Re: Bernie 2020
 

I think you're mishearing. Bernie attacked Hillary as a tool of Wall Street and the result was a loss of many on the left who she probably could have counted on voting for her in the general. And because he stayed in the race way too long, the number of those people increased and dragged in independents. Once they all thought he got screwed, she lost tons of votes. A lot of people sat out once he lost, some who voted for Obama flipped for Trump, and a lot of idiots voted for Stein or Johnson.

I don't think Trump running with what Bernie started mattered much after Bernie fucked it up for Hillary with voters who would have voted Dem if he hadn't run during the primary (or stopped way back when he knew he wouldn't win and had achieved his objective of moving her to the left). And yes, she should have been a better candidate and handled his attacks better. But what Bernie did most definitely affected the number of votes she got in key states.

I'll end with that.*

TM

*And yes, I realize I'm horrible at this.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

I hear. I disagree. I don't think Hillary was always going to lose votes on the left (tens of thousands in MI, e.g.) from people who were willing to vote for a leftie in the Democratic primary and a third-party candidate in the general but not for her. Just as Bill Bradley ran against Gore in 2000, and tens of thousands of people then voted for Nader. I don't think Bernie's attacks on her for being a Wall Street stooge materially changed the numbers.

You have a different view. We'll never know who's right.

eta: Let me say something a little different. I had a bit of a problem with Bernie. I have much more of a problem with the lefties in the Democratic Party who have more passion for attacking the center-left than for organizing to win elections from Republicans. And also a problem with the enthusiasm that the Jonathan Chaits of the world show for hippie-bashing. Sometimes the priorities get seriously out of whack. I think contested primaries are good and make the party better, but there also is a point whether disagreement becomes discord and counterproductive.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Nah. I know I'm right. ;-)

TM

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Can't someone just ask Sebastian? Did Thurgreed drive him into retirement again?

James Brown Thursday on the Daily Dose. Hot day here in the upper Midwest, so here is a slow groovy extended version of "Blind Man Can See It."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJzZ6zIJZzo

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Let's vote.

I vote you're right.

Re: Workers of the World Unite!
 

I have a problem with the damn Berniacs who play lefter-than-thou with me. Screw them. They're a bunch of 1950s labor protectionists that my ole Trotskyte buddies would have said were under the spell of bourgeois nationalism and that my old black power friends would have called a bunch of Miss Ophelias.

Re: Mother, mother, mother - there's too many of you crying.
 

Nice if true.

Re: Workers of the World Unite!
 

True dat. My old Situationist crew would have called them boring anti-revolutionaries, while my friends that ran with the pro-Khmer Rouge set would have sent them all to a collective farm.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Voting is officially closed. Thank you for your participation.

TM

Re: Workers of the World Unite!
 

The great apes I taught to talk would call them filthy stinking humans, then send them to a zoo.While my physicist professor crush would call them strings that propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string looks just like an ordinary particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by the vibrational state of the string.

http://superstringtheory.com/people/gifs/evas.jpg

Re: Workers of the World Unite!
 

Who gives a crap about young GGG's wannabe Sandinista fantasies. The real issue is whether Not Bob have been able to snag any slumming Tri-Delts at his land-grant football factory undergrad school by running with your Situationist crew. (I suspect any Tri-Delts would have been liquidated by your Khmer Rouge set, but hey, if any survived, he'd have been happy to be reeducated with the good-haired ones.)

He certainly tried hard with the herstory/womyn set. I swear to God, he's spent today reading countless articles about the 20th anniversary of the Lilith Fair. When he's not weeping while watching the YouTube of that Sarah McLaughlin commercial for the SPCA on repeat, that is.

Re: Workers of the World Unite!
 

The important thing now is that all of us, Flower's Collectivists, my Trotskytes, Hank's Apes, your Tri-Delts, and each of you, Hank, and Flower, are all part of the Establishment. The Berners disdain us all as filthy globalists, regardless of how good our hair may be.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

I generally vote third party, but I'll make an exception here. I vote TM.

If you can seriously argue that Bernie did not cost Hillary significant Democratic and Independent votes, I have to wonder what history of the race you've been reading.

The whole crux of the Russia argument is that while Putin's scheme to hack voting systems directly may have failed, he nevertheless altered sentiment regarding Hillary with his relentless DNC leaks. Almost all of the resonant leaks were aimed at one issue: Hillary and the DNC screwing over Bernie.

To his credit, Bernie didn't run with that stuff. But he didn't have to. That, plus his relentless attacks on Wall Street and her Goldman speeches (recall his demanding transcripts?) peeled off a ton of otherwise Hillary voters. It also cost her a ton of Bernie voters who otherwise would've grudgingly voted for her when he left the race.

Decades from now, history will write Trump a lucky fool, and Bernie a Hillary killer.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

Obviously, you think I slept through the election and simply didn't read all of the other posts in which people have pointed out that Bernie attacked Hillary in various ways, that not all of the lefties who might have voted for Hillary did vote for Hillary, that people voted for third-party candidates, that Trump used lines of attack first exploited by Bernie, and that Trump won very narrowly. Actually, I caught all of that.

The argument I have been making is that if Bernie had not done what he did, nonetheless those lefties wouldn't have voted for Hillary anyway (just like they voted for Nader in 2000), and that Trump would have been just as successful in exploiting the attacks first used by Bernie. I recognize that I am making an argument that rests on unprovable assertions about what would otherwise have happened. So for your part, recognize that I am making an argument about what would otherwise have happened, and don't simply tell me that Bernie cost Hillary a ton of voters. My argument is, he didn't. A significant number of those voters were disaffected with Hillary and the Democratic Party and were not going to vote for her. My cousin, for example, is one. Hillary excited a lot of people, like my daughter, people who wanted to see a woman President, but she also left an awful lot of lefties unenthused, because they felt that she was old news and too incrementalist. Sanders' attacks on her for being close to Wall St resonated because they expressed what people already thought about her, not because they changed minds.

Re: Bernie 2020
 

We know. We all know. We've read it several times. Phrased and rephrased.

We disagree. We don't buy it. You're wrong. You've convinced no one.