Just wondering...is any reference to not campaigning in WI., not sending extra help to MI and PA,

[Ken Burch]

and wasting resources in Ohio and Iowa when we'd known for weeks we had no chance of winning those states going to be met with the reply of "The campaign was flawless...It was Comey! it was the Russians! It was Racism! It was Sexism! It was the BoBs!"?

I get it that those factors did play a significant role, but is the ONLY way to acknowledge them to pretend that there were no significant mistakes in strategy or in organization?

What is so terrible about saying that, if a few things had been done differently, the popular vote total might not have been close enough for us to lose the Upper Midwest and Florida?

[elleng]

1. 'What I've said is that I can maybe give some counsel advice to the Democratic Party.

And I think the -- the -- the thing we have to spend the most time on -- because it's the thing we have most control over -- is, how do we make sure that we're showing up in places where I think Democratic policies are needed, where they are helping, where they are making a difference, but where people feel as if they're not being heard?

And where Democrats are characterized as coastal, liberal, latte- sipping, you know, politically correct, out-of-touch folks, we have to be in those communities. And I've seen that, when we are in those communities, it makes a difference. That's how I became president. I became a U.S. Senator not just because I had a strong base in Chicago, but because I was driving downstate Illinois and going to fish fries and sitting in V.F.W. Halls and talking to farmers.

And I didn't win every one of their votes, but they got a sense of what I was talking about, what I cared about, that I was for working people, that I was for the middle class, that the reason I was interested in strengthening unions and raising the minimum wage and rebuilding our infrastructure and making sure that parents had decent childcare and family leave, was because my own family's history wasn't that different from theirs even if I looked a little bit different. Same thing in Iowa.

And so the question is, how do we rebuild that party as a whole, so that there's not a county in any state -- I don't care how red -- where we don't have a presence and we're not making the argument, because I think we have a better argument. But that requires a lot of work. You know, it's been something that I've been able to do successfully in my own campaigns.'


from TRANSCRIPT of POTUS' Press Conference

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/12/16/transcript-obamas-end-of-year-news-conference-on-syria-russian-hacking-and-more/?utm_term=.a3f6a252e8bf

[Lostnote]

6. Thank you for the text... I feel like I'm

... watching a dear friend wave goodbye...

[elleng]

7. You're welcome, Lostnote.

[Crunchy Frog]

15. Thanks for that. The most important thing is that the party leadership

adopt that view and get serious about implementing it. If they don't, then I'm afraid that our party is essentially finished and will drift off into complete irrelevance.

I really, really hope that Obama will be heavily involved in helping to reshape the party going forward.

[elleng]

19. You're welcome, Crunchy.

I've sent this message to DNC.

[bettyellen]

2. It's just as valid as saying the BOBs hurt by carrying the Wiki water, sure.

But pretending it's about economics, LOl just nope.

[Ken Burch]

5. I didn't even mention economics in the OP.

And would not have mentioned it here if you hadn't insisted on raising it.

Why are you so invested in arguing that economics played no role?

It's not as though the economic status quo does anything to fight grassroots or institutional bigotry. Corporations want at least some bigotry to perpetually exist in order to keep the majority divided and unable to stand up to it.

And it isn't "either/or" with economics and bigotry...there's a correlation between support for tribalist "taking care of our own" politics(which racism and sexism are components of)and economic uncertainty and fear of falling into want. The country is always more bigoted in hard times(or regional hard times as exist in the Upper Midwest)than in good times.

We're much likelier to have a future where social justice gains are secure if we can also have a secure, egalitarian economic system. Get rid of fear of want an lost ground, and it will be a lot easier to get rid of hate and of institutional bigotry.

It's nob about letting anybody off the hook for being a bigot, and I join you in denouncing anyone who WOULD do that.

[emulatorloo]

37. ""The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class"

Last edited Sat Dec 17, 2016, 10:56 PM - Edit history (2)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028335843

Ken I love you, but for some reason you insist on working from false premises from the MSM/The Politico and the blogosphere.

Hillary won with voters making under 50k, and won even more with voters making under 30k

Trump won voters making 50K and up.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html?_r=0

We're not going to learn anything about how to move forward if we work from false premises



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The Dangerous Myth That Hillary Clinton Ignored the Working Class"

Mark Murray ‏@mmurraypolitics 21m21 minutes ago
Via @DKThomp, impt corrective to idea that Hillary Clinton didn't talk about the working class or how to help them https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/ …

In the days after her shocking loss, Democrats complained that Clinton had no jobs agenda. A widely shared essay in The Nation blamed Clinton's "neoliberalism" for abandoning the voters who swung the election. “I come from the white working class,” Bernie Sanders said on CBS This Morning, “and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to where I came from.”

But here is the troubling reality for civically minded liberals looking to justify their preferred strategies: Hillary Clinton talked about the working class, middle class jobs, and the dignity of work constantly. And she still lost.

She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers. She had decades of ideas to help parents, particularly working moms, and their children. She had plans to help young men who were getting out of prison and old men who were getting into new careers. She talked about the dignity of manufacturing jobs, the promise of clean-energy jobs, and the Obama administration’s record of creating private-sector jobs for a record-breaking number of consecutive months. She said the word “job” more in the Democratic National Convention speech than Trump did in the RNC acceptance speech; she mentioned the word “jobs” more during the first presidential debate than Trump did. She offered the most comprehensively progressive economic platform of any presidential candidate in history—one specifically tailored to an economy powered by an educated workforce.

...After the election, some people called for an end to “identity politics” that promotes niche cultural issues over economic policy. But any reasonable working-class platform requires the advancement of policies that may disproportionately help non-whites. For example, hundreds of thousands of black men stay out of the labor force after being released from prison sentences for non-violent crimes. For them and their families, criminal justice reform is essential economic reform, even if poor whites see it as a distraction from that “real” issues that bedevil the working class, like trade policy.

The long-term future of the U.S. involves rising diversity, rising inequality, and rising redistribution. The combination of these forces makes for an unstable and unpredictable system. Income stagnation and inequality encourage policies to redistribute wealth from a rich few to the anxious multitudes. But when that multitude includes minorities who are seen as benefiting disproportionately from those redistribution policies, the white majority can turn resentful. (This may be one reason why the most successful social democracies, as in Scandinavia, were initially almost all white.) Nobody has really figured out how to be an effective messenger for pluralist social democracy, except, perhaps, for one of the few American adults who is legally barred from running for the U.S. presidency in the future...

read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/hillary-clinton-working-class/509477/

-----------------------------

The most common words in Hillary Clinton’s speeches, in one chart
They weren’t about “identity politics.”
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/16/13972394/most-common-words-hillary-clinton-speech

<snip>

I gathered all her campaign speeches (from both the primary and general campaigns) into one document and did a simple word-frequency analysis.

The results are below. As you can see, I’ve been as generous as possible in filing things under “identity politics.” Anything about minorities or criminal justice or gay people or immigrants, I filed as identity politics. I even included mentions of climate and clean energy in that category, though in a sane world those would be top-tier economic issues.

So, without further ado, what did Hillary Clinton talk about?

<CHART>

Yeah. She talked about jobs, workers, and the economy — more than anything else. They were the central focus of her public speeches.

You can critique how she talked about jobs, workers, and the economy. Maybe she should have used different words, or framed things differently. Maybe, despite running on an agenda of worker-friendly policies, she should have chosen a clearer, simpler economic theme and hit it more often.

You can critique where she talked about jobs, workers, and the economy. Clearly, in retrospect, she should have spent more time and resources in those upper Midwestern swing states.

But you cannot say she didn’t talk about jobs, workers, and the economy. She talked about them all the time, more than anything else.

It’s just not what voters heard. Here’s what they heard in the two-month period of July 17 to September 18, according to Gallup polling:

<CHART, GALLUP polling 2 questions: "What have you heard or read about Donald Trump?" "What have you heard or read about Hillary Clinton?">

Virtually everything the media said about Clinton was about corruption, one way or another. None of it was about policy. None of it was about her actual priorities, as reflected in her speeches and her agenda.

You can critique the Clinton campaign in all sorts of ways, but excess rhetorical attention to identity politics simply isn’t one of them.

[CBHagman]

39. "She detailed plans to help coal miners and steel workers."

One thing that's really galling is that some in the media cherry-picked sentences from Hillary Clinton's remarks on how to work with miners through a transition to a different type of energy and made it sound as though she was declaring a vendetta on them instead of expressing empathy and an intention to help. Some of the fact-checkers got the story right, but the damage was done.

[url]http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/may/10/context-hillary-clintons-comments-about-coal-jobs/[/url]

And in an unrelated but equally disturbing note, if the GOP makes good on its threat to repeal the ACA, miners suffering from black lung will have greater difficulty accessing benefits.

[url]http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/rate-black-lung-disease-among-miners-may-10-times-higher-reported/[/url]

[SlimJimmy]

10. Actually, it was ALL about economics.

Just ask the out of work citizens in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. We, as a party, STILL don't seem to get it. "It's about the economy, stupid."

[NanceGreggs]

3. What's so terrible ...

... about acknowledging that there were things at play in this election that were beyond Hillary's control - and that she would have won were it not for those "things at play"?

Why this need to keep finding reasons why - despite Trump being coddled 24/7 by the MSM, despite the constant emails-emails-emails stories, despite the fake news, despite Comey's interference, and despite Russian intervention - this loss has to pinned on Hillary's alleged mis-steps?

The Russians just fucked with our elections! I'm not sure what part of that fact you somehow find secondary to whether HRC "wasted resources" - oh, and BTW, according to who?

[Ken Burch]

4. In my OP I acknowledged that there were factors beyond the campaign's control

and factors WITHIN the campaign's control(and I've clearly avoided making my post election comments into any sort of personal attack on Hillary.

It's possible to acknowledge both sets of factors. And there's no reason NOT to.

The desire to find reasons why is grounded in two natural reactions:

1) Disappointment and despair at the results.

2) The entirely understandable wish to do better next time.

Hillary was a good candidate. I grieve the fact that she isn't going to be president and rage at the various ways the election was messed with. There's no contradiction between those feelings and the desire to learn from the experience and improve what we CAN improve for next time.

[pnwmom]

9. How many OP's have you made on this topic? I think you've made your point enough.nt

[Ken Burch]

11. My point is simply that we should be open to learning from our experiences.

I'm not bashing the nominee.

[pnwmom]

12. But we're learning the wrong thing if you think she could have somehow done

everything right and Russia wouldn't have been able to affect the vote.

Obama and others were wrong when they said that hacking would be too difficult. The Russians wouldn't have had to hack 50 states. They could win by just hacking tabulators in a handful of states -- and they had the capability. Because it turns out that 25 states are using optical scanners that can interfere with the tabulation of the vote.

In addition to that problem, more than 30 states are run by Rethugs who have done everything they could to suppress the votes of Democrats.

So we should be concentrating our efforts now on three main things, which will require a great deal of time and effort:

Bringing the voting systems in our states up to date so they cannot be hacked.

Fighting Rethug efforts to suppress the vote.

Fighting gerrymandering.

Because if we don't solve those problems, it won't matter how hard a Dem campaigns or what states she campaigns in -- she will still lose.

[Ken Burch]

24. It's not about what SHE did...it's about what the campaign did.

I agree with doing all of the things you call for there.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't also be talking about what WE could do better next time, no matter who we nominate.

[pnwmom]

28. No, it's a complete waste of time. What we should be doing "better for next time"

is exactly what I just said. Otherwise, it won't matter where our candidate campaigns; they'll find a way to steal our votes.

[Ken Burch]

29. Why can't we do BOTH?

Why can't be fight for election security AND work on crafting a message and strategy that gets us more votes(which can easily be done without throwing anyone under anyone's bus)?

It's not as though we can ONLY say this election was screwed with if we deny that our campaign got anything wrong.

And it's not as though there's any possibility of Hillary still getting sworn in on January 20th(much as I'd welcome that surprise ending).

[pnwmom]

30. Because what you want to do is a backhanded way of blaming Hillary/her campaign --

which you have done over and over again.

And neither can be blamed for not having 20/20 hindsight. There was no way HRC could have run her campaign and not have been susceptible to these attacks.

[zappaman]

32. It's beyond tiresome, isn't it?

[TexasTowelie]

13. Ken,

There is a difference between learning and browbeating. I think that the body of your work in this forum with your nightly observations and questions indicate that you have moved from the former and into the latter. When you feel obligated to include a statement that "I'm not bashing the nominee," then the reaction I have when I read that comment is to believe the opposite.

The election is done and Clinton allocated the resources logically based upon the polling available. Looking in hindsight to say that she should have been more vocal on a particular issue or she should have campaigned one more time in a specific state which would result in winning the election is speculative, counter-productive and insulting to the people that worked on her campaign and voted for her.

There is very little left to learn about what happened in the general election, save perhaps the extent that the Russians manipulated the system and we are pursuing the leads of that investigation. That issue alone should be the impetus for Democrats to unite and prevent if we want to return to the White House.

[killbotfactory]

22. The reason he says he is not bashing the nominee

is because people are alert-stalking anyone who has a criticism of how Clinton ran her campaign.

[kcr]

31. Yeah. That's the reason.

[riversedge]

36. Well said T

[still_one]

38. Well stated Texas

[Gothmog]

41. Great post

The polling was way off and that affected the allocation of resources

[Crunchy Frog]

16. By definition, things that are beyond our control are beyond our control.

We can rage as much as we want about the things we can't control, and about how unfair it is, but ultimately, it's not going to enable us to improve anything, or start doing better (ie, winning offices) in elections. We can only begin doing better as a party by focusing on the things that we can control.

It's sort of like if I lived in Tornado Valley, and my house kept getting destroyed by tornadoes. I could endlessly rage about how terrible and unfair the situation is, or I could focus on building a house that can withstand a tornado.

The simple reality is, that the Republicans are nasty, play dirty, cheat, and will do anything they can get away with to win, including disenfranchising millions of voters and collaborating with a hostile foreign power. The reality is that we have a largely hostile, corporate run media.

The truth of our situation is that we have to take these things into consideration when we run our campaigns. If we keep trying to act as if that's not the environment under which we're operating, then we'll continue to get our asses handed to us.

I think it's helpful to recall the words of the Serenity Prayer.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
and the Wisdom to know the difference.

I'm not intending this post as an insult or an attack, and hope that you don't take it that way.

[pnwmom]

8. Hillary lost by less than 1% in those states, so Comey's interference was critical.

Also, lawyers at the recount in WI discovered that the optical scanners used there and in 24 other states had the option for cellular connectivity -- both at the precinct level and the tabulator level. We'll never know what effect that had.

I know you have great 20/20 hindsight, but it is pointless. Her national lead went from 7-9 points to about 2 points after Comey dropped his letter bombs. No one could have predicted that.

[Nay]

18. I also believe that Comey was the crucial piece, and it points back to the Dems'

idea that we should 'play fair' -- from now on, seeing that Comey, a Republican, threw the election, NO elected Democrat should ever, ever appoint a Republican to any high office, ever. Ever. Look at who Trump is picking! Not only are there no Democrats, there are no people with the relevant skills! In fact, they abhor the existence of the agencies they are going to lead!

We should close the doors to any Republican (or Pub-leaning Dem) and police that line vigorously.

[synergie]

21. As David Duke has retweeted, Donnie loves Tulsi!

[Crunchy Frog]

14. For some posters here, yes.

I think it's probably a minority position (vocal) both here and in the party itself, but those still holding to it are probably not going to let it go. At this point, I wouldn't continue to keep pushing it at people who will likely never accept it.

At a time like this, I think most of us need some kind of defense mechanism just to cope. As long as it's not the sort of monolithic, consensus, attack anyone who disagrees, position that it was on here when we first came back after the election, and it's not dictating party policy (which would be a disaster) I would let go of trying to persuade the unpersuadable.

That's JMHO.

[Orsino]

17. The Clinton campaign had no asteroid contingencies, either, I hear.

None. And no plan for sharknado strikes or alien invasion.

[synergie]

20. Just wondering where in MI you were present that you thought "extra help" was needed?

Or PA, or WI?

Also, have you perhaps educated yourself on what was going on in MI, and WI and PA? Where VOTES WERE NOT COUNTED, this after increased turnout, in Dem areas, despite voter suppression, purging and pretty much every shady way to depress turnout?

Why pretend that increased turnout, and historic numbers of votes are "significant mistakes in strategy or in organization"?

What is so terrible about actually saying things that are actually true, require attention and were screamed about for years by the Democrats, as people refused to get off their rears and go vote or pay attention to things like voting rights violations and unsecure voting machines?

If the electorate had bothered to pay attention, were not busy blaming the DNC for the GOP's actions and their own failures to bother to show up, and were not so poisoned by the media and the losing primary candidate, a 3rd party with zero chance at winning, people wouldn't have been writing in Bernie and thumbing their nose at the party. They might have bothered to vote for a valid candidate and not a pointless one, let's not forget what the margins were of the votes counted.

Why won't you accept that the things that could have been done differently might have been the actions of the purists, the ones too lazy to vote, or to inform themselves and who attacked us all for pointing out the obvious consequences of the RW rhetoric and false purity? Why do you pretend that it wasn't significant mistakes in strategy of the "pure" ones who were played badly, that didn't contribute to the current chaos? The fact that you guys are STILL at it, with literally the same nonsense should tell you a little something.

[Hortensis]

23. Yes, if I read it. Because I take these as repeated

attempts to pretend the loss is really mostly the campaign's fault, and ignore reality. As opposed to acknowledging a corruption of this election that amounts to oversetting the democratic process by multiple enormous opposing forces, including what are almost certainly multiple treasonous acts by the FBI.

In the same way, I respond to all attempts to deny the reality that H won a 2.8 million popular vote majority by claiming she was "unpopular," "carrying too much baggage," etc. These days all presidential races are close, but her margin larger than most.

And the supposed "baggage" was fake (i.e., lies) and was manufactured and schlepped by those same opposing forces. What is the purpose of coming here to pretend it was not?

All except, of course, for the one enormous weight she was carrying up that mountain: Her gender. That was huge. To some people it still is.

[Warren DeMontague]

25. We can either try to appeal to more voters, or.... come up with new ways to insult them.

Someone posted a thread about "expanding our appeal", and the consensus was "fuck anyone who voted for Trump".. okay, fine. Fuck em.

So who is left? What's the biggest slice of the voters after Trump and Clinton? Well, gee, I'm not a math expert but it seems to me, it's Gary Johnson voters.

My thinking is, great- the GOP tends to knee-jerk authoritarian any time they have the chance, so why not emphasise that we're the party that supports personal, individual freedom, choice, ending the drug war/legalizing marijuana, pushing back against the religious right, an open internet, opposing censorship or other government control of what consenting adults can do with their own bodies, read, watch, yadda yadda. None of which is incompatible with a strong economic fairness message; the hard-cord Randroids won't listen but many of the rest will be so alienated by the inevitable GOP drift towards Daddy Statism, they may be receptive.

Response?



All I can figure is, maybe those people DON'T actually want more voters, or else a personal freedom agenda is anathema to them for some unfathomable reason

[Ken Burch]

27. For the record...the last think I would EVER want to do...

...is to fuck someone who voted for Trump...



As to what we should do...I still call for us to do what I've called for us to do for decades...be the party of everyone the GOP hates...in other words, to unite the majority of people that are left out in the cold by the status quo.

Our "strategists" have never been interested in doing that, however. Many of them would rather LOSE than do anything like that.

[Warren DeMontague]

34. We need to stop being afraid to stand for things, for sure.

And as others have pointed out, policies that we support, or we ostensibly support, or that we should support- a livable minimum wage, a SPHC system or at least that public option of the ACA we were promised, pot legalization, standing up for the 1st amendment against "culture in crisis" crusaders who would tell adults what they can do with their bodies or what they can read or watch on cable... that sort of thing- those are supported by a majority of Americans.

Unfortunately we've had "leaders" too terrified to actually do what's right. And then we expect to win on nothing but "well, we don't actually stand for anything, really, but at least we're not Republicans"

[kacekwl]

26. You know if people

didn't know who they were voting for after the primaries then they never would. Last minute "undecided" voters were few and far between.

[Garrett78]

33. As I've written elsewhere, some seem to conflate 2 different arguments.

See here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/12512632931

[emulatorloo]

35. Another strawman, Ken

Nobody said the campaign was "flawless"

[Gothmog]

40. Yep

[NCTraveler]

42. ""The campaign was flawless."

Who said that? I believe your comment here to be completely dishonest with your goal being division. It's the only reason to plop such a dishonest line like that in there.