Now The Dust Is Beginning To Settle A Little

Clinton in Democratic Party minds is the popular President and even if she is not the actual President it was because of a hard fought primary that she is not, i.e. it's all Bernie Sanders fault.

1] It was well known before the election took place what you had to do to win over 270 delegates, Trump won the campaign as the system exists [Electoral College] by quite a wide margin. Not carrying out a 50 State campaign and turning a deaf ear to "fly over country" is not the way to go about it, yes, I know we are all oiks and rednecks.

2]Branding everyone that disagreed with the epithets of deplorables, sexists and racists was also a mistake by both Hillary and her surrogates/supporters

The Washington Post notes

One error was to stick with a long-standing, one-dimensional campaign strategy: attacking Donald Trump. That strategy had been devised despite overwhelming evidence, not only in Trump’s rise but also in Clinton’s struggles during the Democratic primary against Bernie Sanders, that the electorate was looking for political and economic change.
Another problem, some said, was to devote resources in states Clinton did not need to win — notably Arizona — instead of shoring up support in deep-blue states, notably the Rust Belt, that she did need.

Why go to Arizona? Who the hell needs Arizona?” said Lou D’Allesandro, a state senator and Clinton supporter from New Hampshire, where Clinton appears to have narrowly prevailed Tuesday. “You go to Michigan. You go to Pennsylvania. You play to your strengths in this business.

“What you can’t do is you can’t manufacture enthusiasm,” Axelrod said. “There was an assumption that antipathy toward Trump would be enough to mobilize the base . . . a certain lethargy that sets in when you’ve had the White House for eight years. Your troops are just not as hungry.”

“What you can’t do is you can’t manufacture enthusiasm,” Axelrod said. “There was an assumption that antipathy toward Trump would be enough to mobilize the base . . . a certain lethargy that sets in when you’ve had the White House for eight years. Your troops are just not as hungry. ”Axelrod added that “too much was assumed in the industrial Midwest.”

In the end, even as the campaign shifted resources and sent surrogates back into the Rust Belt, the message remained the same: Trump lacked the temperament to be president and was unfit for office.

The Guardian looks at it from different angle

In a letter to the New York Times, Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard University, claimed Clinton’s campaign had been undermined by Sanders during a bruising primary contest: “Mr Sanders’ refusal to concede in a timely way as Hillary Clinton won many millions more votes and his constant harping that she was ‘corrupt’ furthered Mr Trump’s message and contributed to the conman’s catastrophic victory.”

The defiant Vermont senator told an audience at a Politics and Prose event at George Washington University on Wednesday night: “My campaign brought millions of people into the process, I suspect the overwhelming majority of whom ended up voting for Hillary Clinton.”

Noting emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, published by WikiLeaks, Sanders added: “To say the very least, the DNC [Democratic National Committee] was not a neutral force in the campaign and we had to take on virtually the entire Democratic establishment. Do I think our campaign in a sense made Hillary Clinton a better candidate? Yeah, I do.”

The DNC set up the narrative of the establishment versus the rest perfectly and that damaged them in the "Rust Belt"/"Fly Over Country". When the popularity of the established politicians in congress is also in the trash can.

My vote was counted.

Despite losing the nomination, Sanders received 18,183 write-in votes on election day in Vermont, according to its secretary of state’s office, putting him third behind Clinton and Trump with nearly 5.7% of the vote.

The lesson the DNC/Hillary Campaign ignored.

Sanders – who, like Trump, beat Clinton in states such as Michigan and Wisconsin – said Senate Democrats would be willing to work with the new president on economic issues that benefit working families. “Towards the end of the campaign he was actually using the term that many Democrats don’t use. He was saying that he was going to be the champion of the American working class. Well, Mr Trump, we have a list of everything that you said, and we are going to hold you to account.

My take

Don't make the campaign about how one widely disliked candidate is less odious than a greatly disliked candidate especially when you are perceived to be on the side of a detested system.

Admittedly Obama's style of campaign would probably not have worked as that ship sailed, but it would not have worse, however the DNC helped reject a widely popular candidate with a populist message of the non-authoritarian type. They ended up cornering themselves in the not as bad as bubble and pointing at the candidate they deemed to be unfit for office. What a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars, Trump demonstrated his odiousness free of charge, that was the time to put out a positive message and not just repeat the negativity back at the voters.

Supporters of a campaign must also realize that mocking and insulting people with a different point of view is not the way to make them change their minds, it tends to make them bloody minded. Throwing "but you lost" in their face whenever they signal a warning might make them not care at best.

When picking a candidate look at their negatives/positives with the population in general not how you relate to them. When 60% or so of the population has a negative view of your candidate that should send up warning flares and not harden your resolve to keep bailing against the tide.

When analysing the reality leave the tin foil alone.

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ggersh's picture

outside of the obvious, why is the MSM(corporate media) laying the blame game all over shit and it's been a shitload of shit, until some shit sticks?

In the back of my mind I remember how good friends the clintons and trumps are, maybe I'm just paranoid. A diazepam or two might help. Wacko

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

in the coming years.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

Creosote.'s picture

in an attempt to clean themselves up. Just as it was all about Her, this shows it was also all about them. Conformity is insidiously infectious -- see Camus' The Plague.

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ggersh's picture

the smell test, I can't put my finger on what it is though.

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

Alphalop's picture

for her loss..

That's how the TeaJadists took over the Republican party.

They made their opponents lose elections and primaried the SHIT out of those that didn't support them.

That may be one of the only lessons worth taking from them, but it is an IMPORTANT one.

We keep thinking we need to "Win" in order to achieve our goals.

While that would be the ideal way to do it, we DON'T have to win.

We just gotta prevent the 3rd wayers from winning.

I imagine that they will be a lot less dismissive of the left after a couple "Important people" lose their jobs because we no longer were willing to settle for the lessor anything.

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"I used to vote Republican & Democrat, I also used to shit my pants. Eventually I got smart enough to stop doing both things." -Me

I can see them proposing so many blue dogs in two years time for "teh" win and if Trump is catastrophic enough they might just do it and hence back slaps all round. There is a long way to go before they get it, as I said I'm done with them. Third Party/Independent all the way.

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Bisbonian's picture

That's what we need to be doing.

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"I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” —Malcolm X

they are called " Third Way" but they should be called "Same Way" Democrats. Their delusion is beyond comprehension and they are the enemy every bit as much as the repugs are. If there is any truth to the old saying (The enemy of my enemy is my friend ) it definitely puts true progressives in a precarious position.

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That they're blaming Bernie for their own buffoonery is not a surprise.

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Damnit Janet's picture

So many saw the complete corruption of HRC over that one.

My friends who couldn't not vote against Trump aka they voted for Hillary out of fear of Trump... could not eat me up too much after the election because tell me to vote for HRC after my own personal story of voter registration fraud was like telling a victim of a carjacking to pony up for the gas money for the thieves.

No way in hell would people vote for someone they felt who interfered with their right to vote. None of us believed it was the "rooosians" who stole the Primaries.

And Hillary only had two messages.

#1 I'm a woman and it's my turn because of HERstory, faux feminism, Woman Card and it's her turn and did I mention it was "Her Turn"?

#2 Trump doesn't have a vagina and he's not as corrupt as I am. He's just racist and sexist and orange.

Nothing about Standing Rock, hunger, climate change

I was backstabbed by Obama in 2008 just after a two weeks into his administration I knew I had made a major mistake in trusting Democrats and got called a Libt$ard for it, got called the professional left. Was told to Shut the Fuck Up and settle for less. So I wasn't too keen on the DNC to begin with.

Vote for Her and shut the fuck up is not a great campaign.

And still no one is talking about Standing Rock attrocities, the war attrocities, or hunger.

Fuck all the politicians. From now on, they are all my enemies. It's the only way I can live now. By not pretending that their is a difference between an R or a D.

They both suck ass. And now our lives and our economy, our planet will suck ass.

Happy Birthday to me. I have to get to work while I still have a job.

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"Love One Another" ~ George Harrison

better judgement [cynicism] the glow lasted all of a month after his inauguration. As soon as he pardoned torture I was done.
When the Nobel committee gave him a Kissinger Prize I knew there was going to be trouble.

I'm with you, fuck them, now it's up to them to prove me wrong.

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ballots and left President blank.
That is a very distinct message that Hillary was loathed by the people that should and did show up to vote team D. How many times was that repeated around the country? A couple of million?

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Wink's picture

At least. I wrote in Bernie.

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

MarilynW's picture

Legally, they must show their tax forms and they must submit to a health exam, mental and physical.

"You want to run for office of POTUS, these are the criteria and that's the law."

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To thine own self be true.

hester's picture

learned even one thing from this election that will benefit the people. If they had, Chucky Schumer would not have been elected minority leader. Their jobs and esp. their gravy train depends on them not understanding. Money. It's all about money. Phuck em.

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Don't believe everything you think.

from a guy who knows fly-over country well, regarding the role that US media elites played in Trump's win. It's not about Red States vs Blue States -- It's about the Country vs the City:

"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.

But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"

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native

1] The bucolic countryside and rolling around in the hay
2] Wild country full of Jesus, red-necks and guns.

Anything but the gritty reality.

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ZimInSeattle's picture

irredeemably corrupt and must be destroyed. Bernie showed a better way. When the peeps realized through the WikiLeaks that Bernie had been betrayed and the election rigged, Killary was toast.

“Of Course They Don’t Care”

The elitist corporate Democrats prefer to hand presidential and Supreme Court tipping power over to a quasi-, proto-, neo- or real fascist than to be a social democratic party of the people. That much is clear from their insistence on running a hopelessly corrupt, politically incompetent, and uninspiring right-wing Democrat named Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump. For all his serious flaws from a seriously Left perspective, Bernie Sanders might well have been able to leap past the usual right wing vote-tampering in key Electoral College states (maybe not – more on that below) to defeat Trump. Sanders would have had a much better chance because he didn’t share the neoliberal Clinton Democrats’ contempt for white majority working class and rural folks – the “heartland” people Mrs. Clinton foolishly smeared as “deplorables” as she struggled to resurrect to the Obama coalition.

Sanders ran in accord with majority progressive opinion on numerous key policy issues For that he was treated with the standard disdain “elite” dollar Dems have long held for progressives in their party’s ranks. The Robert Rubin-Clinton-Obama-Citibank-Council on Foreign Relations Democrats’ scorn for their party’s left-wing is written all over WikiLeaks and numerous other sources including the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

---

Drive All Blame on to Others…Except the Private Voting Machine and Software Companies Who Stole Another Election

They made sure they couldn’t even do that by rigging the game to make sure the Democrats ran Horrid Hillary instead of the progressive Sanders (to whom I should not give too much credit given his failure to seriously go for the jugular against Clinton and his sorry, Bayard Rustin-like surrender to the fiscal and cultural imperatives of the U.S. military Empire.) And now they are making sure to place the fault on others. Jason Hirthler called it last Friday on CounterPunch:

“Oh, they’ll start pouring out their bile now, blaming everyone but themselves and their candidate media’s fault for popularizing Trump (a Clinton strategy). It was the FBI’s fault for re-opening the email case (thanks to Huma Abedin’s ex). It was stupid Middle America’s fault for being racist and sexist (was that why they voted for Trump?). It was third-party supporters who screwed us in Florida again (Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow are furious that leftists didn’t vote for their heroine). It was Russia’s fault for hacking the DNC (no evidence) and plotting to invade Europe (no evidence).”

Actually, though, there are two legitimate targets top Democrats are reluctant to blame. The first is the Electoral College, that Constitutionally-mandated absurdity that lets candidates become U.S. President without winning the popular vote. The second is the official voting machine outcome in key contested states. The vote counts violated the exit polls at levels that defy basic statistical laws. The U.S. State Department would call an election with such statistically impossible disparities invalid if it put in a candidate Washington didn’t like in another country. But statistics don’t count inside the self-proclaimed heartland and headquarters of democracy, where right-wing private and for-profit corporations tied to the Neocon establishment are in preposterous charge of proprietary vote-tabulating software (used to subvert elections in the Third World in the past) and voting machines. That plus racist voter suppression helped to ensure a crooked Trump victory in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Winner take all.

Trump was right to warn about a rigged election but wrong to say it would be rigged against him — the opposite was the case (this was my sense before). It happened in 2000 and 2004 and it just happened again. (Listen to this Eric Draister CounterPunch Radio interview with the leading election integrity attorney and political scientist Bob Fitrakis.) Oh, well.

It’s absurd to expect the Clintons to challenge the vote count since they rigged results against Sanders in the primaries and there are connections between private election software and voting machine companies and the Clinton Foundation.

One can chew some gum here (loathing the neoliberal and imperial Clintons) and walk (support the integrity of elections) at the same time.

Bold in original; italics added.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/17/beyond-the-hollow-ones/

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"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - JFK | "The more I see of the moneyed peoples, the more I understand the guillotine." - G. B. Shaw Bernie/Tulsi 2020

Cassiodorus's picture

The defiant Vermont senator told an audience at a Politics and Prose event at George Washington University on Wednesday night: “My campaign brought millions of people into the process, I suspect the overwhelming majority of whom ended up voting for Hillary Clinton.”

Noting emails from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, published by WikiLeaks, Sanders added: “To say the very least, the DNC [Democratic National Committee] was not a neutral force in the campaign and we had to take on virtually the entire Democratic establishment. Do I think our campaign in a sense made Hillary Clinton a better candidate? Yeah, I do.”

Why is Sanders pretending to be tone-deaf about his supporters? And why is he pretending not to understand the concept of impunity?

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“Those who make Bernie Sanders impossible will make Luigi Mangione inevitable." - Dan Berger

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