2016 Postmortem

With a President Obama, ummmmmmmmm, no. Right or wrong, a lot of Democratic Party voters didn't hear "Wall Street" or even Blue Dog corporate Dems, but Obama when they heard "Establishment".

The main issue is more optics than anything - you can be progressive without telling Wall Street to fuck off and die (in fact, not telling Wall Street to fuck off can help advance those goals, or at least neutralize them as an obstacle to an extent), but a lot of voters were really waiting for a candidate to tell Wall Street to fuck off and die. Obama and Hillary aren't "tell Wall Street to fuck off and die" types. Because of that, a lot of more progressive voters (and a lot of LPVs) see the game as "rigged" even if they're advocating progressive policy, because "Wall Street will get their way". The paid speeches were certainly benign in content, but that doesn't matter, and wouldn't have mattered unless Hillary was raining fire and brimstone on the bankers like she's channeling Jonathan Edwards in "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". Those were the non-deplorable Trump voters (the ones Hillary said were non-deplorable), or at least some of them who were angry at the system because Obama and Hillary are, while definitely progressive and for marginalized groups, revolutionary in their own way, BECAUSE of their identities and the negative stereotypes used to keep them down (angry black man/bitchy feminist woman), can't take on the bully pulpit and go to war with the real Establishment the way a lot of lefties would like to.