2016 Postmortem

I've never made any of this about claiming that Hillary "failed" and I'm talking about the future here, rather than the fall campaign.

It's a question of the strategic choices the campaign made. The campaign...NOT the candidate.

And those choices were grounded in self-defeating attitudes the party establishment has had for decades:

More than anything else, they were grounded in the belief, a belief supported by no historical evidence at all, that we somehow cannot get the electorate to vote FOR us, we can only get the electorate to vote AGAINST the Republicans.

That belief, more than anything else, that informed the decision to focus the ads, over and over again, on Trump's personal ickiness. They knew the whole time that THAT wasn't going to be enough to put us over the top. The voters KNEW Trump was a scumbag, but for some reason, that didn't matter to enough of them.

The economic agenda(which was strong and which was strengthened by the additions of some Sanders positions to the platform) should have been a greater priority in the ads than Trump's p-grabbing, which, while loathesome, should only have been the dominant theme for a day or two. And when the campaign saw that the media was refusing to report her economic message, they should have used the massive war chest they had to buy time for a nationally televised address to voters that would cover all the issues the media was ignoring.

Everything I'm saying here is as a person who thought our message was good and that our candidate was a worthy choice. I wanted Hillary to win in November as much as you did, and she did win in the popular vote, but the campaign strategy failed to get us the votes we needed. As much as you want to pretend that I'm bashing Hillary, I'm actually sympathizing with her, because I feel the choices made by the party insiders running her campaign ended up undermining her chances.

I agree with you that this is a country in which bigotry is a huge problem. We MUST keep fighting it with all our might, as one of the two pillars of our program of change. But if we assume that we fell short in the EC solely because of that(or that and the media and the Russians), that assumption gives us no hope of gaining any ground in future elections.

We have to find things WE, as a party, can do better, and to do those things better-and we have to do that just as much in the name of defeating social injustice as in addressing economic issues.