done by say tomorrow...if Hillary had won, we would not have had a tax cut...and would not need 'wrenching'.

Let's also pretend that our party hasn't ignored this problem (and even enabled it) for the last three decades.

tilting at windmills and ignoring the true evil (GOP)...we should explain to the dreamers before they are kicked out of the only home they can remember how their plight pales in comparison to making the Democratic party better (losing). Sarcasm of course. We should win always and stop aiming at Democrats. And we should win.

Instead we--or our representatives--fight like our lives didn't depend on it. Why is that?

16. Not one Democrat voted for any GOP shit...not one. But then we have folks who hate Democrats and complain about everything and yet claim to be Democrats...very strange. And no I am not talking about you. I have no idea what you think.

I think WE, THE PEOPLE, are better off without them.

let me know if you find any commies

The radical left lost Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Denying that is like "supply-side economics," "creation scicence," or climate science denialism.

If you want to defeat evil, VOTE DEMOCRATIC.

and crap, here i thought it was the Russians.

how about this: if you want to defeat evil, vote democratically

Nothing you can say will convince me that you don't know exactly whom I refer to.

Credibility with whom? Are you trying to claim that I answer to you?

the basis of your claim. Is that unreasonable?

I am not responsible for you. I am under no duty to account to you. Nor is it my job to persuade you.

My reasoning stands on its own. I do not seek your approval.

The correct response would be "Cary, you are absolutely correct and I am sorry for trying to make you the subject. I was out of line. Thank you for pointing that out and I will try to refrain from using that low level ploy."

It's ok. I didn't expect you to understand.

We have to realize that they are the enemy just as GOP types are if they are running down Democrats or the Democratic Party.

They will just move the goal post and soak up our resources.

There is an old adage in sales: there are three possible answers and two are good answers. Yes is obviously good. No is good too because you can say thank you and move on to find the next yes. Maybe is a bad answer because the maybe will soak up your time and your energy and they aren't going to buy anyway.

Some will, some won't, so what? Next.

Does the radical left want to get things done? If so that's great. Pick up a shovel and start working with us.

More often than not they don't want to get things done, they just want to be radical.

me so angry. I have cut of Move On because of this. I no longer give to Obama's group as they screwed the now Virginia governor...I give to the DNC mostly and locals. Sherrod Brown needs money as he is a Koch target. And since Joshie Mandel bowed out...I am concerned. Mandel was weak but who know who will run.

good enough...our representatives are doing a great job. But of course it is never never enough for some. You do understand we support Democrats here right?

Whatever people feel about him as an individual(and I'm one of the ones who believes he should NOT run for president again)the ideas his campaign talked about are all popular.

It's not a choice of centrism or defeat.

And we are all trying to make sure the Democratic Party wins, DemsRule.

Here is the thing...if we end up with what you all consider a centrist candidate than you vote for them period end of story. And any that don't need to move on to a different party because they are not Democrats. If you are a Democrat, you vote for the Democratic candidate...sick of the the criticism of this party and Democrats in general. The Democrats have been magnificent in my opinion since Trump's election From Manchin to the most liberal member. I say since Trump not because I fault them before but because they have faced terrible odds since they were screwed over in the last election.

I will vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is...and no matter how hard you try, you can't force people to vote for whoever you have in mind or vote in a way that caters to those who cost us the election-the ones you call the 'base' sometimes. They are anything but...It won't be that close I hope so we should be ok...and we can't count on those folks anyway. If Sen. Sanders runs and is not the nominee, we could have a situation similar to 16. I hope he doesn't run for the good of the country. But unless the election is closer than I think it will be, it won't hurt us. We should be working on 18 not worrying about who will run...we have no control over who runs or who wins in 20. The Democratic electorate will vote and a candidate will be chosen. And then it is our duty to vote for the Democratic candidate...and for me a pleasure. That is all folks.

And I agree that '20 is too early to discuss who is running.

The one thing we differ on is whether progressives should be able to work for what they want in the party, or whether they should be told to shut up and settle for whatever our party leaders think we need to do.

We don't need to silence progressive voices to win...progressive ideas, in much of the country, are vote winners. They are the only thing that create enthusiasm and get people to the polls.

The decline in the party in Ohio is largely due(in addition to the gerrymandering, which I agree is horrible)is caused by the party opting for caution and timidity, opting not to speak for those left out in the cold under post-1981 capitalism.

BTW, if your theory about what Dems need to do to win is right, it will simply take care of itself.

If the voters in Dem primaries in those states you speak of accept the argument that it's centrism or defeat, they'll vote for centrists. It's not as though we have to tell progressive activists to shut up in the meantime.

In my view, and I'd say the view of a lot of the rank-and-file, we need to connect with the people Bernie brought in to politics. We can't get their votes by simply demanding them. And the voters aren't going to reward us if Sanders people are treated as untrustworthy and driven away. We're not going to win by saying "don't worry, we won't change things much". People only vote an incumbent party out if they want significant change.

And I've said repeatedly that I don't want Bernie to run, so please don't post as if I want him to run. OK?

I just think we need his ideas as part of the mix...and when we go toe-to-toe with the GOP, we need to put the poor and those who are economically uncertain first, and the needs of the big donors second. We're not going to win the votes of the comfortable or those who oppose making life more egalitarian-people like that are going to be with T___p no matter what.

And I am more focused on 18.

everyone wants to vote for someone who is trashed continuously (sarcasm)...I guess it is far more important to some to purify (destroy) the Democratic party than to defeat Republicans who are the real threat.

Pretending that there's no problem doesn't.

us to lose.

christ on a trailer hitch.

Where was the constructive criticism? I saw only petulance delivered via a one-liner.

And who specifically is arguing (or pretending) there is no problem within the Democratic party?

"...never seen anyone arguing (or pretending) there is no problem within the Democratic party"

really? never? not on this board? not even in this thread? it's Bernie, Jill Stein, Susan Sarandon, Russia, the "left left" * ad nauseum. there's never EVER any criticism of the party, or the candidate, or Dems in Congress without the usual suspects showing up to claim the poster is a Russian troll, a dupe or just secretly hates Democrats.

* key is that it is somebody else

JPR?

Do you have a reasonably objective argument in favor of this "constructive criticism?"

"constructive criticism" and "bashing."

Pretending that there is no difference doesn't mean there isn't one.

I DO have an interest in getting Democrats to act like Democrats and stop ceding to the GOP.

One of the strongest platforms in this area of any democrat that has ran in history. That is a fact. She even even went further than the guy in the op who is simply yelling at walls. WTF. It's laughable that this is coming from an entrenched, wealthy, career politician.

You comment is blatantly false.

The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.

Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class – failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12% today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration – has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency.

more...Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more

Nice deflection.

https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/

Most progressive platform in the primaries and general last time around. We really missed out.

talking about results. Apples and oranges. This isn't about Hillary Clinton. Did anyone in this conversation not vote for her in the GE?

Independents, not as much.

He never at any point dismissed the importance of stopping T___p.

And he isn't claiming we can make these change this exact moment in this congress.

until, I think nearly the end of August-there had been the traditional(and no longer justifiable) post-convention "break".

In my own community(Olympia)the Dems didn't have a general election campaign office until late August or early September.

Bernie had given her a rousing endorsement in his withdrawal speech at the convention, and took a lot of heat from some of his supporters for doing so(I remember seeing a meme on Facebook calling him "Bernadict Arnold" for endorsing Hillary).

And he also refused to accept Stein's offer of the Green presidential nomination. If he'd really wanted to make sure Hillary lost, wouldn't Bern have taken Stein up on that? Isn't his rejection of that at least SOME evidence that he was acting in good faith and with positive intent.

Look-Bernie should NOT run again, but it serves no good purpose to blame Bernie and his supporters as a group for the result. All that does is to perpetuate the Sanders/Clinton division, to trap us in the past when we need to be about the future, and to do so at a time when we desperately need to end division and establish unity.

....there were a total of 73 campaign events. Hillary Clinton appeared at 26 of them, each in a different city (in 13 states)*

And you may recall that the day after the close of the 2008 Convention, she left with Obama for about a week of appearances with him.

Nobody is blaming Sanders for the result of the election, but when I see it said that he did everything he could for Clinton during the campaign that simply is not true.

*Here is the list of her appearances in August:

1-Aug-16 Omaha, Nebraska
3-Aug-16 Denver, Colorado
3-Aug-16 Commerce City, Colorado
4-Aug-16 Las Vegas, Nevada
4-Aug-16 Las Vegas, Nevada
5-Aug-16 Washington, DC
8-Aug-16 St. Petersburg, Florida
8-Aug-16 St. Petersburg, Florida
8-Aug-16 Kissimmee, Florida
9-Aug-16 Miami, Florida
10-Aug-16 Des Moines, Iowa
10-Aug-16 Des Moines, Iowa
11-Aug-16 Warren, Michigan
15-Aug-16 Scranton, Pennsylvania
16-Aug-16 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
17-Aug-16 Cleveland, Ohio
18-Aug-16 New York City, New York
20-Aug-16 Martha’s Vinyard Massachusetts
21-Aug-16 Provincetown, Massachusetts
22-Aug-16 Jimmy Kimmel Live Los Angeles, California
23-Aug-16 Los Angeles, California
24-Aug-16 San Francisco, California
24-Aug-16 Anderson Cooper 360, Atlanta, Georgia
25-Aug-16 Reno, Nevada
26-Aug-16 Morning Joe, New York, New York
31-Aug-16 Cincinnati, Ohio

It still wouldn't have made any difference if Bernie had campaigned in August-the race isn't decided in August. It's enough that he campaigned hard when the race was in high gear. He did all he could to persuade his voters to back her. He did all he could to warn of what a victory for the other candidate would mean. That, by itself, proves the result isn't his fault.

It wouldn't have made any difference if he'd denounced T___p more, because it never worked for any candidate at any point to go negative on T___p. We all know attacking T___p never worked for any candidate in either party who did it, so why complain about Bernie not doing more of what everybody already knew was a failed strategy?

Why is it so important to you to blame Bernie, anyway?

The result would have been the same if he'd never entered the race at all.

How do we know this?

Hillary was at 49% support in most polls in the fall of 2015. She ended up with 49%.


Therefore, Bernie's presence was, at worse, neutral.

There was never any additional group of voters who would have voted for Hillary if she'd been nominated without challenge. Nobody out there in the electorate CARES about whether a nominee wins in a close race or by acclimation-Obama won in the closest primary season ever and John Kerry and AL Gore, both excellent candidates, gained nothing from wrapping up their nominations early.

And you're "refighting the primaries" by insisting on placing blame on the runner-up.

We need to be past that now, and to focus solely on the future and on finding unity.

In the name of that, can you please let the past go, and devote yourself to the future-which is the only period of time we CAN have an effect on?

....the convention. You can't claim I'm "re-fighting the primary", you're the only one who has brought up the primary. And I also said that I wasn't blaming Sanders for the result.

Keep repeating the truth. Keep repeating the truth. Keep repeating the truth. Keep repeating the truth. Keep repeating the truth. Keep repeating the truth.

❤️😊👍🐸🍷😚🥓🍸

What difference does it make if he didn't campaign in August?

He was there in September and October, when most of the campaign was happening.

Most of his rallies were at college campuses. It would have been pointless for him to campaign in a month where the campuses were largely empty.

Therefore, having him hold rallies in August, when no one would have showed up, would have achieved nothing.

He did all he could.

....in mid-August.

Schools are open, but enrollment is smaller.

If he couldn't get a crowd of 20,000, what would have been the point?

Rallies where only 500 were there wouldn't have been worth having, as no small-crowd rally is ever worth holding. Small rallies are always useless. If you don't have a massive crowd you're doing nothing that matters.

Also, we don't even know if the Clinton-Kaine campaign had asked him to make August appearances.

If you accept that the result wasn't his fault, why is it important to you to double down on the claim that he didn't do enough?

There is nothing else he could have done or said that would have changed the outcome, and we all know it.

...."all that he could".

By the way, do you recall his wife tweeting the morning of the election that "it doesn't matter who you vote for"? (may not be exact wording) That's "doing all he (they) could"?

It's not like he REFUSED to speak for the ticket in August-to my knowledge, they didn't want him doing so.

He couldn't have campaigned for the ticket without coordinating it with them.

And we both know speaking on campuses on August, when enrollment is low wouldn't have made a difference. He'd have been speaking to crowds of 200, and it's not possible to make any difference in a result in November speaking to tiny crowds in August.

The ONLY time it was worth having him speak was in the fall when the students were back.

(OK, Jane sent a tweet...ONE tweet on election day wasn't going to make any difference in the outcome and she was the one who sent it, not Bernie).

You are really invested in putting the blame on Bern, when the blame was actually down to 1) The Russians 2)Comey 3)Voter suppression and 4) mistakes in campaign strategy. There is nothing Bernie could have done to singlehandedly counteract all of that.

He spoke for her all over the country, every place he was asked to speak by the campaign. What the hell else could he have done?

It wouldn't have mattered if he'd denounced T___p more, because no one's denunciations of T___p ever worked, no denunciation of any aspect of the guy ever swung any votes our way, nor did any ever swing votes away from T___p to any of his rivals in the GOP primary.

He could have spent three straight months in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania(and remember, nobody knew the contest would be decided by those states until the last two weeks, so complaining that he wasn't there earlier is ahistorical) and it wouldn't have changed anything. Not anything at all.

In a general election campaign, the campaign headquarters has absolute, total control of who speaks and where they speak and how often they will speak. They wouldn't have let him go off and have events on his own.

And there was the real possibility that he would have been booed at some of those rallies. Since being booed automatically means nothing positive can happen at a rally, what would have been the point?

All he could do was what they assigned him to do. That is all he could do.

IN any case, there was nowhere else he could have spoken and nothing else he could have said that would have made any significant difference.

He made tons of speeches and he made them in every locale where they could possibly have helped.

-------

That campaign is over. All that matters now is unity. Accusing Bernie of not doing enough

They would have been for the nominee. He wasn't confined to college campuses. Good grief!

Why should he have spoken in a month where there couldn't be crowds or energy?

He did enough by speaking in large rallies in the fall. Those were the only kinds of rallies there was any reason to have him do.

And I mentioned campuses because that was where his biggest rallies are held. Union halls were about the only other place.

Where else would it even have been worth having him talk?

It would have been pointless to have him go to cocktail parties with big donors, or speak in upper middle-class suburbs.

He was never going to help the campaign by speaking in areas where Hillary had beaten him. Nobody goes to rallies where the candidate they voted against in the primary is speaking, and she should already have been able to count on the votes in those states.

He did all he could. He spoke everywhere he was asked, as far as I know.

Implying that Bernie somehow helped T___p achieves nothing and pushes us away from unity. You do WANT unity, don't you? You do WANT our vote to increase? If you want that, you need to end the war with, if not Bernie, people who currently or formerly supported him. Those people, we need, and there needs to be a process of dialog and mutual respect set up to get us to that. Right now, both sides in that are saying things they shouldn't. Both need to dial it back and reach out to each other. Refusing to move on from the last result sabotages any efforts to get to unity. The only thing that matters is the future. The past can't be changed.

What I'm reading here is the type of post that one usually posts when when they've lost the argument/s on all fronts, and have been proven wrong at every turn. At this late hour, if the loser of the argument can't admit that they've been outsmarted, they should just retreat quietly rather than this type of (ir)rationalization and excuse-making.

All I'm trying to say is that a post like that does absolutely nothing to promote unity, nor does it convince anyone that the calls for unity are sincere.