2016 Postmortem

The Democratic Party has been very unwilling to make a real stand against the high level of financial corruption in the GOP because quite simply, they would be throwing stones while living in a glass house. Aside from Bernie, and then Trump because what does he give a shit, there has been an unspoken agreement in Washington to not go after politicians for their financial connections. Everybody is just a well meaning citizen doing their duty.

Had Bernie not gotten a groundswell of support, these very real concerns would still be entirely mum in Washington, because nobody with a megaphone would risk alienating their fellow democrats sucking on the teat of big business. You can blame the Sanders campaign for bringing the issues into the mainstream, but I blame the party for making themselves vulnerable on this issue.

Being an attack dog against anybody with criticisms for your Candidate is unexamined, unprincipled team pride in the extreme. Especially since in my opinion, the primaries made Hillary a better candidate. She started advocated for things that I actually cared about in a meaningful way, like free college tuition, and she outright said, the first time I ever heard it, that there should not be for profit prisons in America. This sort of rhetoric finally encouraged me that there was hope here, but don't pretend that she wasn't pulled to the left. Don't pretend that had there been no Sanders she would have been appealing to these voters in this way. This is to say nothing of her actual intentions once she gets into the White House, but unless she tells me what they are, why am I going to be enthusiastic about voting for her?

The reality though, is that Sanders is not the reason Clinton lost anyway. The single worst decision made was for her to run at all and for the DNC to put all of its eggs in that basket from the get-go. It is not a common thing for a party establishment to go with the candidate who has been put through such a ringer and so Vilified as Clinton has been. I grant, they all thought she deserved the role. They all had been working with her for decades and knew and loved her brand of politics, and maybe they thought they were going to show the GOP and the corporate media that she had survived it all and was still going to take the White House, but that sort of hubris is out of the norm for politics. Usually people get retired or sidelined. "Thank you for your service. Thank you for being a magnet all these years and persevering, but we can't take a chance that all the smears haven't stuck." That's unfair, but the office of Presidency isn't awarded to somebody out of fairness. I understand why she didn't sit it out. I don't understand why the insiders didn't try to persuade her to sit it out. They in fact, did the exact opposite.