2016 Postmortem

It's probably the height of pointlessness to speculate on what coulda/woulda/shoulda happened, because at the end of the day we are stuck with what did happen, of course. If my grandmother had wheels she'd be a golf cart, that kind of thing.

However, this idea that there was some damning, deal-breaking amount of Sanders oppo material that would have doomed him... okay, maybe, maybe not. In a normal year a video of a Presidential candidate bragging about "pussy grabbing" would have sunk the candidacy for good. Hell, it almost did. But this wasn't a normal year.

In that context, if (again, speculative territory) if Sanders had been out there making his solid economic case to, say, Rust belt voters, was everyone gonna turn around and freak out because of his marital history (um, trump) or his employment record? So he didn't have a real job until 40... neither did Dubya, if I remember correctly. So what? And the so-called "rape essay". Fuck, don't get me started. That thing was beaten to death and it wasn't ever anything close to the hair-on-fire 5 alarm crisis some people here wanted it to be. And it was already out there, people knew about it and would have had plenty of time to digest the context of the poorly written yet era-appropriate piece of social commentary that it was. And again, it would have been sitting in contrast to "pussy grabbing".... circa just a few years ago. One thing that wouldn't have happened is, James Comey wouldn't have commented on it on October 30. I think we can safely assume that.

Castro? Florida? Well, it's worth noting that Hillary didn't win Florida either, now, did she? (Perhaps letting Debbie Wasserman Schultz go to the times and get all reefer madness against a medical marijuana law that FL eventually passed with over 70% of the voters, wasn't such a good strategic move, but I digress) ... None of that stuff would have mattered nearly as much in 2016 as it would have in, say, 1996. Remember, we had an electorate that already knew that the current Russian administration was in the bag for one of the presidential candidates and it didn't cause a mass freakout- so everyone was gonna lose their shit over Sanders' cold war activities from 35 years ago?

but again, this is all speculation. We'll never know, and frankly neither of them are running again, so my thinking is we need to expand our bench, preferably with younger and more geograpically diverse- particularly vis a vis the underrepresented West Coast- leadership. Time to move on.