinton I think Sanders would’ve won it and we’d be such a different political landscape.
Clinton had a lot of shit that would’ve taken anyone out of the race but was granted extra lives by (what I see as) annoying shitty politicking bullshit.
She had all those advantages in 2008 and Lost to Obama when more people voter for him than her. Quite simply Bernie received less votes than Hillary in 2016, and the endless list of excuses weren’t unique to him. There is a massive bias online that Bernie was more popular than he was. He never beat Hillary in nationwide polls and had major holes in his strategy and campaign that he never over came. He’s a great person, not a great politician.
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Primary was rigged by Hillary’s friend Debbie of the DNC.
But who gives a flying fuck about that? The primary isn’t supposed to be anything more than a means to an end. Winning the general election is the part that’s actually important!
Unless you think Bernie could’ve run as a third party candidate and won in the general election, the primary is still incredibly important in any consideration of a realistic scenario of Bernie’s candidacy.
The second half of your comment does not follow from the first half – that nonsense about Bernie running as a third-party candidate is nothing but a dishonest strawman argument.
Anyway, nothing about that abosolves the DNC of culpability for tipping the scales to run a candidate without enough across-the-aisle appeal to win the general election. They only have themselves to blame for Trump.
That goes double when you consider the fact that the people who would’ve provided Bernie’s margin of victor in the general election – those who liked him for his anti-authoritarianism, not his leftism – most likely couldn’t vote in the Democratic primary because they were too busy voting in the Republican one for somebody like Kasich in hopes of keeping Trump off the ballot in the first place.
But… what? How?
My point is that winning the Dem primary is important unless you think Bernie can win as a third party candidate. Which is true, because that’s how party nominations work??
She was making sure Bernie lost by splitting the progressive vote. That was exactly the intention.
Because Bernie was entitled to the nomination? There’s a ton of authoritarian shit coming from Bernie fans. Between this, wanting to change the rules of primaries when he lost, wanting to ignore the popular vote to make him the nominee etc.
Are you claiming that wanting to make antidemocratic rules more democratic is authoritarian? Who wanted to ignore the popular vote? And how, exactly, does the comment you replied to suggest that Bernie was entitled to the nomination? The voters are entitled to get the candidate they want.
I understand why some people think that, which is why I mentioned it as the other possibility, but I honestly think it was simply a stupid mistake. People don’t get into politics unless they’re willing, to some degree, to make bets on long odds and embrace their inner ego. Sometimes, as with Warren’s refusal to drop out, that ends poorly.
Warren claims that Bernie said something sexist to her, and I’m sure that played into it. At the end of the day, the 1% were able to get their people to drop out and unify behind a single candidate and the 99% weren’t.
I never get the warren hate. Other than her native American gaff, she was a strong candidate and would have made a good president.
Hate is a strong word. It’s more that she made a decision that made no strategic sense, and was not a stand on moral principles or anything like that. It was just either a dumb choice, as we all make sometimes, or a conscious attempt to crater Bernie. It doesn’t really have a third option that I can think of.
In either case, it was senseless, and any time the issue comes up, I draw attention to it, because it was fucking disastrous.
You said she made a dumb decision but haven’t stated what that is.
Oh, sorry, not dropping out on Super Tuesday. She was stayed in as a spoiler candidate on Super Tuesday despite the fact that polling showed that she hadn’t a chance in hell of actually making any progress towards the nomination, and all the other moderates had simultaneously dropped out to support Biden.
I love this alternative history where Michael Bloomberg doesn’t exist and didn’t take more votes away from Biden than Warren did Sanders.
Warren should have know it was Sanders’ turn, amirite?
Bloomberg wasn’t a moderate, he was a straight-up right-wing twat. But in any case, that doesn’t really take away from the core problem I’m pointing out?
Man, if you’re at a point in your support and with the polls opening soon and realize you’re gonna be a spoiler candidate, then you have to either accept responsibility for cratering someone, or nut up and drop out to avoid cratering the candidate you’re closer to. She didn’t do the latter, so she has to accept the former.
It wasn’t any kind of gaff…
She said that she has a Native ancestor. Which a DNA test can’t disprove because:
Not all of someone’s DNA gets passed on each generation.
Native Americans have a pretty widespread dislike of DNA tests, so DNA tests don’t really know what to look for.
Also,
Because of #3, anytime someone from outside their culture talks about ancestry, a bunch of tribes release boilerplate statements about how a DNA test doesn’t make anyone a Native or not a Native.
I can’t remember how far back she said that ancestor was, but I think it was so far back that statistically the most likely result was going to be no native ancestry. People think DNA is all stamped with ethnicity of origin or something, it doesn’t work like that. There’s just certain mutations that can be tracked to specific isolated populations.
Most DNA is just ambiguously human.
So you take that slim chance of an identifiable mutation getting passed down every generation, and the low sampling rate among native populations, and yeah, lots of people will get negative results.
However, it was extremely disappointing that she hired that ex Clinton campaign worker, and then took their advice and immediately started attacking Bernie. That was never about helping Warren, they were kamikazing her campaign into Bernie’s.
And it worked.
That’s not how DNA tests work. The experts consulted were confident she had Native ancestry, but it was unclear how far back. The 1/1024th isn’t a chance, it’s people who don’t understand DNA incorrectly converting “on the upper end of 6-10 generations” to 1 out of 1024 ancestors and then to 1/1024 chance. The statistics of it being true were very high even though the proportion of her DNA from the ancestor was small.
Also, I feel like most of these people are either too young to know life without the internet, or they forget, but this was something white, suburban, middle class people used to say all of the time. It was usually some story (true or not, I don’t know), passed down from their great grandparents or some shit, and probably altered like a game of telephone, until you’ve got a person telling their friends about how they’re “1/32 Cherokee” or some shit.
There was never any way to check, and nobody really cared. It was a different time.
I’m not defending what she said, it was a dumb thing to say. But it’s probably just based on some story she was told as a kid that may or may not be true.
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Not to mention, I’ve never heard a person- whose basically white, with no apparent native culture- use “I have Native American ancestry” as anything other than a cudgel to insist they can’t be racist.
Usually while being racist. (Example: my grandfather.)
Eh, depends on the area.
The vast majority of “old family” Appalachians have natives somewhere on their family tree, it’s just most people never really talk about it.
At most it’s offhand mention at family gatherings, which was exactly the context Warren said she heard. Her grandparent or whoever could very well had it and shown up on a test, but it gets exponentially harder the more generations go by
Warren just happened to mention it on the campaign trail, and a bunch of people jumped on it.
it stopped being family history discussions when she mentions it on the campaign trail or on job applications. (I understand there’s conflicting evidence as to the Harvard thing, but, lets be honest here, it’s probably true).
such things coming up in the context of family history makes sense and wouldn’t (necessarily) be racist. But Warren went beyond that… when it’s usually pretty evident if someone’s family is Native American when they’re talking about it. the handful of soundbites I caught were very much in the manner my racist grandfather used to justify his angry bullshit screeds against Native Americans. that said, DNA tests are definitely never going to be conclusive about that. it’s patently ridiculous to think one’s heritage is genetic- heritage is a matter of culture; and culture is learned… distilling your heritage to a percentage based on DNA is a scam to get your DNA.
Lol really giving the benefit of the doubt, huh?
People used to say shit like this all of the time before the internet. It was usually just someone trying to sound cool, or set themselves apart from other kids in some way.
If they weren’t just making it up whole cloth, It was usually some story passed down from their great grandparents that they’re repeating (probably inaccurately) about how someone x generations ago had a Cherokee father or some shit, then they do the math to claim that means they’re 1/32 Cherokee or whatever.
Back then, I don’t remember it being used in any way as an argument against being racist. It was usually just people trying to be cool or different, or telling a boring story about their family that they think is true.
I’m not excusing what she said, it was a stupid thing to say. I’m just not sure if it deserved the criticism it received.
Jeez, some even fly the traitorous flag.
Right. They pulled all the fuckery they pulled when they didn’t even need to and alienated voters they needed. Then didn’t even try to get them back. I worry they’re repeating the same “write off voters you need because you can blame them later” mistake now.
He got outmaneuvered in 2020, yes. The field narrowed to his disfavor and Biden got a key endorsement in South Carolina. This was probably due to some shrewd politicking on Biden’s part and I very much doubt it was the massive conspiracy that some of my fellow progressives allege.
There are other factors, like how the press hated Sanders. I remember the lead up to South Carolina. They were just openly asking “how do we stop Sanders?” There was CNN’s “how did you feel when he said you couldn’t win because you’re a woman” at that one debate. May as well have just spat on him and called him a liar. You had Chris Matthews saying a Sanders presidency would result in public executions in Central Park. He sounded like he was on Fox News and not MSNBC. Chuck Todd’s “brownshirts” comment was disgraceful. He was kinder to the January 6 insurrectionists than he was to Sanders and his supporters.
I think the party had its thumb firmly and unapologetically on the scale in 2016, but not 2020. Sanders just got outplayed in 2020.
The press consistently put out interviews during the prelims about people wanting Sanders but voting for Biden because he’s more likely to win. Bernie could have generated a ton of public and young support. I do think the corporate Dems didn’t want him to take power.
Corpodems would prefer a Republican to a progressive in any given office.
Hands down. He had the populist vote of independents and many Republicans too. The right of center DNC torpedoed him. They weren’t going to allow a center left candidate through. Wasn’t the first time either. At the 1944 Democratic National Convention, conservative party leaders defeated a very popular Henry Wallace’s bid for renomination. I canceled all donations to the DNC and became an Independent.
To put a finer point on it: he had the margin of victory over Trump that Clinton did not, and it came from precisely the sorts of people who don’t vote in Democratic Party primaries (which is why the “but he couldn’t even win the primary” rebuttal is nothing but dishonest horseshit).
TBH that says a lot more about the Democrats than it does about him.
Not really. It benefited Republicans to not attack Bernie to make Clinton look worse. Had Bernie won that would have changed. They had a ton to attack him on, and we’ll never know how well it would have worked. The kind of bullshit they got people to believe about Clinton was insane. I still hear some of it today.
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This makes me laugh. You all whine about how unfair the DNC, the Media, centrists Democrats were to Bernie, and that caused him to lose the Primary. But you assume had he won the Primary that the Republican Party and Donald Trump would not have made all of that look like absolute childs play? If you can’t defend yourself against the DNC and CNN, you’re fucked when you go up against people that will just straight up lie about you. Using polls from when the GOP hadn’t said anything about Bernie is pointless. It was to their advantage to act like Bernie was perfect, it hurt Clinton.
Ummm hi… I enthusiastically supported Bernie in the primary, and then voted for Hillary in the general. Because Bernie lost the primary.
You may have your anecdotal evidence, but my experience has been the opposite. That the people who complain the most about Bernie losing, are people who did not vote in the Democratic primary.
The primary is the time for progressives (and young people, who are notorious for not showing up to vote in anything but the general, if they vote at all) to vote for progressive candidates.
Who the fuck is talking about progressives? We’re talking about all the other people who liked Bernie better than Trump, but who otherwise tended to like Republicans better than Biden. Specifically, the people who liked Bernie for his anti-authoritarianism and who held their noses for the leftist stuff. They can’t vote in a Democratic primary because they’re too busy voting in the Republican or maybe even the Libertarian one instead!
More concretely: they couldn’t vote for Bernie because they were too busy voting for (probably) John Kasich.
You know… Morons. Privileged assholes.
Our people don’t deserve a leader like him.
Our people prefer charismatic liars that tell us we can get moooore than our neighbors if we play the rigged game and work against one another.
Our people would much rather have a 0.1% chance of lucking into a lifestyle of perverse gluttony than have a 100% chance of everyone having a roof, a bed, and a full belly at night.
Our people are selfish and cruel.
I haven’t and won’t vote for any Republican ever, but I will admit, Donald Trump is the perfect reflection of the United States of America. We couldn’t ask for a mascot more reflective of our practiced values. He is the USA personified. All the toxic, antisocial traits we celebrate about ourselves: proud Greed, proud willfull ignorance, vanity, arrogance, all the - isms, unearned confidence, cruelty, gluttony, schadenfreude, nepotism, you might as well run him up a flag post and sing the star spangled banner while eating apple pie at a baseball game.
Doesn’t hurt that most Americans probably can’t even conceptualize what this even means, and have no understanding of just how big of a difference there is between those two percentages. They don’t even know what an order of magnitude is, let alone the implications of several.
Dude is a failure who can’t even garner the support of his own party, let alone the entire country. Not too mention, you can’t complain about the age of Biden and Trump while naming a dinosaur like Bernie.
He has great ideas but that’s about it, he’s as ineffectual as far as politicians go. You want to beat Trump, find someone who can win an election, not Bernie.
And which party would that be?
Democrats, he’s a democrat. I’m not sure what you’re trying to bait.
He couldn’t win the party nomination, which is step one to winning the presidential election.
I’m not American so I can look at this from the outside and realize that no matter how right Bernie’s ideas are, he’s not gonna win it, and at his age he shouldn’t try. Y’all need to start looking for younger people, Bernie was a nice experiment, move on.
Bernie is not a Democrat. Check again, bud.
He almost always votes with them, caucused with them for most of his house and senate career, and ran for the DNC’s presidential nomination twice (2016 and 2020).
He may not call himself one but that’s where the differences end.
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It’s not his party. He used the party to run for President, and people whine about how the party didn’t fall in love with him. Maybe he should I don’t know, join the fucking party and build a base of support. Otherwise he’s just mooching off them.