2016 Postmortem

Initiated by Bill Clinton to usurp traditional corporate support for the GOP. On the surface to promote the idea of finding a "third way" to find consesus with the right wing in order to push through reforms. Giving the right some things like three strikes, welfare reform, opposition to gay marriage, appointing corporate friendly SC justices....in order to pass a few things they wanted. And also important, got millions more in campaign donations.

And it worked!....for a while. Obama slid into that plan as well. Making sure no real prosecutions for Wall Street. Instead promoting them to run departments of finance for him. No war crimes investigations on Bushco., extension of the Bush tax cuts. Even using the same language like "entitlements" to describe hard earned employee paid benefits and floating the idea of SS privatization.

but they, the new DLC, which is dominated by industry bigwigs now, thought that was it. They were now the new Republican party that would appeal to the business class, PLUS the old Democratic party where the left wing would have no other alternative but to vote them in as well. They were the smartest people in the room.

They didn't count on, but should have seen it coming, the Republicans were not going to just die off, they ran to the lowest common denominator they had, the deplorable classes. They went into Sarah Palin country. The Idiocracy. Together with disinformation, faux news, unrelenting hammering of the "criminal" Clintons on all the radio and TV stations they owned. It was all fair game to those with zero sense of conscience.

The DLC though did not foresee the world wide sweep of populist right wing reactionary leaders across the globe and right in the US. The anti-establishment sentiment. Bernie was a gift on a platter to them. He ran as a D, so no votes lost if he had run as a Green or I. He would have swept up a lot of down ticket Dems with him an most likely also took the Senate back. And he fit the bill of anti-establishment. He would have taken those North East states that hated those free trade agreements Bill signed on to. (Probably regarded at the time as yet another chalk mark he tallied up to fullfil his third way cred) and her not long past approval of the TPP.

If Hillary had run uncontested she would not only have lost, but lost dramatically. There would be less of the left base voting for her that were coaxed along by Bernie's gracious exit call to support her. There would be no minimum wage proposals, no college tuition reforms for them to get motivated about that came about because he rode it out to the convention in order to get these ideas into the platform.

So start blaming who you really should be...those that actually voted for him, men and also a lot of women that did not want a woman as leader. Those gullible enough to think Hillary was less trustworthy than a con artist like Donald. The lazy commercially driven MSM that only started doing their jobs in the last week. Before that, Bernie got next to no coverage in spite of teeming full stadiums, the minimal news attention Hillary got was dominated by talk of her email server, and not if she was guilty, but HOW guilty, and how this was going to effect voters blah blah blah...Bernie went out of his way to repeat over and over to flummoxed news hosts with marching orders trying to egg him on how this was not about tearing down Clinton, it was about promoting democratic positive ideas.