BFD!!!

[Ken Burch]

79. Not elected, nominated.

I did vote for the ticket, campaigned for it and tried to get others to do so.

And let's face it-if Bernie had been nominated and then had lost, HRC supporters would be posting threads saying we should have nominated THEIR candidate-plus, at least some would have campaigned for Bloomberg(had he run), even though there was never any chance that guy could have been elected(or been worth electing, since he'd have been as right-wing as president as he had been running NYC as a unionbusting austerity mayor).

All I've done since the site re-opened is to try to tell you WHY they said they wouldn't, to share what my experiences were in the fall and what I learned from them.

What would have been so terrible about running the fall campaign, as I advocated repeatedly, as a "partnership"-Hillary was the nominee, but with a recognition that the ideas each candidate supported essentially had equal support in the party and that the administration we were going to try to elect would combine the best of both?

Instead of that, while some of our ideas were incorporated in the platform, they basically weren't mentioned in the fall campaign and nothing was done to make the Sanders supporters themselves feel particularly welcome in this party. They didn't need to be coddled, but treating them with respect and recognizing that they had done an amazing job of winning support for their ideals would have done us no harm and disrespected no one.

The party didn't have to get all "winners rule-losers drool!" about it. And it didn't have to run a fall campaign directed solely towards winning the votes of "moderate Republicans"-a group, it turns out, that no longer exists and would never break from the GOP ticket no matter what(if they weren't going to break with it with THIS candidate).

If nothing else, Hillary deserved better than the same strategy that gave us Presidents Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry.