is your ideal candidate?

but Biden would've been preferable. Again, no one is inspiring me. I liked Biden in '08, Clark in '04, Gore in '00. I supported Bill Clinton enthusiastically in '92 & '96. I like the smarties; I like genuineness in a candidate. Obama was a gift from heaven. But I fear we as a party are going to pay a price for the Clintons having spent the last 16 years scaring everyone else off from running.

A strong democracy should keep on producing new leaders and it's a measure of our weakened democracy (& growing plutocracy) that a stronger crop of candidates did not show up on the heels of a fabulous & historically successful presidency like Obama's. I'm going with Bernie this trip around the horsetrack, but only cause O'Malley's a dud & Sanders is more electable than Secretary Clinton.

Personally I like Hillary, and if she was running for Prime Minister I'd support her. I'm much closer to her politically than I am to Sanders. But a strong republic needs a rotation in office--the Framers were pretty clear about that. After a quarter century at the heart of power, she's surrounded by cronies & too bought-in to the status quo to really seek reform. A republic of our size absolutely requires a regular housecleaning to avoid systemic corruption. Someone who's been rubbing elbows with the wealthy for 3 decades isn't going to do that. Read Baron de Montesquieu on the relationship between size of nations and the forms of government they best fit.

is all very reasonable...

I don't agree with it all, but it's all reasonable and lucid

Plus Bob Newhart... I mean c'mon.

Thank you so much for raising the level of discourse.

I am well aware of the shortcomings of voting in another Clinton but personally am willing to accept them for other reasons. She is very smart and is not batshit insane like the Republican candidates. She has a command of the Washington apparatus the others do not. I trust her grasp of foreign policy more. And I believe a first woman president would be as groundbreaking as a first Black president.

I also like Bernie. I am just interested in blocking the path to the White House to the GOP. Go Bernary!

I know that's a hard thing for men to realize that women are not just an extension of their husbands now that they are entering more fields which have been dominated by men.

Yes, her name is Clinton, but she's her own person.

She has high poll numbers even though she has had more lies told about her than seems possible, and devious plots planned against her.

She's smart, she's strong, she's knowledgeable, she has workable plans.

I want her to win for the sake of the country.

+1

But, in a world where just anyone can sign up to run for president, and does, what kind of Democrats would be "scared" off by the Clintons?

Frankly, there's so much support out there to woo, so many promising groups, so much funding available, and so many megamillionaires who can fund themselves, that, to my mind, only the most inadequate people wouldn't run for that reason. Boo! See them run -- away!!

I really do not think that is a factor.

I generally supported the same candidates you did over the years. I think Hillary is more qualified than Bernie for the office, at least on most issues, but she's a pretty unpopular candidate among a large swath of the US.

Although Bernie has some great ideas, like single payer, they simply aren't going to ever pass. And I think that if he were the nominee the Republicans would beat him over the head with the whole "socialist" and "raise taxes" issues.

I will certainly vote for whomever the Dems nominate, but both candidates are flawed and that concerns me. Bill Clinton or President Obama would win in a landslide against any of the current Republican candidates, who are about the worst crop I recall in a long time, and we simply cannot afford a President Trump or President Cruz.

You've got the best candidate you're ever going to see in your lifetime. And you don't see it?

admirers of Hillary were gravely disappointed in her. She did make a whole lot of mistakes, mostly small but there were so many, that caused her few successes to mostly be forgotten. Healthcare reform failed, and she was severely humiliated and retreated. She never made friends in the press. She mostly did "stand by" her man like a good first lady and was saddled with responsibility for his actions as president. She just did not present herself well, above all she did not let people know who she was, always talking policy, and as a result the very real vast right-wing conspiracy was mostly able to define her for most Americans without obstruction.

Nowadays there are "two kinds" of Democrats on this topic: Those who never moved off the track those years put their opinions on and those who saw past the smear jobs and have watched her grow all these years -- i.e., those who see the person she really is: a serious policy nerd do-gooder who's along the way become extremely competent.

BTW, somewhere back when she was running for U.S. Senator she finally learned how to set aside that distant, off-putting shell she always assumed in public and appear warm, open and approachable, to make small talk with the press instead of running from them. A basic politician's skill that might literally have changed history if she had made that breakthrough earlier, like when she took on the task of reforming our national healthcare.