Where was the sympathy for Bush voters

[karynnj]

73. So everything David Brock did was ok by you?

I am speaking of what David Brock did in 2015 - you are speaking of comments, intentionally misinterpreted after the election. Even had Bernie said something you disagreed with in 2015, it does not justify the lies and distortions that tried to erase the fact that Sanders was there - out in the streets for civil rights in the 1960s. Brock did not say that Bernie 2015/2016 did not live up to the Bernie of the 1960s - he questioned Sanders' 1960 activism.

Note the ONLY person I criticized is David Brock -- and I stand by that. It was disgraceful and not that far from the creepy slimy things he did against the Clinton's. What seems clear is he changed who he was loyal to -- not his methods.

As to Bernie, what you are responding to are comments post mortem. I did not see the Latina incident that you are referring to, but I did see Bernie speaking to a 200 plus group of Vermont seniors - answering their questions politely and helpfully - often pointing to specific staff people they should speak to. Being Vermont, they were mostly white, but he was warmly greeted by the few POC there. These are people who know him -- some having been guests at his holiday dinner for more than a decade. This was this month. There is a reason Sanders has the highest approval rating of any Senator -- he earns it.

I KNOW post mortems are hard when your hopes and dreams were with the nominee who lost, especially if you did not see her (or him) as a once in a life time candidate. Sanders is not the enemy. Sanders and EVERY Democrat is needed to fight Trump. Just as I have to stop myself from saying what I think of Schumer on several issues because there are many issues we need to be united on, I think the Clinton supporters have to stop their attacks on Sanders. Sanders was a very good advocate for Clinton. He was every bit as supportive to her as she was to Obama. (I personally saw both HRC and Bernie as flawed candidates.)

2016 was a close election - as 2000 and 2004 were. That makes it harder as any small gaffe, action, event could be said to have swung the small number of people that made the difference between winning and losing. I needed the JK group after 2004 because Democrats - all the way up to Bill Clinton were far harsher on Kerry than Sanders or any public figure is on Clinton -- when he lost in a year that no one in 2003 expected us to win. That every 2008 Democrat ran on platforms very close to Kerry's 2004 platform with Iraq changed to essentially be a variation of Kerry/Feingold indicates that the party knew that time passing was essentially all that was needed to win 2008 - as Bush soon sak from around 50% approval to the low 30s.

For 2016, some of the analyses written by Democrats from Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania suggest are worth looking at -- and I suspect that political scientists will design studies that will try to identify why we lost those states. Was it that it was harder for many to vote given the voter id/voter suppression laws? Was it that there were enough people, unhappy and frustrated with their own lives that they were vulnerable to a campaign based on hate? (Note Brexit, which was pushed by the British nationalists, and Netanyahu's election, where he was likely to lose until he spoke of hordes of Israeli Arabs being brought out to vote against him. )

Was it that the coastal discussion of "white privilege" which is absolutely needed to understand systemic injustice was seen as the liberals, Democrats not caring for underprivileged whites, who absolutely had to be startled to hear they are privileged ? In those states, you have counties full of people who know that they can not get jobs paying what a middle class life - that their parents and grandparents had. How do you speak of BOTH systemic injustice that means you are immediately a suspect if you are black, AND speak to economic injustice to change the current system where almost all the economic gains of this century went to a very small percent of people?

Trump managed to gain poor whites by making them think their enemies were the immigrants, the Mexicans, the blacks and the liberal elite - who Trump would fight on their behalf. Needless to say, he won't. Look at his nominees for Labor or any Financial post. We lost the argument that electing a Democrat would lead to less economic injustice. This is an argument that we should have won hands down based on facts (no matter which Democrat was the nominee) -- and we need to regain the perception that we are better for poor people - no matter what color.

I think that it was a huge error to have cast social injustice as competing against economic injustice, when we desperately need to address BOTH. It is not a rejection of HRC to say this. In fact, saying that the problem could be something like this is way better than if people were saying that we as a party had the right message, a very bad candidate who could not articulate it well or excite people to come out to vote. We also need to try to understand what happened to have any clue at all to changing it going forward.