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  • #16
    Originally posted by TopHatter View Post
    Oh I have indeed. I'm actually rather shocked at their relative non-reaction to the DNC conspiracy to keep Bernie off the ticket in favor of the latest Chosen One.
    Even the hard core Sanders supporters (which seems to be most of them) face a rather awkward math problem - Hilary crushed Bernie in the Primaries. It wasn't even close at any point. I've dealt with rather a lot of them, including friends. Whenever I push them to explain why he lost by so very many votes it goes like this:

    mumble mumble....superdelegates....mumble mumble...establishment....mumble mumble....debate scheduling....mumble mumble....media bias....mumble mumble....vote rigging.....

    Apparently the DNC was supposed to change the rules of the Primaries part way through to allow more non-Democrats to vote for Sanders...or something. At heart Sanders voters don't really want the responsibility of winning. They prefer the romance of glorious defeat at the hands of an evil system. That way they get to stay pure.

    If Clinton had run as good a campaign against Trump she'd be in the White House.
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    Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

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    • #17
      Originally posted by Bigfella View Post
      Even the hard core Sanders supporters (which seems to be most of them) face a rather awkward math problem - Hilary crushed Bernie in the Primaries. It wasn't even close at any point. I've dealt with rather a lot of them, including friends. Whenever I push them to explain why he lost by so very many votes it goes like this:

      mumble mumble....superdelegates....mumble mumble...establishment....mumble mumble....debate scheduling....mumble mumble....media bias....mumble mumble....vote rigging.....
      Funny thing is, I never considered Bernie Sanders to be electable. And yet his getting crushed in the Democratic Primary doesn't seem to register on his supporter's radar. How can you win a general election if you're getting your ass kicked in the party primary??

      Originally posted by Bigfella View Post
      If Clinton had run as good a campaign against Trump she'd be in the White House.
      Agreed. She spent too much time in her liberal bastions where she could be patted on the back.
      “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

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      • #18
        joe,

        Agreed. She spent too much time in her liberal bastions where she could be patted on the back.
        other way around, actually. she spent too much time and effort trying to run up the score in places like Utah, Arizona, and Georgia-- and as a (potential) result, lost traditional blue states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

        this is why she threw the DNC data operation under the bus, because they vectored her to those places as the data analytics said the first two were safe.

        of course, the easy rebuttal to all of this is that the HRC campaign DID throw massive resources into Pennsylvania and -still- lost. ultimately, she tried to run an Obama-like campaign but without the charisma or (even more importantly) the direct political messaging of Obama.
        There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

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        • #19
          Originally posted by astralis View Post
          ultimately, she tried to run an Obama-like campaign but without the charisma or (even more importantly) the direct political messaging of Obama.
          I can definitely agree with that. Her message seems to have been limited to "Donald Trump sucks and it's my turn anyway"
          “He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.”

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          • #20
            Originally posted by TopHatter View Post
            Funny thing is, I never considered Bernie Sanders to be electable. And yet his getting crushed in the Democratic Primary doesn't seem to register on his supporter's radar. How can you win a general election if you're getting your ass kicked in the party primary??
            The most damning thing I read about his primary campaign was that he decided early that he wasn't going to win black voters, so he basically didn't bother. His outreach was so insultingly derisory that it hurt him. So did his comments about the type of people voting for Hilary. It is a marker of the extent to which Sanders supporters neither understood nor cared about the process that they rage about conspiracies while embracing a guy who burned the most reliable part of the Democratic base. My favorite response to the hard core Berniebots is simply to point out that his best chance of winning would have been an 'whites only' vote. They really don't like that. :-D

            I'm still not sure how he would have gone against Trump. He might well have carried the rust belt states Clinton lost, but I'm not sure if he would have carried all the states he needed. Clinton handled him with kid gloves on account of the tantrum prone nature of his base (millions still sulked & voted Green or sat it out). Trump, on the other hand, had it all hanging out during the Priimaries. Bernie has enough political skeletons in the closet to start an anatomy museum. That doesn't matter to the 'history began when we invaded Iraq' crowd who hero worship him, but I'm not sure how it would have played to a post-pubescent electorate.
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            Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

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            • #21
              Seems to me like Bernie was largely successful in his primary goal of turning the Democratic Party into Socialist-Lite, so he's clearly more politically successful than anyone on this particular forum....

              I don't think he ever seriously expected to win.
              "The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck

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              • #22
                http://www.richmond.com/opinion/thei...8fcbc648d.html

                The sad spectacle of Hillary Clinton’s slow-motion breakdown
                By Andrew Malcolm 8 hrs ago

                THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
                Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke Monday in Baltimore at a fundraiser for the Elijah Cummings Youth Program in Israel.
                Hillary Clinton seems to have launched yet another political campaign, one to convince Americans they absolutely did the right thing by not electing her president.

                Which is not to say the campaign winner has been ideal.

                But Clinton’s ongoing public struggle with herself is alienating even supporters and it’s crippling the required remodeling and rejuvenation of her aged Democratic Party, which needs a long rehab at some political spa.

                The only thing Democrats have going for them right now is an undisciplined president and Republican disunity.

                There’s no end in sight for her self-imposed scab-picking; Clinton has not one but two books coming out this fall that will put her on stage after stage across the country with obsequious hosts feeding the Clinton ego with continuous curiosity about her thoughts and doings. Oh, and how in the world could Donald Trump have won?

                At some point you’d think a remorseless Clinton might run out of people, countries and conspiracies to blame for that historic upset in November. It was truly a devastating loss, perhaps the most shocking since Tom Dewey’s unanticipated flop in 1948. It’s understandable, if ominous, that the wannabe commander-in-chief was shattered and unable to appear election night.

                In fact, that’s one of the reasons Clinton cites for losing. Not Dewey, but the expectation that the immense campaign she’d planned for so many years would indeed succeed. She lost, she explains, as “the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win.” Say what?

                She lost because “for whatever reason” FBI Director James Comey reopened the investigation into her email scandal just before the election. She lost because of the Russians. You know, the people she helped gain control of 20 percent of U.S. uranium, the folks who paid her husband a small fortune for one speech.

                She lost because of American misogyny. She lost because of big money, even though hers was by far the biggest money. And she got pretty big bucks for her closed Wall Street speeches.

                She lost because of the media. She lost because Americans do not like giving a third straight White House term to the same party, even though they did in 1988 and — oh, look — in 1948, the fifth straight Democratic term in the White House.


                And she lost because the Democratic National Committee, the happily hackable crowd that was quietly subverting the primary campaign of her party competitor Sen. Bernie Sanders, was useless and bankrupt.

                She actually lost because of a quarter-century of political baggage and scandals. But she doesn’t say that because it’s the truth. She lost because even after all this ambition-fueled plotting, no one on her staff would hand her a rationale for why she should be president. But she doesn’t say that because, shouldn’t the candidate herself have an inkling about that?

                She lost because of that darned Comey investigation. But wait! He’d have nothing to investigate if she herself hadn’t ignored official warnings and constructed an illicit, unsecured private email server to dodge public transparency during her government service. There, Clinton and aides were wheeling and dealing favors for Clinton Foundation donors and sharing national security secrets like teen girls texting prom gossip.

                The 69-year-old lost because despite years of practice, she was just a terrible, maladroit campaigner who could not stop coughing and collapsed on national TV.

                American voters don’t always pay attention to politics. There’s so much other news of little consequence to consume. But when they do, they can smell insincerity through a TV screen. “I take responsibility for everything I got wrong,” Clinton proclaimed last week in her best bid at introspection. “But that’s not why I lost.”

                Andrew Malcolm is an author and veteran national and foreign correspondent covering politics since the 1960s. Follow him on Twitter: @AHMalcolm.

                © 2017, McClatchy Washington Bureau
                ,......
                Last edited by TopHatter; 11 Jun 17,, 14:06.
                To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

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                • #23
                  TWITTER ERUPTS OVER NEWS THAT HILLARY CLINTON USED BLACK PRISON LABOR WHILE FIRST LADY OF ARKANSAS
                  BY MIRREN GIDDA ON 6/7/17 AT 8:18 AM

                  Twitter users have reacted with surprise and fury over excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book It Takes A Village. On June 6, Jeanette Jing, an activist with over 33,000 followers on Twitter who supports Clinton's Democratic opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders, shared two pages of the work in which Clinton reminisces about the black prisoners who worked in the Arkansas governor’s mansion she shared with her husband, Bill Clinton, who led the state from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992.

                  “When we moved in, I was told that using prison labor at the governor’s mansion was a longstanding tradition, which kept down costs,” Clinton writes. She adds that most of the workers were convicted murderers and she became friendly with “a few of them, African-American men in their thirties who had already served 12 to 18 years of their sentences.”

                  Despite her alleged friendships with these men, Clinton tells her readers: “We enforced rules strictly and sent back to prison any inmate who broke a rule.” Despite having no psychological qualifications, she later asserts that these men did not have “inferior IQs or an inability to apply moral reasoning” but instead they may have been “emotional illiterates.”

                  Clinton makes no mention of whether the men received any money for working for her and her husband. A 2016 article from Mother Jones notes that when it comes to prison labor, “some state states, including Texas, Arkansas, and Georgia, do not pay inmates at all.” On Twitter, Jing wrote that “Hillary Clinton was a direct participant in what @samswey correctly described as modern slavery.”

                  Jing, who also refers to a June 5 Twitter conversation about the Clintons’ use of prison labor from Samuel Sinyangwe, an activist, data scientist and policy analyst. In a string of tweets, Sinyangwe talks about his experience of visiting the Louisiana state legislature and finding black prisoners serving white lawmakers for free. Sinyangwe adds that the state has the world’s highest incarceration rate, with black people making up 66 percent of the prison population. By comparison, black people make up 32 percent of Louisiana’s total population.

                  He goes on to note that prisoners working in the state legislature are serving people who support laws that “make Louisiana the hardest state to hold police accountable within.” Like in Arkansas, Sinyangwe adds, some of Louisiana’s prisoners work at the governor’s mansion.

                  In her book, Clinton tried to soften the reality of unpaid black men serving a wealthy white woman. But, 1996, the year her book came out, was also the year she made a speech in New Hampshire in support of her husband’s controversial 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act.

                  Of the legislation, which critics say ramped up mass incarceration and disproportionately affected African-Americans, Clinton said: “We also have to have an organized effort against gangs. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators—no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.” (Clinton has since apologized for using the term and admitted parts of the 1994 bill were a mistake.)

                  The resurfacing of her book’s extract has dragged Clinton’s record on racial equality into the spotlight. Despite her reaching out to the black community during her 2008 and 2016 bids for the presidency, she actively supported and lobbied for her husband while more and more black people were sent to prison. Though Toni Morrison named Bill Clinton the country’s “first black president,” under his watch there was an 100:1 gram-to-gram sentencing disparity between people imprisoned for powdered cocaine possession and those imprisoned for crack cocaine. (At the time, a crack epidemic was sweeping America’s black community.)


                  In response to Jing’s tweets, Clinton’s supporters say she would still have been a better choice for president than Donald Trump. In 1973, the Justice Department sued Trump and his father for discriminating against potential tenants who were black. In 1989, ahead of the trial of the Central Park Five—a group of African-American men who were wrongfully accused of brutally assaulting a white woman— Trump took out an advert in the New York Times calling on the state to bring back the death penalty. “Muggers and murderers,” he wrote, “should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”

                  Trump has also distanced himself from his past. He promised to send more people to prison to protect minority communities without acknowledging the huge racial disparities in the prison system or the need for police reform.

                  On Twitter, Sinyangwe concludes : “2016 was a choice between a white woman benefiting from black prison labor and a white man campaigning on sending black people to prison.”
                  ,....

                  http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clin...rkansas-622209
                  Last edited by TopHatter; 11 Jun 17,, 14:05.
                  To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

                  Comment


                  • #24
                    In her book, Clinton tried to soften the reality of unpaid black men serving a wealthy white woman
                    It's prison labor. There's nothing to criticize Hillary for.
                    "The great questions of the day will not be settled by means of speeches and majority decisions but by iron and blood"-Otto Von Bismarck

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                    • #25
                      HRC’s problem was her organization, not her politics, policies or personality.
                      She won the most votes, therefore her politics, policies and personality were deemed to be more attractive than those of her opponents.


                      HRC’s mistake was that she relied on the campaign professionals to get her sufficient votes in the states she needed to win in order to get the majority of the electoral college votes.
                      Those professional advisers failed to do the job they were hired to do.


                      HRC’s fault was having hired those advisers, and listened to them.


                      That is all.
                      Trust me?
                      I'm an economist!

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                      • #26
                        Its not all DOR, though its a fair bit of it.

                        She is a poor campaigner. She frequently looks unconvinced and unconvincing. She has the stink of the professional politician about her far too much. For all her ability she can't overcome her negatives. Look at who she lost to. It wasn't just a technical glitch.

                        I didn't want her to run because she has too much damned baggage an was so obviously going to scare any alternative talent out of the primaries. In the end the Dems left themselves with two bad options. Unfortunately both of those options continue to meddle rather than retiring and leaving it to others.
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                        Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

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                        • #27
                          Originally posted by Bigfella View Post
                          Its not all DOR, though its a fair bit of it.

                          She is a poor campaigner. She frequently looks unconvinced and unconvincing. She has the stink of the professional politician about her far too much. For all her ability she can't overcome her negatives. Look at who she lost to. It wasn't just a technical glitch.

                          I didn't want her to run because she has too much damned baggage an was so obviously going to scare any alternative talent out of the primaries. In the end the Dems left themselves with two bad options. Unfortunately both of those options continue to meddle rather than retiring and leaving it to others.

                          Bigfella,

                          HRC’s a poor campaigner? Unconvinced and unconvincing? Too much baggage?
                          Really?

                          Three million extra votes says she was the best campaigner, the most convincing candidate and the one more people preferred.

                          Now, if you want to think about why we’re in the mess we’re in, refer to my post #25 above.
                          Trust me?
                          I'm an economist!

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                          • #28
                            Originally posted by DOR View Post
                            Bigfella,

                            HRC’s a poor campaigner? Unconvinced and unconvincing? Too much baggage?
                            Really?

                            Three million extra votes says she was the best campaigner, the most convincing candidate and the one more people preferred.

                            Now, if you want to think about why we’re in the mess we’re in, refer to my post #25 above.
                            Losing the electoral college despite getting 3 million more votes tells me she was a crap campaigner. Simply blaming her campaign team doesn't cut it. She ran against the most manifestly unqualified candidate since.....OK, I'll need to do a ton of research there....possibly in over a century. In other words, it shouldn't have been close. She should have won with a big cushion.

                            Instead she lost states Democrats should carry in their sleep. She bled working class voters to a man who has an appalling labor history - Trump picked up over 40% of union voters. She bled Hispanic voters to a man who demonized them - Trump got 29% of the Hispanic vote. I'll say that again - 29% of the Hispanic vote to Mr 'Mexico border wall/murders and rapists'. She lost middle income voters and independent voters outright. She won black voters by the usual margin, but their numbers were down. And all of this against Donald fucking Trump.

                            Sorry, that isn't just an 'oops, my campaign people were crap'. Romney gets that excuse, though it wouldn't have changed the result. That is deep, long term problems. That is people looking for excuses NOT to vote for you. Don't kid yourself.

                            I get how well qualified she was and I think she would be doing a good job. I also think her choice to run was selfish and the price for that is now being paid. Perhaps an alternative candidate would have lost anyway (I think Sanders would have), but l reckon anyone not trailing a lifetime of baggage and with a shred of personal charisma would have made it. The GOP handed the election to the Dems on a place and the Dems blew it.
                            sigpic

                            Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

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                            • #29
                              Just for the sake of argument, assume these are the main ingredients to a POTUS campaign:

                              Candidate
                              Policy positions
                              Base
                              Personality
                              Money
                              Voter turnout
                              Opponent
                              Campaign team

                              Now, from that list – and please, add to it if you wish – identify which key ingredient didn’t perform up to par.


                              Candidate? Count the votes.
                              Policy positions? ditto
                              Base? ditto
                              Personality? ditto
                              Money? Seriously?
                              Voter turnout? Good numbers
                              Opponent? Let's not even go there.
                              Campaign team? Ah, the penny drops. Too much emphasis on the wrong places, not enough on the ones that had to be won.
                              Trust me?
                              I'm an economist!

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                              • #30
                                DOR,

                                BigFella's right. She ran a bad campaign. She was the candidate. It was her fault, regardless of the staff.

                                Big issues:

                                She has always appeared stiff, especially when compared to Bill & Obama. Her attempts to overcome that were unconvincing at best.

                                She concurred and went with the plan to ignore the Heartland. As has been said, 3 million votes don't mean squat when you get your clock cleaned in the EC.

                                She made the same mistake Al Gore did...she made poor use of her best asset, Bill. If Gore had Bill campaign in TN & WV in 2000 it would have been a much different outcome.

                                Never mind her horrible judgement regarding the entire e-mail server business. She handled that entire mess horribly. She allowed the conditions to exist which allowed any possible 11th hour disclosures. I thought she handled the Benghazi hearings well. She should have insisted on the same for server. A bruising last June or July could be overcome. Obviously, a last minute disclosure by the FBI could not.
                                “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
                                Mark Twain

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