Nope. I can see Donna Brazile saying it doesn’t add up to the technical definition of rigged. Just like I can see the Supreme Court saying that gerrymandering isn’t technically rigging elections. I can easily believe that votes were counted just fine, while the entire primary around the votes was broken and shoved everyone towards one option with disgusting vigor, and I can believe that that is a symptom of a larger issue where the Democratic Party has lost all touch with the left.
Oh really - that’s your scientific test for whether or not I’m a troll. Useful to discount my words by saying “I’m jut a republican trolling you”. Sure, that’s why I’ve wasted all this time telling you that the DNC leadership needs to change so they have a chance at winning the next election cycle. Because your head is so deep up your ass the you think the centrist policy an positions are where the DNC needs to be in order to win - when all indications are the opposite. Clinton lost against a Republican party that is a mess, a party that is split between far right wing nuts, and willing tools of the wealthy and wall street. And your solution, which is to out-wall street them is not working. And you think I’m a GOP troll here to try and undermine your winning position.
We are so screwed with the mindset of these faithful democrats we will never win.
Yes, these are troubling, but they appear to be wholly local; the DNC does not run local primaries, it’s done by state Democratic Party organizations.
The DNC is messed up, but Donna Brazile’s comments make no sense in light of how she herself spoke and acted during the primaries and campaign.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-dnchfa-agreement-donna-braziles-growing-pile-of-nonsense
…and HRC had a similar preliminary superdelegate advantage in 2008, it didn’t sway anything; the superdelegates aren’t idiots, they probably think more about 1968 more than anyone here.
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Yes it does, that’s because it’s how a very large number of Americans of both and neither political affiliation feel about American politics. Belief that the country was going in the wrong direction and things were getting increasingly worse was rampant. The Democrats chose to run on, “Well, actually, things are going pretty well” and on “We can’t let this maniac have the keys to the white house.” They lost on that message. Since then all I’ve seen from the Democrats is doubling down.
Canada, the US and Australia all have their own crazy racist histories with indigenous people. I’m sure they bear lots of similarities, but the differences matter and it means I don’t understand American issues with indigenous people at all. Still, somehow when people claim to be part indigenous, there’s always something more to it than that. There’s this weird racist tone to it that makes me really uncomfortable.
If someone were really into genealogy, and knew who most of their great great great grandparents were, and one of those people were indigenous, I’d be a lot more neutral to that fact of their heredity. Of course a person who is really interested that one of their ggggrandparents was Irish and another was French is going to be equally interested that one was Mi’kmaq.
But if a family has held on, generation after generation, to a notion that once upon a time one person in that family was married to an indigenous person, how can I not feel there’s something a little racist about it. It’s like a weird time-travelling parallel to, “I’m not an antisemite, my lawyer is Jewish!”
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Your feeling is pretty spot on, IMO. Myths of ‘native’ genealogy were part of the confederacy origin story, as if their dominion over the south was in part ancestral.
Of course it’s incredibly difficult to run the numbers, but odds are good (as in, bet the house good) that if you come across a USian claiming some distant indigenous blood they are at best mistaken.
My understanding that one of the reasons there were a lot of indigenous ancestry myths was because if you didn’t look quite white then saying you had an indigenous ancestor was a lot more socially acceptable than saying you had a black ancestor. The latter, of course, was many times as likely to be true in many places.
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Trump: “Gonna build the wall, bring back coal, bring back assembly lines, more and better paying working class jobs!”
Clinton: “Here’s some more unemployment benefits, and a training program so in five years you can go work at a startup in Brooklyn or Silicon Valley like all my volunteers.”
Makes no difference that Trump’s spiel was 100 percent hot air. Clinton had no chance.
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What’s really worth remembering is the vitriol tossed at Hillary Clinton by the left back in 2008.
Just scan the headlines, peeps!! Breitbart or Free Republic could not have been more thorough.
So…who runs in 2020? Since the far left seems to think they’re entitled to a candidate of such ideological purity that they lactate soy milk and don’t eat anything that casts a shadow (48th Level Vegan), who is there that will live up to Saint Bernard?
Cory Booker? He once defended Bain Capital.
Elizabeth Warren? Lawyer, used to vote Republican.
Sherrod Brown? Nope. Voted for the NDAA. Clearly loves indefinite detention.
Mayor Eric Garcetti? Allowed Los Angelenos to water their lawns three days a week!
Seriously. Tell me. Who’s left?
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America’s “far left” wants to enact policies like single payer healthcare and the elimination of college tuition. It’s very American to paint ideas that are supported by a majority of Americans and that are common in other developed nations as impossible and worthy of ridicule, and to paint people who actually think the country should be made a better place as radicals who are obsessed with ideological purity. In a lot of other places, the idea of voting for politicians who represent your interests and refusing to vote for those than don’t is common sense instead of a mockable idea.
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Are single-payer healthcare and free college really that far to the left? I’m hearing them represented as pretty mainstream ideas. Could be wrong, of course.
And wow, do I love the idea of being able to vote for a candidate who really has my back and shares my values. But we don’t have a parliament in the US. Does the two-party system suck goats? Yes. So very much yes. Can we reinvent it in time to prevent a second Trump term or Pence ushering in the Republic of Gilead? Not so much.
My concern is not just that the perfect is the enemy of the good, but that maybe right now the perfect is the enemy of finding ourselves in a radioactive wasteland eating rocks.
Frankly? I’m scared.
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From an economic standpoint, yes. The popularity of these ideas among the general population doesn’t make them centrist.
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They were ridiculed as absurd when Bernie Sanders presented them. Hilary Clinton’s book “What Happened” recounts conversations that liken the idea of health care to giving all Americans a free pony. That’s less than 18 months ago. Now pretty nearly everyone who is thought of as a serious contender for 2020 has backed the idea in principle. The “far left” (which, yeah, in any other developed nation would be called “centrists”) are the ones to thank for that.
Clearly what the Democrats have been doing has been a dismal failure politically. Thinking they could do whatever they wanted and progressives would always have to vote for them to stop the Republicans alienated those progressives. Continuing to double down on their “We’re the only choice” platform and blaming the voters for being too ideologically pure when it doesn’t work seems like a really bad plan to me.
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No. But they get mocked as such.
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This is a messaging problem as much as it is anything else – the story of the Democratic Party going back to 2000. Democrats do care about other Americans, but Americans don’t think they do. Republicans don’t care about other Americans, but their supporters think they do.
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I let my fear make me (snarky and) unclear. I should’ve defined Far Left. I guess I’m thinking of the ones who didn’t hold their nose and vote but rather stayed home because it was a Bernie or Bust scenario for them. So this:
…returns me to my question: Who’s left in our Hunger Games?
Given that 54% of white women voted for Trump – which is one of the most rage-inducing statistics I’ve ever read – how do we proceed? Is Bernie going to run again? He doesn’t have any more foreign policy knowledge now than he did last year. I’ll vote for him if that’s the option. But how can he beat the Republican machine arrayed against him? Post-Charlottesville and hearing all the crazed mentions of Soros and “internationalists” (read: international bankers) (read: Jews), I have zero confidence that his Jewishness won’t be used as a cudgel against him and the rest of us Jewish folks.
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Those kinds of sentiments may not reflect reality, in terms of the damage that Drumpf has been able to achieve. It may mean that people aren’t paying attention to the malignant cancer …
I think Kamala Harris and Tulsi Gabbard are both preparing serious runs.
This was Teddy Kennedy’s main goal for years and years, but it pretty much died with his primary run against Carter.
I keep waiting to hear that Hillary also rigged the republican primary, to give her an opponent to whom she could not possibly lose.
