I think if he'd gone negative earlier he'd just have exposed himself as a regular, run if the mill politician that much sooner.

He thought that if everyone saw him as a good guy, that would be enough.
Now that the true BS has shown his face, all the good guy image things are for nothing.

Great article read that this morning

It only would have happened sooner had he heeded the perpetually wrong Devine

Oh, right you are. He didn't do the Dukakis, Gore or Kerry campaign any favors, either.

It demonstrates her strength...talking with people, listening to people, connecting with people. Yelling to a huge crowd of strangers made Bernie feel like a rock star, while Hillary was meeting with people who saw her as the only candidate who wanted to know them and cared about their concerns. Love and kindness.

yelling @ the crowds. So Happy that this is what won out.

Definitely showcases Hillary's strength, brer cat. She made real connections with the voters in Iowa and she made history!


Hillary Clinton
✔ ?@HillaryClinton
History: made. #IowaCaucus
4:38 AM - 2 Feb 2016
1,856 1,856 Retweets 4,139 4,139 likes

Last edited Mon Apr 4, 2016, 08:42 AM - Edit history (2)

I know it's fashionable to diss the caucuses right now - and in the later states (where candidates can't possibly introduce themselves to voters one-on-one), the critics may have a point. But in Iowa, I think it works: that one-on-one campaigning is important enough for the voters, but it's absolutely vital for the candidates themselves.
Especially in these days of media-buzz-is-all, it's just absolutely essential that candidates meet actual people up close and personal at some point, for just the reasons your graphic says.

Maybe it's the small scale coupled with midwestern civility, rather than the caucus format, that matters most in Iowa. The small scale of NH primary is important, too. But for whatever it's worth, in 2004, when I did phone-bank campaigning for Kerry in the primaries, I found the Iowa caucus voters to be , by far, the most knowledgeable, serious and responsible voters that I encountered in the entire campaign .

sanders campaign said they weren't even trying in the Southern states although we know that not to be true.

There's so much disingenuousness going on with them.. it's hard to keep up but I'm trying.

It's like getting even more studying done!! Imagine everything that she learnt in these smaller closer gatherings from people all over the USA! She is a person that does her homework!! Thoroughly!! This will benefit her as Prez and us as constituents!!!

She has always done listening tours to get the big picture and the details! SMART!

It perfectly illustrates what I've been trying to communicate about the differences in their approach.

One person started using it as their sig line @ the time.

I hold no hero but, it is still neat to say that I have stood on stage with Hillary Clinton at a small rally.

It was in 2008 when she was campaigning for Obama.

They don't want their supporters to hear, read, or see anything that does not fit their program. That includes the cult leader himself. They refuse to do unbiased research on any of the issues and especially on their opponent for fear of finding out that they are being misled.

They will go the way of all cults when the leader is defeated or stopped.

Trump's supporters are exactly the same.

have to defend his positions and answer questions...something he is ill-prepared to do. He much preferred to be unreachable by the people and a crowd pleaser. He and his positions are very shallow, vague...like Trump. But he can stoke anger, smear his opponent and walk away without having to prove anything or be challenged.

Last edited Mon Apr 4, 2016, 09:58 AM - Edit history (1)

He prefers to lecture, rather than to listen. That is typical of authoritarian personalities, who do not see conversation as a means of learning from others. Of course, if you have not changed your mind in thirty years and have been right about everything from the very beginning, what could you possibly learn from others? Many of us have endured the company of persons like that. With genuine conversation, however, all partakers, including the "leader," end up wiser and more informed than when they began. It is always best to begin a conversation with the belief that there is always something new to learn, some new angle or perspective to be appreciated, a new insight generated by the honest give-and-take of dialogue itself. The authoritarian approach, on the other hand, creates followers, but not friends.

ETA: I would like to add this quote from the article in the link above:

to them making a full court negative press. I could see Sanders trying to make the emails an issue during the New York debate.

Either that, or the internals for WI don't look for him and having painted the state as a must win, they are looking to start the exit narrative before it gets too embarrassing. He can go to the end, but he may want to avoid the crushing defeats that further point out his weakness with democrats, folks over 40, and PoC.

Regardless, you don't see winning campaigns commenting on stories like this. They know they're losing.

I could be wrong and they may go full court press on negative but I don't think at this point that is going to win him anything.

The candidate and the campaign have sent out conflicting messages from time to time. Maybe the tax issue has spooked them.

Because he won't attack on cue and otherwise play the kind of politics they want.

And yes, there have been several (and recently an increased number of) instances where the campaign and the candidate are obviously not on the same page. I find this duplicitous, as it allows Sanders to say one thing while his campaign does the complete opposite. "I want to run a positive campaign," says Bernie Sanders, while his campaign is releasing smear tweets and attacking Clinton's integrity at every turn. Not fooling anyone, Bernie.

don't you think?

About Sanders Committee Assignments?

He was playing to the OWS crowd and added the free college to get the attention of young people. He has been on the attack this whole campaign, pushing the imagined sins of bad Wall Street though never saying a bill he voted for CFMA was instrumental in the financial crisis.

within the Democratic Party. Maybe in 5-10 years, but certainly not now. And what wisdom is there in trying to run a political movement that is anathema to older voters? Like Bernie Sanders, a lot of older Democrats have a lot of money tied up in retirement funds linked to the stock market. Did he honestly think "Blow up Wall Street" was going to play well to a majority of Democratic voters who have their retirement accounts invested there?

and given how Bernie campaigns against fracking, it will be a big moment of hypocrisy when it's revealed he makes money off of it, even in an ancillary fashion like through investments.

The only way to avoid banks and Wall Street is to hide cash under your mattress.

It would be troubling for "disciples" of Bernie to discover that he made money on the stock market.

Like most of the political class consistently does, to their own detriment.

Part of why I like and respect Hillary Clinton so much is based on how easily she embarrasses her haters.

from that article-

I saw this late last night, when it got posted to the NYTimes site. It seems to be trying to do a couple of things. The thesis of the article and statements from Devine are Sanders is so nice he waited too long before going negative, and that's why he lost. I read that and just shook my head: you can't have it both ways. He went there, when he shouldn't have.

The whole article is about making excuses for a badly run campaign. I was disappointed to see the canard about how black voters don't know him, and that's why he lost. That's such an over-simplification of what actually happened. The truth is, Sanders didn't do the work. Clinton has spent years building those relationships, and for him to waltz in and expect to win them over in just a few months with big rallies is on him and his own hubris, not the black voters who knew him and rejected him. Reducing this to mere name recognition is insulting.

I have no idea what Bob Kerry was up to in that article, lol. He kind of threw Clinton under the bus.

I think their internals from WI are worse than they want. I'm not sure Clinton will win there, but a close race (essentially a tie) is a loss for him any way you cut it.

Sanders was never going to be able to match her in ground game. Plus, he started later than she did in 2015.

Let's face it: Sanders got into the race as a protest candidate who probably expected to be one of the first men out of the race. But his message of free stuff resonated with the low-info, politically naive crowd who started showing up to hear all about unicorns and rainbows. They started donating $ (easy to do when you just received a windfall when your tuition costs were eliminated) and suddenly, Sanders had $. Not being totally incompetent, Tad Devine realized that the only way to move BS forward was to spend tons of $ in ads and in holding yuge rallies that would generated free media attention. So that's been the plan for the whole cycle. There is no Plan B. Neither is there any nuance to be added to Plan A.

What sunk Sanders -and what continues to sink him - are seasoned D voters who have been through a few years of actual living, who don't buy pie-in-the-sky promises from Rs and who aren't going to buy them coming from a DINO. Simply put, the rank-n-file Ds don't trust Bernie Sanders. And why would they? They hear every negative thing he has to say about them as a party. They're not stupid.

Buh-bye, Bernie. You won't be missed.

I think Sanders would've been out very early had there been another genuine Democrat in the race. People like to have choices (though not too many choices), so some percentage of his votes were anti-Clinton votes more than pro-Sanders votes.

His power at fundraising will be the key takeaway for him from this primary. What he does with that will be interesting going forward. In some ways, he's done a real disservice to himself by not talking about downticket races much more.

when he reneged on his commitment to raise $ for the same? He had to agree to do that for the DNC to allow him to run as a D. Just another instance of him using the party for his own ends.

And he really thinks that the very people he's not raising money for - the super delegates - are going to desert Hillary and flock to him at the convention. Idiot.

At this point, I think Tad Devine is more concerned about his own future and reputation than he is about Sanders' winning the primary. I guess we are approaching "save ourselves" time for paid campaign managers.

Truthfully, both Devine and Weaver misread the concerns of whole groups of people within the Democratic party. They really never got what African Americans were trying to say; they hired too few women and minorities for upper level positions; and they contradicted their own candidate on too many occasions.

Talking to the NYT on this occasion was another colossal blunder. It sounds like rats leaving the ship.

Let's not forget this happened! in Nevada!

He chose to lunge around the Obama coalition and attempt to cobble the New Deal coalition back together. He has been signalling for years that he felt white voters would vote for an economic program that hearkened back to the olden times. His seminal NPR interview from 2014 lays out the whole plan:

http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2014/11/19/365024592/sen-bernie-sanders-on-how-democrats-lost-white-voters

He is dismissive! Condescending! All knowing, authoritative sounding. No wonder he did not win many other demographics... Why would voters trust him with something grand and vague like a Revolution?

HRC GROUP READY!