We keep getting previews of Hillary Clinton’s memoir, What Happened, ahead of its release this month. The book is possibly one of the reasons why Donald Trump is acting so crazy, unless you believe that Bigly Boy simply IS crazy and he is currently being consumed by insanity even further. Anyway, Hillary and her book. Obviously, she wanted to address everything that went down in the primaries, especially all of the Bernie Sanders stuff. Someone on Twitter got an advanced copy of the book and Hillary is throwing shade at Bernie.
In the passage that was tweeted out Monday evening by Tom Watson, Clinton attacks some of Sanders’s supporters for being “sexist” and suggests the Vermont senator doesn’t have the Democratic Party’s true interests at heart. Most notably, she also intimates that he may not have even cared that his underhanded (in her opinion) attacks on her helped Donald Trump become president.
“When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn’t come up with anything,” she wrote. “Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign…. I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not.”
Clinton continues: “He certainly shared my horror at the thought of Donald Trump becoming President, and I appreciate that he campaigned for me in the general election. But he isn’t a Democrat — that’s not a smear, that’s what he says. He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party.”
At the end of the page, Clinton concludes by saying: “I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were too.”
I know “shade” is overused at this point, but I think this qualifies. This is brilliantly shady. Hillary knows that Bernie isn’t the reason why Donald Trump is president. She’s not saying that. She’s saying that Bernie isn’t a Democrat, which is true, and that his primary campaign’s talking points were picked up by Trump. Which is also true. Last month, political science professor Brian Schaffner analyzed primary and general election data and showed that 1 out of 12 Bernie supporters ended up voting for Trump. It’s also pretty clear that a significant minority were Republicans to begin with, and that they went to Bernie (and then Trump) because they disliked Clinton and Obama.
At the end of the day… no, I still don’t care about Bernie. I never did. I like him even less now that he’s backing candidates who want to take reproductive freedom off the Democratic agenda. There’s a reason why “Bernie Bros” were a thing, and there’s a reason why Bernie’s base of supporters looked a lot like Trump’s base of supporters. And I still want no part of it.
Wow – "I am proud to be a Democrat and wish Bernie were, too." #ShePersisted pic.twitter.com/jSv7ilP5Nv
— Tom Watson (@tomwatson) September 4, 2017
Photos courtesy of Getty.
That’s not shade. That’s simply stating a fact.
It’s literally not possible to prove her claim, so it’s definitely not a fact. Shade? Eh, maybe not, but it is a fledgling analysis. There aren’t statistics gathered on “second choice” candidates. Those who planned to vote for Sanders were NEVER going to vote for Clinton any more than they would vote for Trump. Her continued blame of anything and everyone except herself is really embarrassing. She lost in states that Republicans had not previously won. She lost in critical states in which she didn’t campaign. Winning the popular vote does.not.matter. in this country. Trump is every bit as repugnant as they say, but that conversation is irrelevant. She played a foolish game and she lost. I want to feel bad for her, but with crap like this, I’m just embarrassed for her and her entire team.
Thank you, thank you, for a voice of reason.
As a former democrat who still has strong ties to people in (and most ideals of) the party, I know that many of them still do not get or accept what happened – re the dynamics of Clinton, vs. the less-complicated dynamics of our Trump disaster – nor that they will not necessarily pick up voters, even after we all endure our current nightmare, whom they continue to prefer to lump together, characterize as “Bros,” or insistently dismiss as spoilers.
Unfortunately, it’s exactly that sort of frustrated, enraged blinders-perspective that contributed to them drastically miscalculating the last tragic election; I fear it will continue in future, as well.
Uhhhh…. you do know Bernie is a registered Independent – the truth of her statement could not possibly be any more clear. Don’t be embarrassed for her, be embarrassed for yourself.
@shane – I 100% agree with you.
It’s the literal truth that he is not a Democrat despite expecting all of the perks of the party he did not support over the years. Voted with, yes, but support? No. He is not a Democrat; if he were he would BE a Democrat.
Completely agree with you 100% Shane! She continues to blame everyone else but her self for a poorly run campaign and a lot of hubris that prevented her from campaigning hard in key states in the Midwest that went from blue to red.
People here are correct, Bernie has been an Independent who has been consistently more progressive than most mainstream Democrats have been in the last 20 years. Hillary Clinton is a DINO (Democrat in Name Only). Many of her policies would have been considered Republican a generation ago, but that just shows how far to the right the Democratic Party has gone.
Since Bernie has run as a Democrat, he has shown that he is one of the most favorite politicians in the USA and continues to fight for policies that will save the Democratic Party in the long run such as $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All. Bernie has proven himself to be more of a Democrat than most of the politicians in the Democratic Party right now.
@Shane,
She didn’t blame everything except herself. She took total responsibility and yet here you stand, telling lies and manufacturing propaganda because you’d rather stay ignorant or it serves your purposes. You are irresponsible and shameless. Your embarrassment should be for yourself. Or you’re getting paid and don’t give a f#ck like all sociopaths.
Shane, I agree with you completely. Thanks for saying it so well.
I agree: I am sick of Hilary Clinton blaming EVERYONE ELSE for her failure. The woman is a cheat, liar, and a crook, as corrupt as they come, and so I’m also sick of excuses for her (luckily, outside of this site, I don’t find many of them.) I’m not even embarrassed “for” her; she’s too detestable.
Hillary is one of the strongest women in politics. The GOP lies and smears thrown at this woman for 40 years would sent many politicians scouring in fear. I love Hillary.
There is nothing thin-skinned about Hillary.
The thin skinned were Bernie and the Bernie voters who could not accept that he lost the Primary by 4million REAL VOTES to Hillary. Bernie never had the POC vote which is the Democratic base.
Funny, that’s the same thing they say about 45. He cheated on all his wives and cheated people out of their hard earned cash 💰 to pay for Trump University. Last year he was fined $25m dollars by NewYork State Attorney General. He had to refund that money to the people he robbed. He’s a liar, he is a patholical liar. According to people keeping stats he lies at least five per day. He’s a crook. Ask all the people he refused to pay after he used their labor and told them, “sue me” knowing these poor people cannot afford to pay lawyers to fight him in court, etc. talk about bein corrupt, 45 is in the building business, that’s where most corruption are bedded. I’m sick and tired to hear, he’s new to this business, he does not know about government, and he’s to old to change, then pi$$ or get off the pot.
and yet, you probably voted for Trump, who is all these things and more. The irony.
Still waiting for receipts from Barney voters repeating a million times that HRC is “a crock”, “corrupt”, “the worse liar ever”. It’s been 18months and they are still trying to find the proof. Republicans have tired for over 25 years.
This book publisher earlier this year validates HRC’s claims:
“The destruction of Hillary Clinton: sexism, Sanders and the millennial feminists”
By Susan Bordo
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2017/apr/03/the-destruction-of-hillary-clinton-sexism-sanders-and-the-millennial-feminists
Her failure? Failure to do what? Get the nomination? Get the popular vote? The reason she lost was misogyny, plain and simple. But sure, tell yourself that if it makes you feel better about yourself. Bernie (and I, myself, voted for him in the primaries because I honestly lean super-left), is not a democrat and that’s a fact. Once Hillary got the nomination, it was a done deal for me because I damn sure wasn’t voting for Trump and I did NOT want to see him as president. But all these fools thought they could just play fast and loose with their votes because it’s not like our country was at stake or anything. So yeah. Basically, anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary or didn’t vote at all can blame themselves for what we’re seeing right now. Period. End of.
And Trump Is better?!? Lol facepalm
Hillary is 100 percent correct and its about time she said it. I am glad.
This women is a trailblazer and as Obama said many times during the Campaign , Hillary is one of the most qualified people to ever run for office Hillary is a strong woman, who has withstood a torrent of hate, lies , bashing for decades, there is NOTHING Weak or thin-skinned about Hillary.
I proudly voted for her. She is a strong woman. Love her.
She lost….
Funny, you should hear what he said about her during the 2008 campaign…..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H6f4tZFZ_-g
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mb3JHexXljk
HadToChangeMyMind and the rest: No, I did not vote for Trump: he is obviously FAR worse, far crueler and far more dangerous than Hilary could ever be. Sorry not to fit neatly into your little category, your kneejerk presumption that anyone who dislikes (though grimly voted for) Hilary, must surely have voted for Trump. There is nothing, however, that I like about Hilary, nothing that makes me feel that a woman who simply can’t take ANY personal responsibility for losing the presidential election would make a fair, stable, loyal, or responsible president. Among many other dubious incidents with her, I’ll never forget this “feminist” and her friendship with Saudi Arabia: After condemning the country for its legalized abuse of women and lack of female rights, she changed her tune after receiving more than 50 million from them, FAST. “We just have to learn to respect different cultures,” she said. Such integrity! Oh, yes, a woman that loyal and sincere and highly principled and honest and committed to her alleged causes would be a *great* president, sure! Now THAT’S irony!!!LOL!
^^^ this
We HAVE to address this schism among liberal voters. Let’s just look at one comparison- Sweden & Denmark, for example, work beautifully with liberal socialism- but these are homogenous cultures for the most part. All Swedes. All Danes. But for diverse Americans to go for a shared “socialist” economy??? Puh. Leeze. For the educated- the whole Bernster thing is implausible. Bernie demonized Hillary for her middle ground capitalist Democracy background. Hillary wasn’t “pot”enough for the hipsters, nor “ride share” enough for the aging idealists. I’m glad she’s -going over it point by point. We don’t need another “orangeApocalypse in 2020. Let’s find a way to get cohesive as the compassionate – but Educated- people of planet Earth! We have -got- to save the world next round, and these discussions are MORE THAN VITAL.
People were disappointed that Bernie didn’t become the Democratic candidate but that Clinton made it (with the help of some foul tricks). So these disappointed people didn’t vote for Clinton but for Trump to show a middle-fingered salute to Killary.
Hillary shouldn’t blame that on Bernie but she should start wondering if some things might have gone wrong with her campaign. No introspection, is it?
I don’t appreciate such salutes but Clinton should be more critical with her own deeds and her failed campaign. She failed to impress a lot of people and a lot of those unimpressed people voted for Trump. Her well-paid speeches for Wall Street didn’t do her any favours: apparently the banking crisis hasn’t been forgotten yet. The killary aspects of her potential policies gave nervous shivers to a lot of people whose kids have only got a shot at a career in the army. She had very little compassion for the little man and their worries – Joe Sixpack or however you want to call them. Her callous response to one of her old legal cases which involved two rapists of a young teenager looked bad because Hillary had that lawsuit dropped on a technicality. Sure she was the rapists’ lawyer and had to defend them but nevertheless such a callous cold and contentious response didn’t look decent as the victim was a young teenager.
But ask yourself honestly, just as an exercise, if you were to swap her with any of the MALE presidents we’ve had over the years, if these “lack of compassion” arguments would hold up. Wold they have been perceived differently? Of COURSE they would have.
I’ve always been of the mind that Bernie appealed to what I like to refer to as the “down with the government” crowd.
I’m sorry, but Hillary is sounding extremely thin skinned here. It was a campaign. People say things to undermine their opponent all the time. Bernie played his part, so did she. At the end of the day, the Orange Turd won. Time to get over it, stop re-hashing the election and get to work in the resistance.
Exactly. Any campaign would have come up with the same talking points. Bernie didn’t give Trump “Crooked Hillary.” Hillary gave that to Trump by her unwillingness to mitigate her own negatives.
“Her unwillingness to mitigate her own negatives?” Blame the victim some more, why don’t you? You do realize those “negatives” she should have mitigated were largely right wing propaganda created to smear her? You’re perpetuating another one of those narratives right now. Smh.
Esmom says what I came here to say…..thanks, Esmom!
The victim?
It was a campaign, and unfortunately American politics is dirty. It’s not like she’s not a very willing participant in that. She’s done her fair share of mudslinging. She fully partipated in the ugly parts of her husband’s campaigns even when that wasn’t actually a good idea, and her campaign against Obama in 08 got pretty brutal in it’s final desperate weeks. A lot of the stuff thrown at Obama by Republicans came from that. The fearmongering that white Democrats wouldn’t show up for him, the very insistent dog whistles suggesting there was something to the idea he was some kind of secret Muslim…the first time I saw any mention of birth certificates, it was in a mailer from a Hillary PAC. Against Bernie her campaign was really pushing the whole commie pinko angle, and preying on people’s misunderstanding of socialism.
It’s all awful, but you can’t join in and then claim to be the victim when people do the same things you do to try to win.
@Kate,
The false equivalency train has left the station. It’s a shame you missed it.
Whoa… Blame the victim? The only thing that woman is a victim of is her own hubris. She was a crappy candidate who couldn’t even beat worst candidate the republicans could inflict on the world.
You’re right! This woman is unbelievable! She blames everyone but herself. If the Democratic Party continues to think like this, idiot Trump Will win again.
“and unfortunately American politics is dirty.”
It wasn’t American politics, it was a Russian attack.
No, she’s not weak. But she is a massive hypocrite. Recall, when Bill was facing scandal after scandal for womanizing, she went AFTER those women, and she went hard. I think a woman absolutely could have won this thing, just not THIS woman… there are too many people with long memories, and we do indeed recall her flip-flops, even if Bernie does not.
Her absolute refusal to move on from her loss demonstrates her thin skin (the lecture circuit, the interviews, etc., i mean, google her recent talks)… let it go already, you lost to an enormous crook. we all lost.
@Esmom (Crazy liberal Megan here) One of the core functions of a campaign is to mitigate the negatives. All candidates have them. In that regard, Hillary and her campaign did fail. it is important to separate Hillary the person, Hillary the candidate, and Hillary the campaign. I love the person and the candidate, but the campaign was a straight up sh*t show and it would be rewriting history to say otherwise.
Megan, I don’t disagree that her campaign was far from perfect. I still believe many other factors contributed to her defeat more than her/her campaign’s ability or lack thereof to respond to the negatives accordingly.
@Esmon at least 10 times a week I wonder what the f*ck Podesta was thinking when he kept sending her to AZ instead of PA. They made some truly huge mistakes. Saying the campaign wasn’t perfect white washes the truth. They eff-ed up big time and they should own it.
@Esmom
Find me the perfect campaign. This is the conversational standard of trolls. Perfection shouldn’t even be an issue but the trolls make it so.
@hmmm I’ve worked in and around campaigns since 1992. The unforced errors made by Hillary’s campaign will be studied in political science classrooms for years to come. It’s unfortunate that you think facts that don’t fit your flawed narrative constitute trolling.
So true. Hillary Clinton / her campaign never did some more critical thinking on how to include more people or how to appear more appealing and more authentic. And those she included simply weren’t enough to help win the election. She / her team miscalculated.
Even Bill Clinton is said to have told Hillary that she needed to include certain groups much more. Allegedly her team’s response was that they knew better (than a 2-times president, apparently). Over-confidence seems to have been one problem.
I don’t believe Hillary is “thin skinned”. I believe she has to come to terms what with happened before she can be at peace in her mind. IMO there were so many forces working against her. Yes, I do believe Bernie was one, Comey was one, Russia was another one and Russia and 45 combined to steal the election was the big one, yes, Hillary could have gone to a few other states, but I don’t believe it would help. We all know when Comey came out with opening up the investigation again she was ahead in the polls, when he came back the damage was done. Comey fiascos turned off lots of voters, that combined with 45 lying about her every day even calling her lying Hillary was just too much for one person to overcome. I distinctly remember 45 yelling about the election was rigged and if he did not win he knew it was rigged against him. 45 knew he and his people were rigging the election
with outside help from a foreign hostile country. He was transferring as usual.
I agree with all of this.
And inside help from the Republican party in Wisconsin gerrymandering the state into oblivion. Court ruled against the state one week AFTER the election, too late to fix it.
That is how I see it. There were so many things that happened and I don’t think we know all of it at this point.
Yes. Yes and yes.
Yes, little lady, just go away. She’s entitled to say what she thinks. The misogyny directed at Hillary, even from women, is really unfortunate. A lot of good people had a part in her defeat including Bernie & some of his supporters. They need to own it.
No one told her to go away; I said to make her time in the limelight productive (join the resistance). No better blind person than one who doesn’t want to see (or sees just one thing – in your case misogyny). I don’t see McCain still whining about his loss to Obama or Mitt Romney. She needs to buck up and roll up her sleeves to the work that needs to get done. Complaining about why she lost is not the way to do it.
@HadToChangeMyName
She’s not ‘whining’. That tells me all I need about your comment.
@hmmm
Yes, she’s whining. Big time.
@Megan
TROLL
It’s like people don’t understand what the term “troll” means.
She sounds like a sore loser. It is now time to stand up, dust herself off and make a difference in the world. Just because she lost the election, there is still a lot of work that she can do. There are many many reason that she lost. Time to move on and stop pointing fingers. She lost and we are stuck with a nightmare. We need her now more than ever.
She’s not pointing fingers, ffs. She’s telling her story. I can’t think of any less of a sore loser than her. She’s incredibly gracious despite the garbage she constantly faces.
A sore loser? I think you mistake her for Bernie. I see the Bernie bots are out in full force. Enjoying Don the Con, are ya?
Talk about “sour louder” that’s 45. Damn, he’s the president with help from a foreign country and he’s still blaming everything that’s not good on Obama and Hillary. I’m guessing he knows he’s a loser because he’s governing with 3,000,000 less majority votes. It must keep him up at nights knowing he’s governing with less vote than the person who lost the election, burn. 🔥.
LMAO, as if Bernie Sanders has accomplished 1/10th in all of his 76 years that Hillary has.
@Esmom… she’s not pointing fingers? wow. i don’t know what you think that means, but here on earth it means you identify the person you think screwed up. hillary did exactly that. repeatedly.
Cine Johnson, I don’t know what you think pointing fingers means but the implication is pinning the blame on other people and taking no responsibility for anything. I’d hardly say that’s the case for Hillary. But keep trashing her, clearly you guys are getting your kicks doing that.
Lots of trolls I’ve never seen on here posting today. Lots of interest in helping perpetuate the “the left is infighting” narrative, I see.
Amen, @Esmom. The trolls are alive and kicking. And they’re not good at it either. Actually quite intellectually weak. Kinda dumb too.
@hmm: People who disagree with you aren’t “trolling,” and your ad hominem crap reflects poorly on you.
Thin-skinned? Like Bernie after he lost to her, and a woman to boot?
LMAO! Thin skinned??? This woman has had more shite thrown at her than ANY other political figure in modern history. And she is THIN SKINNED?? Just. No.
One out of every 12 of Bernie’s voters voted for Trump. Sounds bad until you learn that 26% of Clinton’s primary supporters in 2008 voted for McCain. It didn’t matter because Obama won handily.
Its kind of shocking that people would think Hilary is in the right being offended by normal campaing behavior. Its also similarly odd to me when people are more mad to people who voted for third candidate than those who didnt vote at all but not a alot of people are bragging aboit not voting so its kind of a human reaction. But Bernie did nothing wrong on his campaing, its completely against demoacracy to say he should not have campaigned against Hillary in the way he right to.
It’s funny how she is blaming Bernie for exactly the same thing she did when she ran against Obama. And at that time I fully supported her to continue campaigning until the Democratic National Convention. Here is why: Every American deserves to cast a vote for the candidate of his or her choice. Doesn’t matter if you live in Iowa or California, if you live in the first state to cast votes or the last. Every person deserves his or her vote counted until the end when a candidate is nominated at the convention. Bernie did nothing different from what she did in 2008.
The shade is so real. And yes Bernie is no Dem and they need to stop pandering to him. He’s not a registered Dem he doesn’t get to choose the party’s platform.
If the DNC wants to lose their core base (minority women/mostly black women) they can continue to pander to Bernie Bros. see how that works out during midterms.
Their base includes the working class. They’re just not white.
I think we all see how the Hillary & the Dems ignoring that growing segment of their former potential base worked out during the election. Just a fact.
Yup. They gotta keep that echo chamber running.
I absolutely believe Bernie bros had a part in why Trump won. Misogyny plays a big part of it and it’s awful that people blame Hillary for Bill’s (who is a brilliant politician but is a flawed individual) infidelities. I can’t wait to read Hillary’s book. Both President Obama and President Clinton’s statements on DACA were so beautiful and moving. Worth repeating: Sessions lied twice to Congress and Trump had to pay 25 million to US citizens for fraud allegations. These are the men talking about rule of law. 🙄
Completely agree with you. They’re still railing about “Hildebeast” (yes that’s what some of them call her in TYT comment section) and this just gives them fresh ammo. On one hand, I wish she would just stop talking about it. On the other hand, I generally agree with what she said here so…eh.
@Kitten
What’s ironic about TYT is that they constantly rant about “corporate” politicians and media and yet they are partially funded by Buddy Roemer’s firm (Buddy is a huge conservative, former GOP politician, and the definition of a shady corporate figure).
Are you serious? OMG. My Berniecrat and TYT fanatic BF will not be pleased about this.
Ugh. I feel guilty for feeling a bit smug about it.
Thanks for the info, Div.
@Kitten
Ha, no problem. I was a bit smug when I found out about it too. A Mother Jones writer likes to gleefully trot out that fact on twitter whenever TYT slams them for not being 100% on the Bernie/DSA/Red Rose train. I’m honestly surprised that so many outlets give them a pass on being partially funded by an uber conservative shady GOP politician, especially when people have investigated those behind Drudge and Brietbart, but I don’t think it’s well known.
They also just got a huge cash infusion from Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is an angel compared to the disgusting Buddy Roemer. However, it’s enjoyably ironic that TYT are hyperbolic with their criticism of the Dem party for fundraisers and corporate money and then took $20 mil from one of the biggest Democratic fundraisers out there.
Agreed!
There’s no shade there. She is speaking the truth. Bernie Sanders was an independent, not a democrat and he ran for the democratic nomination in order to use the democratic parties networks and organization, which an independent normally doesn’t have. The democratic party had no obligation to put him on their ballots in the primaries. But they did so all the screaming from the Bernie Bros about how they sabotaged him and stole the nomination is just nonsense.
This…just all of this!!!
This. The party has the right to chose its nominee and party members have the right to expect that person to be a Democrat. There are still people I know who think Bernie would have won if he had gotten the nomination. Talk about denial.
Not that I’ve got a dog in the race, but I am inclined to agree with those who are saying that left/liberal/progressive infighting is not helpful and the future is bleak unless people put differences aside and concentrate on uniting issues. And I don’t think Bernie is the devil incarnate grieving Hillary supporters make him out to be.
But that said, what you say is THE issue, isn’t it? I can’t understand how someone who isn’t a Democrat can stand for the Democrat presidential nomination. This is one very weird aspect of the US system that he was able to do that. And, as it turns out, a very unhelpful aspect.
Under the rules of some of the political parties here, he wouldn’t have been able to do it and, in the chain of emails we have courtesy of Putin and Assange, the DNC leaders did discuss blocking him but, as the Bernie Bros like to ignore, that chain of emails ends with them deciding to let the voters have their say and let him on the ballots.
And I agree the infighting isn’t helpful. The purity tests aren’t helpful. Bernie isn’t the devil incarnate, but he did do some harm, but even so, we need him as an ally in the Senate.
As for Hillary, she has a right to tell her story and she has a right to make money from it. Tickets to see her speak on her book tour go on sale today and I’m going to try to get some. I’ve met her several times, sat at a table and drank wine with her at a fundraiser for Kerry when he ran for president, and she is a kind, engaged, and very funny person. Those qualities somehow got buried in all the vitriol. The Republican party has spent 25 years and hundreds of millions of our tax dollars investigating her and finding nothing and still, she persists.
@Sixer
There was an interesting article a year or so ago in one of the major political magazines about how the American two-party system is a failure. Yeah, we technically have “third parties” but there is no feasible way for them to grow or flourish. I don’t hate Bernie, but I think he should have joined the Democratic party if he wanted to change the party/caucus with the Dems. That said, Bernie doesn’t seem to get the act of compromising or pragmatism.
The infighting is a huge problem but there are grievances on both sides (although the far left has a particular ugly problem when it comes to race and they refuse to address it). I usually consider myself to be fairly far left but I’ve been extremely angry with how the far left is acting like economic socialism will solve the fact that our country is deeply racist and sexist (Black political twitter is sometimes like “wut the hell” when it comes to red rose twitter ). There’s also an ugly issue with how many Bernie surrogates in the media and the DSA (very pro-Bernie) singles out Democratic politicians who are WOC for criticism but lets white politicians slide on significant issues like abortion or the same exact issue they criticize the WOC politician about. To be fair, centrists could definitely afford to shift further left in several areas….particularly health care as the general public’s opinion has changed over the past few years.
@ Sixer
We will lose because both sides think their side didn’t do undermining things or questionable things. There were things I could say about HRC and some of her supporters but what does it matter?
The orange Nazi sits in the white house with this Grand Wizard sidekick as the nation’s sheriff.
I try to keep my mouth shut these days since I see no point in fighting.
I keep saying this. The biggest block of voters is Independents and they break down to more left leaning but the left leaning ones are more likely to be frustrated with the party that leans left, The Democrats. I am. They make me want to scream.
But I vote for them.
@Div, third parties could grow and flourish if they focused on building networks in communities, which means running for local offices like school committees and city councils and building from that to mayor, state legislatures, smaller statewide offices like auditor or AG instead of focusing on the big offices with inexperienced candidates.
As you guys probably know, the left side of politics in the UK is embroiled in a similar and equally unhelpful internecine war, only this side of the Pond our version of Bernie won the party leadership.
I greatly disapprove of the left’s purity tests – we need people who focus on economic injustice, racial injustice, gender injustice and everything else. We need all of them. I also greatly disapprove of a politician’s policy proposals being judged on the behaviour of the most unhinged of their supporters. The internet makes that worse, you know?
At some point, everyone just has to agree on a positive program that benefits as many people as possible with as many practical measures as possible – a rising tide lifts all boats, you know?
I agree with LP about localism. Politics is as much local as it is national and international. And local politics shows the apolitical and floating voters that you are in it for them as much as you are the headline causes. You’ll never convert the alt-right and their associated bedraggles, but you might just get folks to the polling station who wouldn’t bother otherwise.
THIS.
Read Peter Daou’s twitter. Bernie Bros are still toxic. They harm the Dem party way more than HRC. #stillwithher
Peter Daou isn’t someone I’d recommend reading. He was so racist against Obama back in 2007-08 he got banned from the biggest Democratic blog, Daily Kos, while working for Hillary. So for him to whine about attacks from Bernie is a bit rich.
Thank you. They forget the racist crap they pulled in 2008 against Obama but ok. I do. I also remember the 90s policies that caused 3 strikes you are out, welfare reform based on race and mass incarceration.
We can throw and sling but the orange Nazi still sits in the white house.
It doesn’t detract from the fact that reading the tweets from Bernie bots shows that they are fanatically toxic on his threads and everywhere else. The comment was NOT about him but the Bernie freaks.
Daou’s an ass no doubt. But spot on about Bernie, his followers, and what really hurt HRC.
Am I the only one who read that the “Bernie Bros” were not actual humans but bots which were funded by his opponents? That’s not a sarcastic question. I know I read that somewhere.
ITA with everything she says, and of course she has every right to speak about it. But I’m already frustrated at the thought of all the ways the Trump people and the Bernie Bros will use this to tear her apart even further. But whatever, she’s a private citizen now. She has no f*cks left to give.
Hilary survived 25 years of attacks by Republicans she can handle the Bernie Bros/Dump supporters. To me they are one in the same at this point.
It doesn’t matter what she says or does. She will always be reviled. So why should she have any f*cks left to give? Her criticisms and observations are mild compared to what I’m thinking.
This is the big misogynistic deal- a woman can’t win. Everyone now is telling her she should shut up and know her place, while the likes of Bernie and Drumpf are entitled to spew poison with impunity.
I absolutely believe a woman could and would have won — just not Hillary.
Your belief has nothing to do with reality.
As if they could possibly ever do anything worse to her than enabling Donald freaking Trump to win the Presidency, give me a break. Hillary has been through it, there is nothing that Bernie’s Bros ever do anything worse than what she has already endured.
They’ve been tearing her apart for three decades now. Trump won and he and his minions still go after her. She might as well say her piece.
Sigh. I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but…wrong time, Hilary.
If Democrats can’t figure out how to unify behind a central theme and get their voters to do likewise, we all should all just stay home at mid-terms because we have already lost. That we’re almost a year into this nightmare and and still losing elections and she still feels compelled to to take shots at her opponent (who lost…does that sound familiar??) instead of trying to rally voters to take back some degree of power tells me that we on the left have learned nothing.
That she has a legitimate right to be angry, I don’t deny. That there is truth to what she said, I also don’t deny. But it isn’t helping anyone right now and right now is what we have to deal with. She and Bernie can go back to one upping each other after we’ve managed to claw back some territory. For once I would like the left to prove that they are as good at presenting a united front as the GOP is, instead of shooting themselves on the foot like they usually do.
+1.
Completely agree, I think The Democrats need to realize not everything was The Republican faults. They turned the party to where it is today. They lost because of it, people didn’t want to vote for Democrats. While yes of course sexism played some role in what happened, I still think that if they had put someone like Joe Biden up he would have just as easily lost to Trump. Trump’s base at the time wasn’t just full of racists, he appealed to people by pretending to care about the “common” man. All of those people were out and about racists. Poverty in this country is a real issue and those people have felt for years that they’ve been not represented. The Democrats haven’t done a good job at gaining those votes.
The Republicans are horrific but The Democrats poll numbers are always worse because they get nothing done, they have no unification and they in general just give up.
She had three million more votes so the idea that people don’t want to vote for DEms is complete false. 2016 was the first election without the full voting rights act in place, voter suppression does exist and is another reason wmore people did not come out to vote along with irregular working hours or no ability to get to a polling place because of all the polling places being closed down in key states.
You do realize that Biden would have been hammered for the 8 years he was standing next to Obama. This election was not just about sexism but racism too. The Rethugs would have had no problem linking him to Obama and subtly calling Biden a race traitor/liberal who is trying to take your guns away. And the rethuglican sheep would have eaten it up because they geneuinely believe that they are victims. If Biden was a legitimate option, why didn’t he beat Obama back when he was runnning against him in 2004. There is a reason he was vice president.
Trumps’ base has always been full of racists. You cannot listen to what he said and still vote for him and not be considered a racist. Just because you don’t use ethnic slurs does not mean you cannot be a racist.
By the time President Obama left office, the unemployment rate was under 5% (and the U6 was very low too). He saved the economy after the crash of ’08 and delivered a stable, if not perfect economy. Poverty is a major issue but we certainly aren’t a desolate wasteland like Trump makes us out to be. The problem is that those manufacturing jobs in the Midwest (which went for Trump) are never, ever coming back and those white folks who used to work the mills would rather blame POC, immigrants, etc. rather than face reality that those jobs have been disappearing for the past 20 years and will be gone in the next 8 or so. Hillary had a good plan for job retraining, but it was pretty much ignored by the media which would rather romanticize a factory in Iowa.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I think Biden could have beat Trump. That’s just my opinion.
I think the Republicans unify because they have so many platforms based on “morality” and the religious right, lowering taxes at the cost of social services and programs etc. Not all Republicans agree on this, but lots of them will close their eyes and plug their ears so that these issues are addressed. Lots of them dealt with the maniac Trump to get the Supreme Court. They didn’t want a pro choice judge on there. I think Democrats are a much more diverse party, which is why unity on certain issues isn’t as feasible. Which programs are more important? Where should tax money go? That isn’t a slap to the Democratic party, I just think the Republican party is much more of a monolith with a focus on similar issues.
This. This is what I was saying. The party is breaking and this serves no one but her ego. This is a time to reform and unify or the party is going down in flames.
Agreed. What’s the saying?
‘Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.’
There is never a wrong time to speak the truth and your dismissive comment is exactly part of the problem along with angry white men who think they thoughts are more import than everyone else. Comparing hersharing her thoughts on Bernie to Dump is a stretch of epic proportions. She is not personally attacking him to make herself feel better. She in fact is going out of her way to be polite and express herself and lightly criticze him at the same time, which is more than he deserves.
How are we supposed to unite when we have fundamental issues that need to be dealt with? Are we just supposed to shut up and go along with Bernie Bros to keep the peace. Fuck that idea. Why should we have to unite with people who put their privelege and their identity over everyone else’ existance? Bernie Bros don’t believe in compromise, so why should any of us have to work with them?
Respectfully, I disagree and I’m not sure how my comment could be misconstrued as being dismissive. I said she has the right to be angry and that there was truth to what she said. I have also never been a Bernie supporter and thought his problematic in many ways, to say nothing of his sexist bros shouting down everyone around them.
But I stand by my opinion. The “f*ck that, why should I have to work with anyone” attitude has been dooming this party for decades and never more spectacularly than this most recent election. While there are some demographics the left simply will never penetrate, there are others that we shouldn’t give up on just yet. There are moderates in the Bernie camp – we need to be working with them, not against them. Judging them all by the Bros isn’t any better than everyone one else deciding that HRC supporters are all angry “feminazis”.
“The ‘f*ck that, why should I have to work with anyone’ attitude has been dooming this party for decades and never more spectacularly than this most recent election”
You cannot possibly be talking about the Democrats here–and I say that as an Independent–I mean, you’re not, right?
Please tell me that you are referring to the GOP who’s leader Mitch McConnell literally said that he wanted to make Obama a one-term president. The party that made sure to block Merrick Garland until they could get a conservative in what was rightfully his seat. The party that was, for 8 years, quite literally the most uncompromising and hardline adversaries the Dem party has ever seen.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, I really don’t know how you can be upset about the Dems refusing to work with a party that is quite literally destroying our country. They have an absolute OBLIGATION to block and fight this administration every opportunity they can.
First, what party are you talking about? The Dems have been bending over backwards for white people for decades and trying feebly to engage people of color voters to stay even though they have not given any of us a reason to do so. The only most people of color vote Dem is because we have a shot to survive with Dems. It is a lie that whites have been left behind and I am not going to indulge in it any longer. Everything in this country is geared towards whites(history, tv, statues, gov policy, the way that the food tastes, everything) and us POC are lef to pick up the scraps that whites don’t want. If you feel that whites have been left behind you need to take a good look at why that happened?
Whites choose to walk away from Dems and not the party kicking out whites. One of my hypotheses which is slowly turning into a theory is that Whites have been leaving the Dems in droves because the Dems are trying to be more inclusive with people other than straight white people, which for some reason scares the fuck out of the “decent” “white working class”. The more progressive the party gets the more straight whites want to leave and skip over to another party. Why? And don’t pull the economic anxiety card because that has been proven false. If you believe in equality why would you want to leave a party that mostly believes in the same thing. Boosting up the middle class and fighting for more people to be treated equally. Why leave when the non-whites non-straights show up to participate?
@grabbyhands
The Republicans worked with extremists and radicals and now we have Don the Con. The puerile reaction at Bernie’s loss during the primaries at the convention told us a lot. Where are these moderates? What do they have to say? Clearly there is a failure in communication, because Bernie bots dominate. Which means, it’s time to look to their own movement before criticising anyone else’s.
Moreover, there seems to be no infighting between the Bernie bros and ‘moderates’. Looks like the bros have already won and define the movement.
To be fair, she devoted a couple paragraphs out of a 512 page book to talk about Bernie. If she hadn’t addressed it at all, it wouldn’t give a complete picture of how/why she lost. It’s not her fault that the media decided to pull this small portion out of the book and feed it to the Bernie Bros in order to rile them up–it’s click-baity and divisive so of course it will “sell papers”.
And you can’t talk about sexism within the context of Trump-supporters and HRC without discussing racism because we all know that when it came down to it, their hatred of a black man superseded their love of country.
They only love black people who parrot their own beliefs. They use them to say “see here’s a real American who doesn’t drink the kool aid.” See: Ben Carson, Sheriff (or former Sheriff) David Clarke, Michael the Black Man (that is really what the blacks for Trump guy calls himself), Omarosa, Diamond and Silk, Candace Owens (Red Pill Black).
I’ve seen some of the Trumpettes I still follow on facebook trot these people out like “see see, not all black people are demoRATS hardy harr harr.”
“Sigh. I’m sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but…wrong time, Hilary.”
Jesus. Do tell us when it’s the right time.
When we take back the Congress then let’s dish it out. Right now more division in this mess helps nothing.
@magnoliarose
That is not going to happen if we cannot even agree on what plan we are going with and how to implement the idea. At this point, I have zero patience for people who regurgitate rhetoric like what you just typed out. You want us to unite but don’t want to do any of the hard work to get to the uniting. In order for us to come together we first have to be on the same page. It has been clear since Dump won that we are not on the same page. We can only get there through talking and airing out all our grievances and then come to a consensus on where we need to go and how to get there. Nothing good will happen until then.
@magnoliarose
“When we take back the Congress then let’s dish it out.”
Life experience has taught me and many of us that that there never is a “right time”. Your solution is as arbitrary and simplistic as any other.
We lost. There is no platform. There are no leaders.
She had said this before and discussed it for months. How does it move anything forward?
You were a supporter. I was not.
We don’t have the same read on what she said. Ten months later, and we are talking about this yet again. Airing out grievances for HRC supporters seems to mean blaming and trying to say she made no mistakes. It was her campaign.
I am politically active, but I don’t want the left to shoot itself in the foot with going over the past when there is nothing new to say. It changes nothing except turn people off, and then they stay home.
First, I wasn’t a HRC supporter. Never wrote that I was a supporter of HRC. I have criticized her several times in fact. I voted for her because she was the best and most qualified for the country. I put what was best for left leaning people above my slight distaste for her.
There is a Dem platform and there are several leaders to get behind. If you want to see their platform go to their website and take a look. I easily found it, so can you. Saying there is no platform is a falsehood that you need to stop spreading.
No one said she did not make mistakes. What you don’t seem to understand is that we are commenting on EXCERPTS from her book. She has spoken about her part in the failure of her campaign as have others. Did you think that she was going to spend 500 pages castigating herself or express her thoughts on the events of the campaign? Why would she beat herself up for the whole book? She was not solely to blame for what happened because she was not the only one in the race.
If we are still talking about something ten months later then nothing has been resolved. That is the problem that needs to be fixed. Maybe you need to think about why you are taking the issue so personally.
If trying to resolve the problem and coming to a consensus “turns people off and makes them stay home” then that those weak minded people need to stay home. Those people were never for equality; they were only about making themselves feel better. They don’t understand sacrifice and are not down for the cause. This is not about their hurt feelings. This is about what is best for the country and our existence as the left. Get over yourself.
She wasn’t the right candidate. There should have been a regular election with voters choosing the nominee period. A lot of people didn’t like being left with no choice at the end. We deserved 4 or 5 people debating the issues, not 2.
Biden could have won. He knows how to talk to the demographic we lost. He would have decimated Trump verbally because Trump is afraid of stronger men. A stronger white guy would have beat him.
I don’t believe Bernie would have won but if HRC had taken some part of the platform she could have won. There were so many that just wanted to be acknowledged and a few progressive ideas supported, and they would have run to her. They were energized and would have been just as hard working for her. But it didn’t happen. All she needed was Michigan.
Hopefully that is one of the many lessons learned from this but I don’t think it is.
I also think Biden could have won, but Hillary faced misogyny and people who hated her husband because he was a Democrat former president. Things she had zero control over. Could she have spent more time in those swing states? In my opinion, yes. But there were certain people who weren’t going to budge either way. All they had to hear was a “successful” business man say “I’m bringing your jobs back” and they were hooked. She wasn’t the perfect candidate to face Trump, but who was really? People came out of the woodwork for him. My husband’s mother is 63 years old and registered to vote after being eligible for 45 years just to vote for Trump. So I say speak your truth Hillary. Because being quiet won’t unite the party. Listening to each other will.
She wasn’t the right candidate but she massively won the popular vote? This is all about blaming Hillary while ignoring all the other factors, as if she was the one that tipped the scales.
@hmmm
No, she wasn’t the right candidate. She lost. She lost 30 states to a walking dumpster fire. She lost to the worst major candidate in U.S. presidential election history… which makes HER the worst major candidate in U.S. presidential election history.
@megan. Exactly! @hmmm. She wasn’t the right candidate. I mean, just break down that sentence. Wouldn’t the right candidate have won? How many people did you speak to that uttered the phrase “the lesser of two evils?”
@merritt. Bernie is not a democrat, thank god for that. Wouldn’t you rather have a politician, whose job it is to represent the people, vote with his conscience, and not the party line. The party system is what’s wrong with the election system. Independents can not vote at the primaries, and why is that? I lean towards the left, very much so, but even the democrats have policies i don’t agree with. I’m surely not unique.
@Megan
She lost by 200K plus votes in 3 swing states. She won an historically massive popular vote. Your hatred for her is obvious in your words and in your refusal to consider other factors.
@Cine Johnson
“Wouldn’t the right candidate have won?”
I’m sure a Trumpster would agree with this kind of illogical statement.
Hillary is right. Bernie is not a democrat but keeps wanting to dictate what the party does. The party needs to bluntly tell him to either join or he needs to shut up because they are done with his bs.
ITA.
I find the Dems to be spineless when it comes to Bernie especially thinking they need his white working class palaver. He owes no allegiance to anyone but himself as he has proven over and over again.
All this. 100% right.
Oh for God’s sake, Hillary may have been the most qualified Presidential candidate in history, but she was never going to win against the obvious right wing neo-Nazi crowd.
Bernie did more to expose corporate schemes & actually discussed inequalities that plague all kinds of Americans every day. He’s pushed for programs that would benefit all of us as opposed to espousing rhetoric about “equal opportunity” without actually doing anything.
Hillary is another corporate hack, but I still voted for her in the general because she was obviously a more stable & reliable choice as President. The DNC is also a fraud.
I’d like too see her doing more work in this disgusting era of Trump as opposed to shading a candidate who she beat in the primaries.
This as well. I voted for Hillary only because Trump is dangerous, which the party should see as a big problem. This election was never going to be won by democrats because the people who pushed the win are the very people the democrats have stopped connecting with.
+1
One of her friends asked her why in the world would she do a speech on Wall Street knowing she was going to run in this climate? How did that work for Romney?
The Clinton’s history with trade and her support of fracking were never going to fly with some people. She had some flaws but I still voted for her.
But you know what? Asking Bernie to leave is asking a large chunk of progressives to follow and believe it or not some blue collar people in the Northern states. It isn’t about him personally. It was always about the agenda. Bashing him for many feels like a rejection of progressive ideas, not Bernie.
He isn’t Obama with all the charisma and charm that makes us all adore him. As a Jew, I can say this. He is every grumpy Jewish uncle that scowls, full of complaints and is a general pain in the a,s but when no one is looking he slips kids a little money for ice cream. He is endearing in his own way but you don’t want to go live with him.
Why not find a bridge?
Bernie voted pretty much the same as Hills during their whole time in congress.
“I’d like too see her doing more work in this disgusting era of Trump as opposed to shading a candidate who she beat in the primaries.”
Wow, she did everything she could.
Hillary is not a hack and the DNC is not a fraud as you say.
I read an interesting article about how the democratic party’s attachment to “regaining the working class”, a group that has been trending more republican for decades, has been a big factor in why the party is failing. Hillary fails to see the problems within the party and that ultimately is why she lost. This continuing narrative against Bernie is not going to bring in his liberal supporters nor change history.
If the democrats want to survive, they need to actually reform their platform. Neither party is viewed positively and ultimately the one who manages to change will survive the next few elections. Otherwise we are probably witnessing that moment where the major parties are replaced.
“I read an interesting article about how the democratic party’s attachment to ‘regaining the working class’ ”
Who do you think is pushing this narrative? I mean, it’s a huge HUGE part of Bernie’s platform, not Hillary’s. And what’s ironic about that is people blamed HRC for not catering enough to the working class so which is it? Are Dems catering too much to WWC or not enough?
Look, liberal economic reform was embraced by the white working class in the 1960s. They happily paid into social programs like Medicaid throughout the ’70s and ’80s even as they were beginning to break away from the Dem party. The reason for their sudden lack of interest can be directly related to the fact that the Dem party began to make available to poor and working class blacks these same social programs. When white people saw the civil rights movement leading to riots in the late ’60s and ’70s, they immediately associated that with urban upheaval, disorder and welfare.
Dems pushed anti-poverty programs to lift up poor black communities and while the income levels rose for blacks, many whites remained stagnant or even declined in terms of income and wealth.
The same tired and quite frankly false, “welfare queen” narrative was trotted out back then and let’s face it: not much has changed since.
I agree with Nicole up-thread and other posters that maybe it’s time to just accept that the white working class vote conservative. Obama was an anomaly and a lot of that was due to his messaging. He gave people hope. Now that they are disappointed and disillusioned with Obama’s presidency it will be doubly hard to get them back. So yes, a large part of this is due to racism as well as a completely unrealistic view of our political system. They don’t seem to grasp that a POTUS doesn’t live to serve *just* them. A POTUS cannot magically get them a job or make their lives better. Trump promised them the world and they believed it and I’m certain that they will end up being disappointed yet again.
WWC is a small portion of the country. They vote against their own best interests. They voted for Drumpf. That kind of uneducated crazy will not be influenced by Dems, ever. POC overwhelmingly voted for Hillary which includes the working class. But let’s not point that out because they aren’t white, and hence, not important.
Absolutely agree with you on all counts.
@ kitten
I respectfully disagree in some areas.
The right has been able to successfully hijack the working class narrative because the left has taken them for granted and forgotten that they are part of the base. Unions were the first and most powerful voting machine in politics for years, and it is by no mistake the Koch brothers and crew aggressively went after them.
Unions were especially helpful for minorities because they were able to get the same benefits and fight for pay through their unions and open path to have a middle-class life. The Republicans could not make a dent in the rust belt because the unions were out there turning out votes. Reliably, locally and statewide. If you noticed the diversity of the crowds that supported the automobile bail out there were all sorts of people including a large number of women.
Republicans don’t want policies that help the working class so throw in
some racism and social tropes like precious snowflakes or liberal snobbery. Even if they didn’t care, they couldn’t turn to the Dems to find another solution.
They aren’t the 30 percent hardcore people. He has lost them, and the polls show it in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. If we leave them there again we will lose all those electors and senate again.
The only reason Bernie won Michigan is that minority working class people don’t have different concerns as southern minorities. It could have been anyone with the same platform and that person would have won.
@magnoliarose,
Why don’t you understand that the working class includes people other than whites? And THEY voted for Hillary. Overwhelmingly.
@magnoliarose-
“Unions were especially helpful for minorities because they were able to get the same benefits and fight for pay through their unions and open path to have a middle-class life. ”
This is the typical romantic and ideological illusion of labor unions that I see so often from liberals.
The truth is that unions were no friends to blacks and it’s revisionist history to make it seem like they were welcoming to the black community. Most blacks ended up in unions out of necessity, lured by the hope for economic prosperity, only to be met with the harsh reality that discrimination still thrived and flourished among the various groups within unions.
In fact, in post-Reconstruction, pre–New Deal era America, blacks faced extremely harsh union discrimination and an indifferent government that typically sided with employers during the great labor-management disputes of that era. During this time, educated black intellectuals and black leaders as well as working class blacks alike wanted a competitive labor market in which black workers could compete without fear of being shut out by cartels formed by white workers. Needless to say, that was not the reality that unions provided for them.
It wasn’t until the New Deal that blacks started to see unions more favorably and that was mainly due to being swept up in the ideological fervor of the time as well as the appealing marriage between government and unions. Later when it became apparent that labor unions in the private sector were in decline, it also became clear that unions didn’t GAF about the unique issues that blacks faced. When they realized that organized labor wouldn’t be the ticket to solving their economic and social issues, they ditched the unions but stayed with the government, which became the leading employer of blacks. This partly explains why blacks are the largest supporter of an expansive Fed govt.
(just a history lesson detour 😉 )
“The Republicans could not make a dent in the rust belt because the unions were out there turning out votes.”
A lot of the unions here in New England vote red, too, and they’ve been voting red for as long as I can remember. I don’t think Bernie’s socialist message would have appealed to them ultimately because they have been brainwashed to believe that economic prosperity is achieved through fiscal conservatism, which is hilarious because the GOP loves to spend. Anyway, unions generally have had a contentious history of racism and rewarding their own. It’s true that they largely voted for Obama last election, but that was only because he was going up against Mitt Romney, who was seen as symbolic of corporate greed with an economic plan that would be detrimental to the working class. Also, Obama got them the auto company bailout, which won many of them over.
Anyway really long post sorry about that..just to end it I will say this: unionized workers make up an ever-smaller slice of the voting populace, with the national unionization rate at just 12 percent.
I say let them vote red!
We should be pandering to minorities, immigrants, POC, LGBTQ and women and let the WWC vote against their own interests all they want. Just tired of being held hostage by these people.
The bigots and 35 percent of the population can eff off.
But we need to win electors. I am all for finding another path, but I don’t know what it is.
I am afraid we are going down the Carter or Mondale road.
Oh yeah, I know things weren’t perfect. But I did learn some things kitten. It is like construction in NYC racist Italians wouldn’t hire black people for the longest time. Hmmm, 45 was in construction, and I am sure he embraced the policy.
This book is about as welcome as a Susan Sarandon political forum. I for one, don’t feel like rehashing the election again and re-open wounds. This is just going to increase the Democratic party’s infighting.
I’m at a loss for what to do with Bernie Bros. I sit on my local board of Dems and there are a few Berniecrats. There is a lot of latent sexism when they talk about HRC and frankly they have some well…not very intelligent viewpoints. For example, last night, one Berniecrat suggested that North Korea hasn’t really threatened the US, that KJU is not really a threat, and we’re all just overreacting. “KJU JUST WOULDN”T attack the US” was his main reasoning. Hmm…ok.
My theory is that Berniecrats are just as brainwashed by right wing & Russian propaganda as any member of the Westboro Baptist Church, they’ve just come to a different conclusion.
Anyway, I along with the other real Dems in the group just smile and nod because the fact is, we do need to bring the Berniecrats in. But they are annoying as heck. We’re supposed to kiss their arses and beg that they join us, but I feel like they are combative, convinced they know better than everyone else and refuse to meet us halfway.
I do NOT want to become another Tea Party, where we are putting up unqualified, nutjob candidates just to appease the Berniecrats.
Is this what Cleo was talking about, the other day? She used “alt-left” in reference to bernie bros?
Please correct me if I am wrong. I thought she was saying that this “alt left” has been around a long time, and that it is used to describe exactly what you have written above. The term has gained attention because of how it is being used now, as deflection, but in reality it’s been a huge issue for years. ??
No. Bernie Bros are not the “Alt-Left” and please let us stop using that term along with “politically-correct”, “pro-life”, the “war on terror” and any other idiotic term invented by the right.
Thanks for the clarification.
So basically, I was pretty much spot on when I decided to not read her posts. That Cleo, not the other Cleo.
Yes exactly and you may have abandoned the thread by the time I posted, but I did reply to Cleo, telling her that her post was problematic and a distortion of facts.
Bernie bots=Drumpf bots, in my estimation. Cultish fanatics riding on emotion and purity.
What a strange post.
I don’t want war with Korea either. What are you talking about?
This doesn’t invalidate the OP’s observation.
The idea that it was all the Bernie Bros fault is just an idiotic idea. It shows a black and white world thinking often. but really if you think that it was just sexism and racism that cost the Democrats the election you are fooling yourself. People need to start paying attention to the issues.
Hillary Clinton is not a terrible person, but she was the wrong candidate for 2016, the Clinton name was too tarnished, and yes that is not all their fault but the fact is on a political level Clinton probably never could have won. Too many people just hate the Clintons.
And the notion that Bernie Sanders went hard on her in primaries is laughable, he didn’t bring up her voting record because he admitted that wasn’t the campaign he wanted to run. Go look at Obama and Clinton’s primary, he went 1000 times tougher on Hillary Clinton. I bet nobody on this site would call Obama sexist or say things like “Why is a junior first term senator dictating policy”.
Bernie Sanders votes consistently with the Democratic party, he’s an independent in theory but in reality, Sanders has always been a vote the Democrats can rely on. He’s the one who’s shifted the Democratic party in the direction of the 15 dollar minimum wage, college for all, and Medicare for all solutions. People like Kamla Harris and Chuck Schumer are coming out in favor for these policies because of how hard Bernie Sanders campaigned for it last year. Hillary Clinton didn’t do that, Hillary Clinton only took on Sanders platform after it became apparent she had to. She didn’t shift the Democrats in the right direction, Sanders did.
No one has said tha it was all Bernie Bros fault. We have said that Bernie Bros are a part of the people who caused Trump to win along with the sexist, racist trifecta of doom Putin, Assange, and the Russian hackers. Also racism played a huge part in his win.
Sexism and racism are huge issues and should not be dismissed. Just because you don’t believe that they don’t have an impact on your life does not mean that it doesn’t. If you are a white woman or a person of color of any gender, take off the glasses and take a long look in the mirror, pick up a history book along with new research and pay attention to what is going on. Racism, Sexism, and the economy are all intertwined.
She was the best candidate on the ticket and for the country if you believe in progressive ideas. She had the ideas and had a plan to make them a reality. Bernie just had ideas put no clue on how to make it happen. She had an idea and real plans to make it happen. Or at least build on what Obama laid down.
Bernie was no cleaner than HRC. There voting recording is 93% the same. BTW Bernie DREAM Act in 2007, for the 90s crime bill, for commodities dereg.. He has as much POC and white middle class blood on his hands as HRC. The REthugs has an arsenal that they were more than ready to use against him if he had somehow beat HRC.
Obama was a Dem and Hillary was a Dem. They were Dems fighting for the Dem ticket it makes sense why they can dictate policy in their OWN PARTY. What is so hard to understand about that? If you are two members of a club you can make suggestions about how the club should look and sound to others. If you are a member of another club barging into someone else’s club and they let you stay it doesn’t make you a member, you are a guest. You don’t get to dictate anything especially when you go out of your way to shit on the other members and tell them they aren’t good enough to be in their own damn club. Bernie is a freeloading independent that votes with Dems because he is ideologically closer to the Dems than Rethugs. Like Rand Paul is for the Rethugs.
He didn’t shift the Dems further left; they were already there. They were just being actual adults and being realistic on how to implement ideas instead of promising the world with no way to pay for the promise, which is what Bernie did. He had no realistic way of paying for any of his ideas and even some of his diehard fans understood that. If you had taken ten minutes to look at her website you would have seen that HRC was already talking about the same things that Bernie was shouting about and she had a legit way to implement it. He could not even go in to any details on his own plans. Stop giving Bernie credit for something he didn’t do.
“The idea that it was all the Bernie Bros fault is just an idiotic idea. ”
No one is saying that. How did you forget Russia and the Republicans?
How did you forget Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin?
@Megan
And Russia.
There are two Megan’s who comment here. I am crazy liberal Megan and I generally disagree with the other Megan, but if Hillary had run a better campaign, Russia would not have mattered, and possibly didn’t matter in the end. I love Hillary, but she isn’t a martyr, nor is she a victim. She didn’t make her case to the voters where she needed to and she didn’t get out the vote where she needed to. Pretending that didn’t happen only weakens the party going forward. Thank god Obama learned from the mistakes of Al Gore because McCain is a trigger happy hawk and this country didn’t need any new wars.
+1 well said
Another reason it doesn’t make sense is that over 10 percent of Republicans voted for HRC and it is not unusual for crossover. What about the Obama voters who went for Trump?
There simply aren’t the number of Bernie Bros people seem to think there are. 90 percent of Bernie’s supporters went for HRC.
Some truths:
1. HRC had plenty of ideas for helping working class.
2. Bernie is just as much a corporate hack as HRC.
3. HRC did not screw Bernie’s nom
4. Bernie would not have beat Trump.
5. Nothing is wrong with the Dem platform.
6. The Dem party’s problems are sabotage by Bernie Bros who aren’t Dems but pretending.
7. And the right wing media machine/ lousy MSM not vetting Trump.
8. And racist idiots who don’t do their voting homework and/or just hate Obama/libs
9. And DT’s manipulation of his base.
10. and Russian hacking/propaganda.
11. HRC warned us.
12. That warning should have been enough.
**applause**
Of course Dems have the policy, but they don’t have the message. They haven’t had an appealing message for years. The weakness isn’t in the ideas, it’s in the marketing and brand. Unfortunately, I see absolutely no evidence the party grasps this reality. Ray Lujan is suggesting the way to win House seats is to care less about reproductive rights, FFS.
Exactly. Nothing more to be said.
I’m stepping out of this thread before my blood pressure rises any further.
This exactly. I keep hearing how she didn’t have a plan for the working class… She did. Most of the things people wanted, dems had plans for also or at least agreed with them. Could she had run a better campaign? Absolutely. She’s disliked by a great number of people and those people will never like her, but her policies could have beat trumps.
**echoesArchieGoodwin applause*** My only qualifier is that many were not aware of her good ideas due to poor messaging. That imo is the only significant respect in which her campaign could have been stronger (as well as VP choice and more presence/handshaking in the rust belt).
This.
@Rapunzel.
Those are the facts. People prefer to be dictated to by their feelings and ride on emotion and faux idealism. That’s how Don the Con won. No hard choices there.
Perfectly said. Thanks.
Rapunzel, rapunzel let down your wisdom 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾💖
Those are your interpretations of the truth. I know written it sounds different than I mean it. I am just offering you another viewpoint so we can move forward so we can get rid of the orange Nazi and his racist minions. We want the same things, so we need to listen to each other and then bury it forever.
If nothing is wrong with the platform why aren’t the Dems winning now? And no one knows what their platform is.
-What was her plan for the working class? I never heard one since she supported trade deals that were not popular with the working class.
-No Bernie is not as much of a corporate hack.
-Some people just didn’t agree with her platform. She is a Hawk, and that was a problem as well as her views on fracking.
-Bernie is problematic, but at the end of the day, 90 percent of his supporters voted for HRC. -Turnout was low across the board for both parties.
-There are not enough Bernie Bros to throw an election. The numbers simply aren’t there. -He got over 13 million votes. She won almost 17 million. There are not even a million bros in existence.
-10 percent of Obama voters went for Trump. 11 percent of Republicans went for HRC.
-Most people know Bernie couldn’t win the election but ignoring their disappointment at the time didn’t help drive them to the polls. It felt condescending, and no one likes that.
It was never as simple as that. It still isn’t but a lot of what you say I agree with 100 percent.
You know, you assume that there’s everything right about Bernie’s platform. Which is why he lost to Hillary. Honestly, you tout that Bernie bros had no influence? What about the swing states, which you fail to mention and where it all mattered the most as far as the electoral college was concerned. And she did have a plan for the working class. That’s why they voted for her in droves; *they just weren’t white*.
As for ignoring the “disappointment’ of the Bernie bros…. there’s the crux of it all. It’s a ride on emotion and feelings. Time to grow the hell up. It was embarrassing to watch their disruptive display during the convention after Bernie lost. It was about hurt feelings and their very own disappointment, not principles.
On another note, It seems to me that the Bernie bros are and continue to be pretty white centric (as he is).
Why do you equate Bernie with Bernie bros? I am talking about progressives. I have never met a Bernie bro in my life. I know they exist, but they seem to be bigger in the discussion than they ever really were in numbers.
They were a bunch of a-holes. I hope they slink back into the pit they crawled out of, but they don’t represent progressives.
@magnoliarose
Do you think Bernie bros are any different from Bernie? I’m not seeing a difference. Do you think you are different from Bernie bros? Not seeing much difference. You think you and Bernie are progressive? Bernie is a misogynist and white centric.
You think there are no Dems who are progressive? That you’ve cornered the progressive market? How special.
Bravo Rapunzel!
Truth. All of it.
Listen, I’m not a bro and I’m not anywhere near a Trump voter. I grew up pretty poor, tied on the college debt that is the hallmark of my generation, and couldn’t even get a job in the field. My husband and children are Hispanic so I don’t fit the “oh so white” Bernie supporter mold.
Bernie talked about universal healthcare, for real. He talked about affordable college. He talked about taxing the 1% for real. He talked like a socialist becuase he is one, and so am I. Bernie didn’t pull the wool over anybody’s eyes on this. Yes I want change, and the Democratic Party isn’t offering it in any real form. I want a nation of free people who live within a society that functions for the good of all. I want hard work to pay off. I want my fellow Americans treated like human beings. Hillary didn’t speak to me at all. Sorry Hillary, this isn’t Bernie’s fault.
Thanks for posting your POV on this. I want that for you guys too, though I think you are not going to get it 🙁
It’s almost like the country should just split apart and form 2 separate governments, with time to move to the country you want to live in.
ok, totally not doable but it’s at least something else to think about, in between crying and raging over what is happening.
Bernie is no real socialist. He’s all talk. He’s as corporate as any other career pol and folks were just wooed by his talk. And he puts his talk before people. Case it point: being willing to sacrifice reproductive rights for a win.
Anyone thinks Bernie blowhard would actually be a good president or accomplish his agenda as Pres. Is delusional.
With all due respect, you can’t just say he’s all corporate and not back that up. Why is it that so much of what people have to say against Bernie is pure conjecture or hyperbole? The situation is complicated, Bernie spoke to the people who had been left behind. Please don’t erase that.
@Ummm,
Bernie may have spoken to some people who felt left behind, but obviously Hillary spoke to more of them as she not only beat him in the primaries, but also massively won the popular vote against Don the Con.
@hmmm
She didn’t win the popular vote where it mattered the most. That’s why she isn’t president. In the U.S. , you have to do better than just stockpile votes from California and New York (which is what Hillary did, she lost the popular vote easily in the other 48 states.)
@Megan, actually she won the popular vote in 21 states, they just weren’t the right 21 states. This was a nail biter of an election, the giant swaths of red on Trump’s favorite map notwithstanding. His largest margins of victory were in states with few electoral votes. In the key states Hillary lost (the ones with the most electoral votes), Trump’s margin of victory was not always large, and in some cases was shockingly small.
– Michigan (16 electoral votes), Trump won by 11,000 out of 5.5 million votes
– Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes), Trump won by 50,000 out of 6 million votes
-Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Trump won by 15,000 out of 3 million votes
If she had won those three states, she would now be President Clinton. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena holds more people than Trump’s combined margin of victory in those three states.
Rapunzel trolls are on sale for 2.99. You squeeze them, and they fart out “BERNIE BROS!”
I think those ideas are great but I also don’t have enough faith in America to pull it through. Here in California we tried to get universal healthcare passed and even our liberal state politicians couldn’t pass it through. I actually think a Medicade for all program might work though since the public opinion on ACA has increased drastically.
My problem is the Bernie crowd turning on everyone and claiming they are a corporate hack if they say “yeah, I agree but I also think that will be near impossible to pass and we need to take it one step, instead of one leap, at a time.” Hillary actually had a good plan for free public college for those whose parents made under $200 k and she got slammed for it. It would have been a good first step to eventually free public college for all.
The centrist wing of the Dems aren’t innocent either but I definitely get the frustration with the fact that a large chunk of the DSA seems incapable of pragmatism.
So does that mean you voted for Jill Stein whose platform was almost identical to Bernie’s? If so…LMAO.
Bernie the Mouth is the other side of the Don the Con coin. Take a look at his less than dynamic performance over the years. What did he ever make better? His words are as cheap as Don the Con’s.
If you want to make it better, join the Dems and work within the party. But don’t ignore the facts about Hillary’s contributions and the lack thereof from Bernie the Mouth.
Patricia- What has Bernie actually done as a Senator? What has he accomplished? It’s fine that he says all these great things, but what are his plans for getting these great things done?
You can’t be all talk, no action.
For what it’s worth, I’m a lifelong (left leaning) Independent, so I don’t belong to any parties.
No Bernie defender has come up with a list of his accomplishments. Still waiting….
Oh and screw this “HRC needs to let it go”. DT keeps using her for deflection and she can say what she wants.
i totally agree. She is still being dragged through the media and ridiculed and if this is cathartic for her after the horrendous campaign she had to endure, then more power to her.
She has nothing to lose . She is not perfect, nor is any political campaign and hopefully she will take responsibility for whatever SHE considers her faults.
No woman with a modicum of personal power should ever bow to oppressive treatment- because this continues to be about still trying to shut her up and put her in her place. I find her heroic, because amidst enormous and relentless negative pressures she will not stand down and always stands up for herself and others.
It’s Katy Perry igniting a fake fued with Taylor Swift for this woman at this point. The election is a competition. Your “team” lost and now you are throwing shade at your “teammates” as if it’s still Hillary show. In the word of Rupaul – “we need to see some vulnerability from you” / “we want to see the real Hillary”. It’s not cute to keep throwing people under the bus AFTER “the show” ends.
I wish they BOTH would go away. It is time for new faces like Harris & Kennedy and the like.
Yes. I am tired of them too.
The Bernie Bros have been going after Harris though.
Exactly Bernie’s minions and Bernie Bros are now they are going after Kamila Harris a strong Democratic leader, who is getting a lot of attention as a future party leader and possible Presidential candidate.
They see she is strong and are trying to already sow the seeds of divisiveness against her. She’s an amazing woman. I hope she runs in 2020 Democratic candidate for President.
This feels divisive and ultimately unhelpful.
And it only helps Trump.
Berinie is a Hypocrite. Bernie ONLY HELPS Trump and the GOP, all he does is put down Democratic Party, while not joining it. Bernie lost by 4million votes to Hillary. I’m sick of him, he’s a hypocrite.
Like Trump, Bernie never showed his taxes either. He’s a hypocrite.
Bernie may not BE a democrat, but they certainly count on his voting with them.
He was working in the 60’s with civil rights activists. As a mayor in Vermont he was supporting gay pride parades…. in the 80’s, when the rest of the nation was gripped in the AIDS scare. He supported same sex marriage from the start. He DIDN’T support the Iraq war.
He is a good man that has spent his entire adult life working to make others lives better. More often than not, he was on the right side of history the first time around.
He isn’t the reason she lost. Continuing to put any focus on him as an excuse is losing sight of the real problem. The extreme efforts Republicans put into stripping people of their voting rights. Gerrymandering. The ability of a foriegn government mess with our elections. Years of Republicans working to convince the American populace she was untrustworthy. Shade that, maybe.
I respect Hillary, I voted for Hillary. Bernie Sanders isn’t why she lost, and dragging him does her no favors.
She didn’t say that Bernie is why she lost, though. She said that some of the Sanders-supporters played a huge hand in the false equivalencies that helped Trump to win and I happen to think she’s right.
It doesn’t mean that gerrymandering and foreign interference weren’t huge (and maybe even more influential) factors as well.
I mean, she’s right, but that’s how campaigns play out whenever there’s any semblance of real competition. A lot of the worst stuff that plagued Obama came from Hillary supporters in 08, some of it from the actual campaign.
It sucks, but that’s always how it’s going to be with this system. If you have people on the same side fighting it out for over a year, you’re going to gift wrap the other side a ton of talking points in the process. It’s stupid and counter-productive, but it’s nothing new, and it’s not the first time it’s cost the better candidate the Presidency.
No, she just “shaded” the man as not a real democrat, ignoring that he has been voting with, for, and suporrting Democrats the entirety of his political career.
Can she say the same?
Short answer? No.
I admire the woman, but holy cow, this nonsense about Bernie Sanders not being *real* Democrat is bullsh*t hairsplitting of the lowest order. He’s been fighting the good fight the entirety of his political career. He is an admirable human being, willing to stand up and fight for things that will make America a better, stronger nation. He is on our side.
Go snipe at the people deserving of it it all I am saying.
And blaming “bernie bros” is a waste of time. There are real problems Democrats face, that small group of assh*les didn’t lose her the election. Voter disenfranchising did. F*cking Comey… that guy deserves some shade, how about a media that completely failed the American people in giving the populace real facts about the canidates. Also shade worthy.
Bernie Sanders voted for her. He supported her. He had differing ideas on the issues the country needed to focus on. But he ran an honorable campaign that focused on the issues facing the American people, and blasted those that tried to run down on Hillary over emails, Benghazi, and other right wing hack bullsh*t, as opposed to encouraging them so he could win votes. As opposed to *shading* her.
I just want Democrats to stop insulting people on our side and face the real enemy.
@happyoften
Unless Bernie joins the Democratic Party, he’s not officially a Democrat. This is a basic syllogism. You can’t twist it into something else. He never committed to Dem principles or the institution except for $$$$$ and when it suited him.
As I said up-thread, some of you are making it seem like she wrote an entire book slamming Bernie for her election loss when in reality she dedicated a few short sentences out of a 512 page to Bernie’s influence in the outcome of the election.
Perspective, people. Context, people. Both important.
@ hmmmm
My point is that democrats count on his support when it matters, he caucuses with them, he helped give them the senate majority when they needed that vote. So this nonsense about him not supporting dems until he wanted to run for president is crap.
I think she can save her insults for those that didn’t vote for her is all. There are plenty of people deserving, but Bernie Sanders ain’t on that list. That she wrote one sentence demeaning what he has spent his entire career doing (i.e. supporting democratic policies) says more about her than it does him.
@happyoften
He has supported the Dems but he is NO Democrat. That’s what she is saying but you have to make it something negative and blame her for it.
I blame her for her backhanded insult to a man with a exemplary democratic voting record for the purpose of delegitimizing his run as a democrat. She is basically saying she shouldn’t have been primaried and throwing the lack of a unified front at HIS feet. Nonsense. President Obama managed to unify the Democratic party, and THAT was a contentious primary. Holy cow.
She won. Just not by the numbers necessary to overcome all of the Republican’s interference in select states. Bernie supporters overwhelmingly voted for Hillary. He voted for her. Sheesh
Again, there is blame to be spread, and things at which to point judgey fingers. Bernie Sanders, cranky old too liberal for the dems coot that he is, shouldn’t count amoung them.
I have a list if she needs one.
@happyoften, thank you and well said. Bernie is a democrat in terms of what it’s supposed to mean. HRC is a DNC “dem.” Former is in spirit what the latter is in name only.
What did Bernie ever produce in the government that mattered?
I think he’s done a lot on the state level for Vermont but in terms of the Fed level I’d be hard-pressed to point to anything revolutionary– I mean in a legislative sense, not ideologically speaking.
What has Hillary ever produced that mattered?
Just a reminder, there are two Megan’s who post on CB. This is crazy liberal Megan who is here to say Hillary has produced a whole hell of a lot that matters …
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/carly-fiorina-debate-hillary-clintons-greatest-accomplishment-213157
That’s what I keep asking. I think Bernie fans inflate his “accomplishments” more than they should. There’s nothing wrong with being realistic in this sense.
I just read the other day that the man who was in charge of CNN programming during the election was a friend of the Wonder Twins. He purposely skewed the amount coverage so he would be able to get his message out for free and cut down on HRC except for the negatives. Dirty. But 45 hates CNN now, so I guess they broke up.
Do you think it is wrong to enjoy Bannon trashing the Wonder Twins aka Javanka? lol
The Democratic Party is going the way of the Republican Party. Splintered into various factions and eventually taken over by a more militant wing of the party. Republicans allowed the far right extremists/tea party contingent to muscle its way in and eventually take over the entire party. Now every republican is scared to death of them.
The Democratic Party won’t survive if it can’t unify and pull its various factions together. Centrists and more left leaning members had better figure out how to co-exist and work together otherwise they’ll just keep losing elections. And as far as I’m concerned, the Bernie Sanders contingency should stop trying to hijack the Dem Party and just do the hard work necessary to build their own party from the ground up; rather than take the easy way and try to usurp a national party.
I truly wish there were more voting choices in this country and we had more political parties to represent voters interest. This current two Party system is unsustainable.
I think some of the Bernie supporter comments were actually Russian bots and Trump supporters working hard to turn people against Hillary. Some things said were outrageous but the alt-right loved it. Hillary is right, though, Bernie was obviously NOT running as a democrat (although he ran in that arena) so this became a serious problem for Hillary, along with Russia and the fact that people prefer men who yell (there were two of them) but not women.
Agreed. The Russian bots had no problem inflaming the Bernie cultists.
Hillary was a bad candidate. Too tarnished, too hated. But I think the reason a lot of Bernie-Bros didn’t get on board when she got the nomination is misogyny. She probably reminded the recently fledged white boys of their mom, and they don’t want to be bossed by a woman any more. Add to that the white men who were driven to distraction by a black president and no way anyone but a white male stood a chance. I think Obama screwed Hillary in 08. We could have had her, then him if he would have waited. And he’s young enough that it would have been very plausible. To top it off she’s pragmatic. Tells it like it is, doesn’t make promises she can’t keep. The president isn’t a fairy godmother who can just grant single payer or free college with the stroke of a wand. And the “free college” program just rolled out here in NY, with Bernie standing next to our governor, is a joke.
Hillary was not a ‘bad’ candidate. She was an eminently qualified candidate smeared by Republicans for decades.
Since when do people give credenceand validation to bullies and their propaganda? Hillary didn’t, her popular majority didn’t, but obviously you have.
She was hated beyond reason. Had a lot of baggage. She was a bad candidate. Even in 08, but at least that was pre Benghazi, and we were so desperate for an anti Bush that I think she could have won then. But a young, far less qualified, far less experienced man came along and bested her. Why? Because he had no baggage. No one knew enough about him to hate him. And even if he was black at least he had a penis. I’m not saying she isn’t qualified. I’m saying many voters are stupid.
As I said upthread, Hillary was a bad candidate. She WAS reviled. She WAS polarizing, and obv she still is. Being a bad candidate means she didn’t have a strong chance of winning. She was very, very qualified (tho the feminist in me wishes her qualifications didn’t come by way of a wedding ring.) … IMO she just had too much baggage. winning the popular vote is not an expression of where this country voted, and this is why the electoral college is in place. i think we’d be better off if the ‘popular’ vote wasn’t polled. it does no good —
@Cine Johnson
Hillary won the popular vote. You refuse to accept it and the will of the people. Your logic it totally nuts. And you are NO feminist.
All about her, except the whole taking responsibility for a crap campaign thing.
We’re going to get an R President in 2020 because Democrats just cannot get out of their own way.
^THIS
She absolutely did take responsibility for the campaign. Do your homework before spouting lies and manufacturing propaganda
I rest my case. Enjoy Trump 2020
WTH is wrong with you? Your response doesn’t even make sense. It’s a fact that Hillary did take responsibility for the campaign. Only a bot/troll would ignore the easily found facts in front of their face and go on an irrational tangent, living the MAGAt fantasy, probably in Russia. No one in the actual, real world is stupid enough to believe your propaganda.
she took responsibility in the sense that she said the campaign was her responsibility, and she made the decisions. but she continues to qualify that by stating over and over again the reasons (she believes) she lost. i’m old school, i guess, because pointing fingers (addressed above) is not the action of a person truly accepting responsibility.
@ Cine Johnson
You’re not old school. Just lacking in logic.
I agree, Kimble. HRC just can’t stop pointing fingers.
Bernie should have run as the Independent he is. Since we’ve never had a viable third party that builds from the ground up(hey, forget about electing Indy mayors and governors, let’s go for the top job every time)he would probably serve as a spoiler like Perot and Nader, but it would spare this internecine fighting.
The money mattered more.
HRC has every right to let her (mostly justifiable) anger out. I’m just worried that the infighting is going to continue. The biggest obstacle is that neither side of the Democratic party seems to putting a hardcore effort into tackling gerrymandering and voter suppression….that is our number one problem after the Voting Rights act was more or less gutted in ’12.
The infighting is not her fault.
In 2008 die hard HRC supporters were the originators of the birther idea. Fact check.com and Politico archives have the proof. There were some racist overtones in her campaign that everyone seems to forget. Obama forgave her, but some of us never forgot it. Michelle took a little longer, but they became friends because he won. If he hadn’t what would we be saying now?
That is why I can’t go with her with this. It is like 45 conveniently forgetting history but going on and on about the election.
We need healing and moving forward. But opening wounds lead to other memories that we buried in 2008.
The infighting is still Not. Her. Fault.
The ‘Not Hillary’ enablers still can’t seem to move on until they are ‘healed’.
Lol at this “Dems can’t get anything done/Dems don’t play nice” talk… Dems brought all recent social reform/protections. And they reach across the aisle all the time. It’s GOP that’s inept and obstructionist.
And this “Dems are screwing themselves for 2020 with infighting/no message/no unity” talk is BS. It’s Right wing anti dem propaganda to scare Dems into giving up. And distract from the real truth: the toxic GOP is being destroyed by Trump and his MAGA crew, who are exposing the GOP’s toxic racist idiotic heartlessness.
Truth: This is the right’s last gasp. They will die, not the left.
Agreed. Anything to distract from the imploding Republican machine. Another false equivalency served up.
Also- F–k anyone who says the Dems need to examine what they did wrong or it wasn’t all the Republicans fault. HRC warned us all. The Dems warned us (Except faux Dem Bernie Bros). It’s all on those who didn’t listen.
Voters for anyone other than Hillary seem to have no problem blaming others especially Hillary while never blaming themselves. Don the Con is still using her as a punching bag and scapegoat for the ills of the universe enabled by those very same voters. So who’s keeping the ‘infighting’ going?
When is Bernie going to show his taxes? Oh like Trump, he’s not?
Also Bernie and his wife are under FBI Investigation for a possible Multi-million dollar fraud that closed a Northern College. So much for Mr. man of the people. He is a con. I never trusted him.
Hillary is 100percent right.
Bernie is NOT A Democrat. He is a fraud, imo.
@lavn,
Good point. Where are Bernie’s taxes? What has he got to hide? So far he’s a lot of hot air with no results to show for it for decades. Except an investigation into his $$$$ dealings.
@lavn -wow. i’ll bet when HRC was under investigation, you screamed “propaganda! the truth will out!” yet here you are just KNOWING bernie is going to be found guilty.
I will say that minorities and other marginalized communities are side-eyeing this “poor white America we’ll take care of you” schtick the Dems are pushing HARD. If the party decides to go full throttle with the “Great White Economic Dream” at the expense of “identity politics” (nevermind the fact that some of us can’t change our race or our gender when the going gets tough) in 2018 and 2020 you will have lost that key part of the base for a long time. Dems will be seen as no better in pandering and using than their republican counterparts, and seeing the way the demographics are changing in the States that’s not a risk I think the party should take.
Regressing to just an economic perspective is what they want, but life is wayyy more nuanced than that. People of all walks and colors of life need protecting. Equality in everything (money, education, social rights etc) is a good thing don’t let an orange oompaloompa and people who fell for a con tell you otherwise.
Dems would be pandering. As if there are not millions of non-white, marginalised, poor/working class folk. They would be morons of the first order to be so craven. Then America is really sunk.
Great job, Hills. Make sure the narrative going into 2018 is your continued bitterness. Keep the focus on yourself. That’ll win those elections.
The Economist called Hilary a republican in disguise. Most of her economic policies leaned conservative. She didn’t back reproductive freedom till very recently when her campaign decided to make 2016 about feminism. Until then she was toeing the Christian majority voter line. I resent when people claim Bernie supporters are sexist or girls who want to get laid. For a lot of us young people facing minimum wage part time gigs, back breaking life long college debt and cannot afford healthcare, Bernie was speaking for US. Hilary needs to man up and stop pointing fingers. She messed up her own campaign. She underestimated Trump and didn’t talk enough about the economy because her campaign was all about #feminism when it’s about the economy, stupid. She decided not to campaign in important states because she thought she had it in the bag and those went trump. She was entitled and complacent and that lost her what should have been a walkover victory.
Yes. One other element, which I believe played a part in the election outcome: Voters see who Hillary has stuck with lo these many years (that would be the disloyal, dissolute Bill) and who her number one aide, Huma, likewise sticks with (the disloyal, dissolute Anthony), and conclude that Hillary, despite all the hype is not a strong woman. She makes highly questionable decisions for someone seeking to be seen as a role model and leader.
I couldn’t care less about Huma or Hilary’s decisions regarding their husbands. I actually find it incredibly sexist to call them out for staying with their cheating husbands. What decision you make regarding your partner has no bearing on whether you’re a strong woman or not, so shut it. IMO that has nothing to do with policy, it’s their personal lives and does not reflect them as political leaders. I only care about her policy decisions and track record. Hilary’s hawkish stance gives me pause.
Having said that Hilary all the way when it’s Hilary vs Trump. I just think she should stop blaming Bernie supporters. It sounds like whining.
Uhm, Bill was a good president and despite many flaws, is a good man. They obviously care about one another and their personal life should remain just that.
Don the Con is on his third wife and cheated on each one. Yeah, let’s talk about Bill’s sins and how it’s Hillary’s fault for staying in the marriage and being associated with him. She’s so weak, not like that macho Don.
@lightpurple. bill was a good president and is a good man? dear lord. your opinions are your own, of course, but the man is scum. he LIED to the grand jury, under oath. he was DISBARRED from practicing law. at the very least, we must say he is a liar, and a liar of his magnitude does not a good man make. and btw, guess who it was relaxed the banking regulations that led to massive home foreclosures and bad mortgages? you know, the bankers who paid he and his wife QUITE a sum of money on the lecture circuit.
You’re still holding Bill Clinton’s feet to the fire after all these years? He is not the root of all evil ffs.
@moon: agree, agree, agree. I haven’t like Hillary since 2002, but using her husband’s infidelity against her is insane and incredibly sexist. Just not relevant.
I haven’t read the book so I’m asking – does it address why she didn’t visit Michigan or Wisconsin during the most crucial stretch? Is that Bernie’s fault too? Or is misogyny to blame? Were decades of GOP attacks the reason she didn’t make those trips, didn’t keep her voting pool databases current, and just kind of relied on automatically getting/being entitled to the votes of all the people there who had previously voted for Obama? Just wondering. 🙂
(And I voted for her in the general because I felt I had to – it was a vote for SCOTUS, the EPA, DACA, etc.)
“Everybody’s To Blame Except Me” is what she should have titled her book.
She took responsibility. Only propagandists tell it differently- i.e., LIE.
@CC: exactly.
Lifelong Democrat here. Always respected Bernie’s independence in the Senate, but very confused as to why our Dem leadership allowed him to join our party primary in the first place. Why was he given access to all of our funding and infrastructure without being required to join our party? I give money to the Dem party to support Dems and our platform, not other parties. By not following boring, basic political party rules, our Dem leadership got us into this mess. I blame them for this, and not Bernie.
At this point it’s behind us, though. We need to press on and get Trumpkin lawfully removed. One thing I would like to hear from Bernie, however, is what he thinks about all the bot swarms (perhaps financed by Russia?) that were used to signal boost his candidacy and that still are programmed to rush to his defense. These bots are threatening our democracy, as dashboards like Hamilton68 demonstrate.
I think it’s been determined now that it is definitely true … Bernie had a lot of supporters but some of them were fake as a result of Russian bots.
He tried to Primary Obama the second term run. O was not having it!
Bernie has been badmouthing Obama, Hillary and Democrats for years. They should have never let him run as a Democratic Party. He used the Democratic Party to make money, for fame and to disrupt, especially when he found out he could not win. He stayed in and stirred the distruption even more. He had no chance of winning after the NY, PA, NJ primaries but stayed in claiming he had a chance.
He also tried to get the Delegates to go his way AFTER Hillary had already won them with REAL VOTES by April, May. Bernie was trying to do the same thing he accused Hillary of. I can’t stand the man.
His peeps , Bernie bros, etc are already going after Kamila Harris, a woman, a person of color, who is popular and a strong Democrat Senator with a strong future for the Democratic Party.
Let’s not forget, please, that Bernie had a massively successful grassroots outreach, an innovative tech fundraising approach, and wildly popular, viral, appealing ads – developed by his own people, and a huge amount of volunteers… with many of them homemade, fueled and spread by passion and conviction… not DNC or party dollars.
He inspired a volunteer network of supporters nationwide – offering their homes, transportation, food, all manner of goods and services and help – to each other, solely because of their shared admiration for a candidate and a campaign. A Hillary campaign counterpart openly admitted to me once that he was insanely jealous because Bernie supporters fired themselves up, and did most of the hard work themselves.
There’s a serious, practical reason the Dems have begged, pleaded, threatened, and tried everything possible to get their paws on Bernie’s mailing list.
All of the above was generated by people who were not so enthusiastically offering the same to Hillary, or to the Democratic Party, or in support of the DNC.
DNC dollars and Hillary and party infrastructure did not accomplish the above – nor did they speak to & energize– in an unprecedented way, to such an unexpected extent – people who wanted to hear something distinctly different.
Those people heard Hillary Clinton’s message, funded and framed by traditional campaign and party financing; but they chose to listen to Bernie, whose message was powered by peers and volunteers.
@returningvisitor: yes! ^^^^^^^^^
In that particular passage, it doesn’t sound like she’s blaming Bernie for her loss, but possibly asking why he’d potentially/accidentally want to play a part in helping someone as horrifying like Donald Trump win.
Had she lost to someone like Joe Biden, I don’t think that passage would have been written, or, alternatively, the passage may have been written differently (i.e “He certainly shared my horror at the thought of Donald Trump becoming President..”).
Burn lol. Love her.
Man, the level of rich privilege is off the charts here. LOL. Only a rich person can blow through a billion dollars, lose and blame her primary challenger for the loss. LOL. Guess Bernie made her lose in 08, too? And her whining about “impugning her character,” OMG, are you kidding me? Hey, HIll, remember how vicious you were against Obama and he was with you? Remember saying you stayed in the race in case Obama was assassinated, a la Robert Kennedy? If Bernie had said something even .001 remotely close to something like that. Thank God your running for office days appear to be over.
Do you know Bernie was never vetted? If he was the nominee 45 would have tear him to bits. He left him alone and focused all his hate on Hillary. Do you know Bernie wife is under federal investigation because she misused million of dollars. 45 would have killed them with lies and innuendos. No one mentioned that 45 has given speeches for million dollars a pop. Hillary was not treated fairly by the media, they gave 45 over a billion dollars of free publicity. He used to call up all the media everyday and was given free time because he was good for ratings with all his buffoonery. No one knew at the time that there were so many racists people who were willing to vote for a fool just to get a border wall or to stop brown people for coming to the country or staying in the country. Last night Rachael meadows show had a clip of a video of Sessions two years ago lamenting that there were too many none white in the country and the laws has to change in order to bring this back to a majority white country.
We should leave investigations alone since she has had problems too, but I agree he would not have won. I don’t think he would have.
The whole thing was not set up right in the beginning. Give people a handful of candidates, and it would have been a different outcome.
She has no problems. She was cleared from everything that came her way. And yet, you @magnoliarose, see fit to perpetuate the smearing and innuendo.
Tangential thought: I think some people misunderstood what Bernie really wanted and what he truly stood for. He was not Obama’s natural successor. Hillary was. Hillary LITERALLY campaigned as Obama’s third term. Bernie was actually quite critical of Obama in alot of areas and wanted to shake up the whole political system. Hell, that was part of his appeal. He and Trump were both change candidates in a change election. So while I believe Bernie is sincerely horrified by Trump and his policies, I bet he is unbothered by the fact he helped hasten the destruction of the Clinton/Obama Democratic party (i.e., essentially pro capitalism but with some regulation, moderate to slightly hawkish in the area of national security, etc)
Exactly. If Clinton had won, it would be very much akin to a third term of Obama as both were very much in-line with each other politically.
Thank GOD that didn’t happen, right?
*eyeroll*
Also it’s worthwhile saying that HRC had one of the most progressive platforms this country has ever seen, even slightly more liberal than Obama but yes, let’s keep up this BS “she was a bad corporate candidate Republican in disguise narrative”.
*another eyeroll*
@kitten. Obama and HRC may have aligned politically, but not professionally. You see the difference? Obama is not a scandal-ridden liar, and his platforms were not born out of a desire to win at all costs. HRC cannot say the same. good lord, the flip-flopping that woman did. sure, she was super qualified, and she had a good plan, but implementing that plan is a whole other thing. HRC simply lacked convictions, and the public saw this. she sold her political soul and the debt would have to be repaid. trump is a despot and a despicable human, and i believe a better candidate would have torn him to shreds.
Wow. They have the exact same policies. You’re shredding HRC for bullshit. You bought into the HRC hate. Boo.
@CineJohnson
“Obama and HRC may have aligned politically, but not professionally. ”
This is gobbledy gook.
Why won’t the deranged media investigate the real scandal: Why did alternate-timeline President H.R. Clinton use experimental time travel technology to help the Russians hack the election in favor of Donald Trump? Trump knows the truth–that HRC made him president with her awesome temporal engineering technology from the future, but whatever comes out of his mouth is indistinguishable from lunacy, because this timeline is itself so preposterous: “No puppet. No puppet. She’s the puppet.”
Once the interest around this book dies down I hope progressively minded people can start looking for a leader we can all get behind.
Hillary the manipulative complainer is back blame everyone except you for your failed campaign as long as there are people to support these none sense why will you stop.I just pray the democratic one day wakes up to your foolish games and distance themselves from these pathetic attempt to shift blame for something you caused not only on yourself but the whole America which was deprived from voting a genuine authentic candidate.The only one I blame for this disaster is you Hillary and your guilt will not stop you from blaming others with stupid books to make you look like a credible candidate.Save your games for the naive.
Stop worrying about the democrats. Worry about your lier in chief. We will be fine. Don’t come here trying to start nonsense. If I was a Republicans I would be worrying that 45 cannot get over 35% favorable and 60% unfavorable for the last three months. We will turn out next November.
@Daphne
Your comment is not even literate. You sound like a Russian, so hahahahaha!
If Bernie Sanders can b*tch about the Democratic Party from day after the election to the People’s summit and beyond, Hillary Clinton can call him out on his sh*t.
The problem with the “let’s focus on Trump” mantra that always pops up when people want to take bernie supporters,progressive/liberal white men and their faves to task i.e. when writers on the left went after Sen. Kamala Harris, Bill Maher’s House N*gger mess, Bernie + crew endorsing a mayoral candidate with pro-life views to the detriment of Democratic women, is that it is used selectively to quash debate.
And frankly as a PoC, I’ve dealt with my concerns being brushed off to serve some “greater good” enough to know that it’s only a excuse to ignore those concerns. I’m tired of being treated like a pariah because I actually like my party and our leaders.
As to how this relates to 2018 and 2020 and beyond, we’re not going to win anything if losing candidates take on a Sanders 2016 post primary type role. And when Hillary did it in 2008 for 4 days, she caught hell for it and had to capitulate at the convention and quite frankly, it’s about time Sanders did as well.
Bernie is a sexist old white dude. There isn’t much difference between him and Trump. The people who voted for him were duped. He said what he did to get his base whipped into a frenzy the same way Trump did and still does. Bernie’s ideas were just that – ideas. He didn’t have any plans to make them happen. I’m glad HRC is saying this stuff. She did take blame for her part but most of her loss was due to people thinking that a woman isn’t good enough to be POTUS. Bernie wasted no time seizing on that sentiment and using it to his advantage.
I think most people are looking at this ass-backwards. The reason we are at risk of getting Trump 2020 isn’t because “HRC cannot take responsibility for her loss.” It’s because too many people are *only* blaming HRC for that loss.
Riddle me this: The Dems have been bleeding House, Senate and State legislative seats since 2009. Explain to me why that is big bad HRC’s fault? Doesn’t that suggest there are bigger problems with
a) the Democratic brand overall
b) Democratic organization at the state level
c) getting out the Dem base vote? (It appears the only time we are truly engaged and motivated to show up at the polls is for President Obama)
Some of this can be explained by gerrymandering but not all of it.
And please (to paraphrase dopey little Marco Rubio) can we dispense with this fiction that Bernie would’ve been a slam dunk winner in the general election and the nomination was stolen from him? I think the lingering anger from *some* Bernie voters is a big reason the Democrats are still unable to get their act together. HRC did not steal that nomination from him. Clearly the DNC was rooting for their fellow Dem, and yes it would’ve been advantageous for Bernie if there had been more debates, etc But the truth is Bernie was not even close to beating HRC. It’s not like 2008 when HRC & Obama basically tied (Obama got 17,535,458 to her 17,493,836 and when you include the MI primary HRC actually got *more* votes for the 2008 nomination. ) HRC trounced Bernie 16,914,722 to 13,206,428. You have to admit that the few shady things pulled by the DNC was not enough to make up for 3 million votes, particularly when Obama faced many of the same obstacles Bernie did (e.g., the super delegates were initially aligned with HRC in 2008 too, Obama didn’t have high name recognition initially either, etc.) I wish the Bernie supporters would just admit he had trouble connecting with many rank and file Democratic minority voters. That was a big reason he did not win the nomination and it had nothing to do with HRC or the shenanigans of the DNC. While African American voters were not likely to ever go to Trump in large numbers they could easily have stayed home and flipped key purple states to Trump. Moreover, it’s foolish to underestimate Trump’s ability to label and destroy his opponents. I have no doubt Trump would’ve tagged Bernie a perverted crazy old Communist. Lastly, Bloomberg was set to run as a third party candidate if Bernie won so more moderate voters had someone they could support. You don’t think he would’ve siphoned off many of the moderate leaning Dems? Think again.
If we could move past this unfounded bitterness and stop attacking one another it would be incredibly helpful. We would be able to focus on why the Dem Party has been annihilated over the last 8 years. That’s the only way we’ll be able to rest control back from the GOP and the Orange Hitler.
Thats what is wrong with the American political party system– just two parties who spend more time fingerpointing and reversing/undoing any progress of the other, that everything is going NOWHERE and in the meantime monopolies and lobbies are taking over in the background. Whoever buys out the greedy party members keeps them in office and get laws in their favor, so the party can for 4 years be venemous to the other party, and this just goes in circles. Who wins? NO ONE. So much time is sent just bashing each other and not actually making factual debates about problems and their solutions. “the dems/republicans did this” is NOT a solution!!!
Hasn’t it been proven the Democrates screwed Bernie over? Why would a man want to identify with the party that never wanted him??
“He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House.”
No one should do that. Country before party, not the reverse.
@Raquel: exactly.
Bish, please.
Bernie Show your taxes, Hypocrite, like Trump you never showed your taxes.
Also Bernie never talks about that investigation the Sander’s are under for missing funds.
He’s a con man. Can’t stand him