The DNC picked a bunch of sleazy lobbyists as superdelegates, can't figure out why no one is donating

And considering we’re talking about a hypothetical situation, where we have literally zero actual evidence and (at least in this case) only non-expert speculation, that’s also some bizarre new definition of the word “fact” that has no relation to any previously known or used definition.

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FTFY But unfortunately it doesn’t work when the majority of the superdelegates have their collective heads up their collective arses.

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BTW: does anyone know of any good sources on the effect of establishment Dem sabotage on the McGovern campaign?

A lot of the Dixiecrats and plutocrat Dems openly campaigned for Nixon, and plenty of others worked behind the scenes to throw the election.

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played that game as a kid

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I used to keep a pair of mirrorshades in the box of my copy. Compulsory uniform for the Chief of the Secret Police. :slight_smile:

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Take a serious look at NationalPopularVote.com . It is on the way to being implemented and only needs a bit more uumph in a few more State Legislatures.

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Pffff.

Ten fucking points. It’s indisputable.

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You haven’t realized the people of the US don’t want more of “past 50 years” yet? Get your head out of the sand.

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Good gawd. Stop that. I, for one, never ‘hated’ Hillary, I just preferred Bernie. Hillary could have been, at the very least, a competent President (ah, fleeting faded dreams of competency…sigh). A major problem with her is that she has all the charisma of the toe in a Sourtoe Cocktail, which is rather sad. When accidentally seen acting normal, she seem like a really nice person. That said, Hillary is way to far to the right for my liking. But I don’t hate her. [not like my sister who unfortunately believes that Hillary is directly responsible for the ‘murders’ in Benghazi; it is really hard to argue with people when they are Kansas Christians (not the nuts, but still) and you are so angry that your vocabulary devolves below Andrew Dice Clay.]

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oh. I sort of chalked that up to binging on The Wire

Dammit, I’ve really got to watch that show.

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From a few weeks before the election:

From the day after the election:

And from a couple of weeks after that:

Three for three.

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Sanders was not rigged out of anything. Clinton won more states, more pledged delegates and more individual primary votes, and she did it fairly and openly: more Democratic primary voters supported her, for whatever reasons.

If anything, Sanders got disproportionate benefits from the number of states with caucuses instead of primary elections, as the caucus mechanics give advantage to the candidates with more dedicated supporters, even if they’re fewer in number as a whole.

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They really love losing. Or, more accurately, a whole lot of dems would rather have Republicans in charge than progressives. They’re pretty much Republicans who don’t hate women and gays, and the corporatist part is stronger than the not hating women and gays part.

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All your points are correct except possibly in Nevada where some strange votes took place. However we know that the DNC had a preferred candidate and colluded to give that candidate an edge by reducing the number of debates and adjusting the timing of those debates. Perhaps an even-handed DNC might have done a better at uniting the left and right of the party.

I guess where some of us have a minor gripe with HRC is that it seemed totally obvious she was not a popular candidate. Being more popular than a total outsider septuagenarian is a benchmark of unpopularity not of popularity. One might have hoped that she might have recognized that she was not that popular and chosen not to stand for the good of the party. Similarly I prefer certain policies - Medicare for all - which she considered unrealistic. I might have hoped that a better candidate might have noticed that the times are a changing. That said, if you cant think of another candidate other than Sanders its not so surprising that she considered herself the best bet for the party.

I guess I just think that political competency involves having a better finger on the pulse. Perhaps her real sin was in placing her trust in people like Robbie Mook.

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The fact of the matter is that Bernie campaigners in Michigan and Wisconsin noted how Trump’s team was smearing Clinton in those states. The fact the DNC nor Clinton’s campaign managers never cared to counter the spin from Trump’s campaigners because “Bernie supporters are know nothings…” kinda shows the hubris of the political elite around Clinton herself (IMO I don’t blame her since it’s up to her managers, the DNC, and other supporters to actually tell her the truth and not lie to her face). The whole situation that happened in 2016 was a series of flubs by technocrats that don’t grasp or don’t want to grasp the current social trends that are happening. Like it or not, the Democrats need to significantly revise their strategy and fast. Repeating the same technocratic and right-wing-lite nonsense isn’t going to work in 2018. The fact there’s already people running in primaries against establishment Democrats as progressives should be an indicator of what the public is going to be receptive to. Meaning it’s time for the DNC to admit moderatism and right-wing politics are DOA. Just ditch the center-right nonsense and start over.

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What you’re saying is 100% true… But the fact that lots of donating voters were pissed enough to even do this, and that the DNC told said donors to piss right the hell off, is a really bad move.

Right now, the DNC is basically telling voters “You’ll suck whatever dick we shove in your face and like it”, and by the same token are acting SUPER SHOCKED that their donations are way the hell down, and somehow are failing to connect those two.

So basically you have a bunch of people in power in the DNC that are trying to get more power by cozying up to corporate interests (e.g. blocking out popular, populist candidates that the voters and donors want) and aren’t bright enough to notice that they’re actually screwing themselves by choking out the party in the process.

I don’t know why anyone is defending these goddamn parasites, I really don’t. They need to be gone, ASAP, and every voter needs to be screaming it at them.

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I think this is something of a disingenuous argument. The spectrum of political candidates in the US has become so compressed into a tiny sliver of center-right to far-right options that I don’t think there’s enough data to determine how an actual left-wing candidate would perform in a national election. The drop-off in turnout among younger voters in 2012 and 2016 has at least in part been attributed to disillusionment at Obama turning out to be yet another center-right politician in office, rather than a genuine progressive, and they were the ones most likely to support Bernie during the primary. Keep in mind that half of the country didn’t even vote in the last election (for any number of reasons, up to and including Republican suppression of less Republican-friendly constituencies that might tilt the playing field left-ward). Would they have turned out in larger numbers for a more inspiring center-right Democrat? Maybe. Would they have turned out in larger numbers for a candidate that represented actual left-wing policy positions that are in fact broadly popular? I dunno, but probably.

I think Clinton’s primary strategic misstep was actually trying to paint the Obama presidency as some rosy utopia that we need to maintain, rather than the first step in a looooooooooooooong fucking road to actually behaving like a real competent, wealthy, developed nation. In a time when Wall Street and big businesses are increasingly a (completely valid) target of ire for a large swath of the electorate, giving $25,000 speeches at Goldman Sachs, acting wishy-washy on minimum wage increases, and pre-triangulating additional desperately-needed health care reforms into a tiny number of Obamacare tweaks is not a good look. It was a tone-deaf “maintain the status quo” message in a nation that has been getting increasingly aware that something is Seriously Wrong, and thinks the status quo is actually kind of bullshit. Even more than the racism and bigotry, that’s what Trump’s campaign correctly zeroed in on as a source of motivating anguish in the places being left behind by neoliberal status quo late-stage capitalism, and he did just well enough in those places to win the electoral college. Sure his “no cuts to medicare, tax cuts for everybody, get the economy moving again, jobs jobs jobs” rhetoric was all just lies and bullshit, but it worked. And yeah, the DNC platform in 2016 was super-progressive (for the DNC, at least), but they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into drafting it that way in the first place, and it sure didn’t seem like anybody took it seriously enough to actually run on it in the end anyway, least of all their presidential candidate.

To be clear: I do not hate Hillary Clinton. She was a solid Secretary of State, and from a distance seemed to be a decent senator. She has the temperament and intelligence to be a highly competent leader. However, I still think she was a terrible, terrible presidential candidate who was out of touch with the mood of the country, and I was deeply motivated to vote for her because of her opponent, not because of anything that she herself was bringing to the table. At every possible opportunity, she opted to triangulate toward the non-existent “middle” that sits somewhere between where the Democrats were the previous year and the ever-radicalizing Republicans, believing that that’s still where the majority of the voters are, rather than make a single overture to her left flank. The DNC is now repeating the same mistake, ignoring where they energy in the electorate is actually coming from in favor of the big-money donors, lobbyists, and so-called centrist politicians who have helped shove the Overton window so far to the right that Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon now look like dirty fucking hippies.

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It’s entirely disputable. Clinton had basically the same support as Bernie in that poll, but Trump went from very little support to the entire GOP backing him. I’m also pretty sure you have not actually looked at many polls since Clinton was the most popular politician in the entire United States in July 2015, and became the least popular by the end of the election. To think that Bernie would have emerged unblemished is silly.

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They don’t seem to be spending in the usual lobby category, more grass-roots advocacy, get-out-the-vote stuff.

http://www.eri-nonprofit-salaries.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=NPO.Summary&EIN=521395040&BMF=1&Cobrandid=0&Syndicate=No

Ah, the Arab American Institute Foundation might do more of that:

http://www.eri-nonprofit-salaries.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=NPO.Summary&EIN=521959306&BMF=1&Cobrandid=0&Syndicate=No

They don’t seem to lobby Congress directly.
http://disclosures.house.gov/ld/ldsearch.aspx
https://soprweb.senate.gov/index.cfm?event=selectFields&reset=1

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