The Real sad part to this is BERNIE SANDERS would have won in a landslide.
Thank Donna Brasille and Debbie Wasserman Schultz for their honorable character representing the democrats interest in the DNC primaries.
Shut this THREAD DOWN
I don't grok with your brand of politics, Rifle, but I'll
+1000 you on this one.
HRC lost across so many "rust belt" and "redneck" toss-up states because she had no message for the blue collar working class. She didn't even seem to care. Never visited Wisconsin. She was a product of East Coast Bubble syndrome that said you could win with educated whites and a large turnout among minorities. In effect, she and the DNC ditched labor and hitched their horses to the winners and proponents of free-trade globalism. Oops. Against your standard Republican, that might still have been dangerous. Against Trump, it was a downright disaster. Trump managed to perfectly capture the anger and resentment of the blue-collar working families who have indeed been left behind.
Bernie felt this. He knew this. His campaign was all about it. HRC, for some reason, couldn’t grasp it. Her “deplorables” comment was probably the end of her candidacy - her very own 47-percent moment.
Against these so-called "deplorables" she clearly had major blinders. For example: contrary to everything many of us assumed, it turns out as we can see now that many people actually do hate Obamacare. They hate being forced to pay for insurance that, to them, sucks. Bernie's single-payer system was a real way forward. He could explain it. He could talk about it in ways that made it feel tangible, even if the numbers were still somewhat wonky. He had solutions to actual problems. HRC didn't see the right problems. All she had was boilerplate.
I supported Senator Sanders for three reasons.
First, I felt the power behind his message. As Trump surged, I saw Sanders as an anti-Trump, able to empathize and connect with those who had been forgotten in today’s technology/service economy. Thankfully, I’m not one of those people who has been left behind. I don’t, to be honest, even know many of these people, although I certainly do know some. But I can very easily sympathize with them. I can clearly discern that the newest iPhone apps aren’t putting bread on anyone’s tables. I could see by instinct that it was a message that had found its place and time. And it was the right message. A message that envisioned an America that could be more equitable, more in-it-together, more conscious of itself.
Second, I liked him as a person. He was respectable. Steadfast. Authentic. Relatable. Or at least, that’s how he came across to me.
And third, I couldn’t shake the notion that the DNC’s presumptive coronation of HRC was wrongheaded from the beginning - despite what the New York Times deigned to argue time and again. She had so many clearly apparent negatives about her. She didn’t connect. She had no center. What was she about, beyond being a Clinton? Really: What?
So let me end with this. Yes, Trump maintained and probably encouraged some vile supporters. But most people in this country are looking out for what they feel is in their self-interest, and the interests of their children. The world - I think we can say this with certainty now - looks vastly different if you've grown up in Youngstown than if you've grown up just about anywhere in the Greater Boston area. Call me naive, but I refuse to believe that many or most of these people who gravitated towards Trump are actually racist, misogynist, homophobic, evil, or otherwise backwards. If we lull ourselves into thinking that they were, then we’re only going to fall further. What I fear more than anything is that, in our liberal echo chamber, we’ll be unable to shake the narrative of Trump's “deplorables.” If that’s the case, this country will tear further and further apart.
