I love Bernie. Bernie probably WOULD have won the general election.
But that’s not the same as saying the primary was stolen. In 2016, he benefitted greatly from anti-Clinton protest votes, and was up against a woman who had spent the past ~20 or so years preparing for a presidential run, while he tossed his hat into the ring expecting to get a few minutes of airtime and ended up finding that the youth was finally ready to receive his message, and had to build a nationwide ground-game from the bottom up. It is a miracle that he got as close to the nomination as he did; and yet it was nowhere near close enough to lend credence to accusations of it being stolen from him. I wish it was otherwise - I wish unimaginative, comfortable, suburban moderates weren’t such a massive vote in Dem primaries - but they are.
In 2020, he was outpolitiked, and as much as it was shitty that the moderates conspired to wait until the last moment to drop out and endorse the sole remaining moderate candidate, that, quite literally is politics. Negotiations and the forming of coalitions. The failure of the progressives to do the same and rally around Bernie was just the nail in the coffin.
I voted for Bernie twice, only because I didn’t have a third chance to do so. I love Bernie. Bernie would’ve improved this country, even with Congress obstructing him at every turn. Bernie would have been a net good. But it wasn’t the DNC which stopped him, or Clinton’s mind-control machines.
We failed him.
And we must keep that in mind when (or if, considering our most recent general election result) the next progressive candidate comes around. We must not fail them the way we failed to come through for Bernie.
Weird that whenever you give this spcheil, you always leave out the part where Hillary’s campaign secretly took over the party in 2015 while she was a candidate in the DNC’s supposedly fair and unbiased primary:
When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party…When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.
The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.
Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.
As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.
God, I hate it so much.
I love Bernie. Bernie probably WOULD have won the general election.
But that’s not the same as saying the primary was stolen. In 2016, he benefitted greatly from anti-Clinton protest votes, and was up against a woman who had spent the past ~20 or so years preparing for a presidential run, while he tossed his hat into the ring expecting to get a few minutes of airtime and ended up finding that the youth was finally ready to receive his message, and had to build a nationwide ground-game from the bottom up. It is a miracle that he got as close to the nomination as he did; and yet it was nowhere near close enough to lend credence to accusations of it being stolen from him. I wish it was otherwise - I wish unimaginative, comfortable, suburban moderates weren’t such a massive vote in Dem primaries - but they are.
In 2020, he was outpolitiked, and as much as it was shitty that the moderates conspired to wait until the last moment to drop out and endorse the sole remaining moderate candidate, that, quite literally is politics. Negotiations and the forming of coalitions. The failure of the progressives to do the same and rally around Bernie was just the nail in the coffin.
I voted for Bernie twice, only because I didn’t have a third chance to do so. I love Bernie. Bernie would’ve improved this country, even with Congress obstructing him at every turn. Bernie would have been a net good. But it wasn’t the DNC which stopped him, or Clinton’s mind-control machines.
We failed him.
And we must keep that in mind when (or if, considering our most recent general election result) the next progressive candidate comes around. We must not fail them the way we failed to come through for Bernie.
Weird that whenever you give this spcheil, you always leave out the part where Hillary’s campaign secretly took over the party in 2015 while she was a candidate in the DNC’s supposedly fair and unbiased primary:
I regret that I have but one upvote to give this comment