Played like a drum

[Uponthegears]

I hesitated starting with this comment, but can we please stop with the bullshit?

Sanders did not cost Clinton the election. Hillary had a substantial post-convention bump. We were a united party. However "unfair" you think Sanders' tactics were, they didn't affect Clinton's popularity. The "Blame Bernie" movement is a complete fiction with only one objective in mind . . . keep the Democratic Party in the hands of a middle-of-the-road leadership.

Choosing Clinton did not cost us the election. Hillary was not a weak candidate. Her 3 million+ vote victory in California may not stand for what Clinton die-hards want to believe, BUT it does show that she was a great candidate with a great message. While we're at it, Sanders would not have won. TRUMP DID NOT RUN ON AN ECONOMIC MESSAGE, he ran on HATE. There weren't enough economic voters in Trump's camp that if they switched over to Sanders, Sanders would have won. I suspect that Sanders supporters still pushing this line have the same target as the "Blame Bernie" movement.

It is highly unlikely that Comey cost us the election. I understand the temporal correlation between the release of the letter and Clinton's decline in the polls, but as the saying goes, "correlation does not equal causation." The fact of the matter is that no one in the real world gives a FRA about Hillary's e-mail server. The ONLY people who got fired up by Comey's letter were the same people who were fired up by the Vince Foster suicide.

DIRECT voter suppression did not cost us the election. There is not one doubt in heaven or hell whether the racist scumbags in the GOP deliberately suppressed the vote through things like voter ID laws, closing polling places, and the disenfranchisement of convicted felons, BUT they have been doing this since 2000 and both the political parties and the pollsters have already figured it into the equation.

Finally, Black Box/election official skullduggery did not cost us the election. Our president is not in league with Trump when he says that the mechanics of the election were fair. If you believe that Black Box conspiracy stuff, you need to see a professional. <<< This was a hard one for me to come to grips with. The fact of the matter is that I could not see any explanation other than rigged vote counting for the fact that Hillary Clinton WON California by well over 3 million popular votes, but then LOST the cumulative popular vote in the 49 remaining states by a fairly significant margin OR for the sheer number of Obama districts that flipped to Trump. All California jokes (or boasting, if you happen to live in California) aside, California is a great state with a great state Democratic Party, but it's not that much better than the rest of us.

That is to say that I couldn't see any other explanation UNTIL I heard liberal blogger/radio host Mike Signorile talk about the full extent of Russian interference a few days ago. By the time the greatest president in our lifetimes spoke yesterday afternoon, it was clear to me that he was correct.

Apparently there were two facets to the Russian/Trump conspiracy. The first we all know about, the drip, drip, drip of DNC and Podesta e-mails. The other was that apparently there were also reports of overwhelming Clinton leads in early exit polling and of huge voter turnouts in heavily Democratic areas that were picked up and spread by the MSM that were COMPLETELY FALSE. I know that you all heard these just like I did. At five o'clock on election day, I was telling friends that by the time they got off work at 7:00, Hillary would be our president and we might just have both chambers of Congress.

Let's think about this . . . obviously the email leaks were designed to tamp down enthusiasm.

Even though Sanders only had one path to victory (and it ironically involved a near-sweep of super-delegates. Sanders knew he just couldn't make up for what were almost certain losses in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and across the entire South without majorly flipping the super-delegates before California) and even that path was extinguished when he didn't sweep the upper Midwest, the DNC email leak showed that it clearly put its thumb on the Hillary's side of the scale. Now I agree that it's ludicrous to say it made a difference, but I'm not talking about the primary, I am asking everyone to at least comprehend the fact that a huge swath of our party could not have been real enthusiastic about Clinton. Mind you, I'm not saying they wouldn't voter for her, exit polls show they overwhelmingly did, I'm just saying that they weren't eager to get out to the polls and vote.

While I know many of you do not want to hear this, former Sanders supporters were not the only group of people who were not enthused by the time the GE rolled around. I talked to thousands of relatively young Southern urban black voters as part of the general election GOTV effort and they were not fired up either. Now this didn't have anything to do with the DNC/Podesta emails, but they really felt that Clinton had forgot about them when the primary was over. I told them what I believed (even before the convention when I was still working for Sanders), that you don't forget community and Hillary had spent years and years being as much a part of the community as a white person could be and that just because this issues they cared about weren't being talked about on the campaign trail didn't mean she wasn't still with them. I will tell you now, though, they didn't go away fired up.

The point is that heading into election day, you had a huge swath of the party that wasn't really into this election.

What do you think happens when these people (and even Clinton supporters who may not be as politically involved and naturally cautious as those on DU) get hit with the second prong? "It's in the bag . . . it's looking like a wave election . . . the lines are around the block in Miami" . . . THE BIG LIE. You guessed it . . . they stay home.

Because of our astounding hubris . . . because deep down MOST Democrat voters believed that it was in the bag, that it was going to be a wave election, that Hillary would win more electoral votes in history, that Trump was a p***y grabbing misogynistic troll who no one but the most insane Tea Partier would vote for Trump . . . when we heard that LIE, we lapped it up like a kitten at a bowl of milk. Polls close in an hour? . . . damn, I was going to pick up some chicken for dinner and maybe a six pack to celebrate with. And the numbers out of the eastern and central time zone states show it.

The Russia/Trump connection played us. They played us with leaks, and false news. Most of all, though, they played on our divisions and our weaknesses. They played the naïve cynicism of Sanders supporters. They played the arrogance and hubris of Clinton supporters. They convinced them that their vote didn't matter.

I can hear the naysayers now . . . well how in the world did Hillary end up with the most popular votes in history (not here to argue over this) if what you say is true?

Let's go back to California because there is where our popular vote margin came from and let's go back to my fearless election eve prediction. What did Democrats in California know that got them to the polls in numbers big enough to give us an over three million vote victory margin that we in the Eastern and Central time zones didn't . . . they knew the "exit polls," the reports of lines all around the block in Miami," the "coming wave" were all a lie. That they were propaganda. That we had lost in swing state after swing state. There was no cynicism, no hubris in California. They knew their vote counted. (Aside: One of the saddest things about this forum is the pathetic "if we just had 80,000 more well-placed votes, we would have won in the electoral college" meme. If Democrats across the country knew what California voters knew, it would have been the landslide we were expecting).

As we prepare to be ruled by a despot, an oligarch, we need to stop and consider the price of arrogance and the price of cynicism, especially when we talk to each other. We are all to blame. Even though we voted ourselves, we contributed to the hubris, we contributed to the cynicism. When we pull out our self-righteous finger to point at every day Democrats who believed us "experts" and who then bought the fake news about an impending landslide and who stayed home, we need to remember one thing:

Yea, we were robbed. Yea, Russian propaganda determined the outcome of this election. But at the end of the day . . .

This is on us.

Second over