Thread after thread insisting HRC is going to be the nominee and everyone should just accept it...

[Ken Burch]

...doesn't actually do much to help get HRC nominated...or make it easier to elect her if she does end up getting nominated.

Better to avoid premature gloating and talking down to people(and the use of arrogant phrases like "the reality-based community"-a community we are ALL members of) and to just go out there and make the case for your candidate, door to door, during the actual primaries. Like anybody else, your candidate has to actually earn the votes and earn the nomination...she isn't simply entitled to it and all anyone has seen so far is a bunch of polls...all of which will be meaningless once the actual voting starts.

It serves no purpose at all to try to preempt the whole primary process, and doing so just makes people supporting other candidates dig in their heels and pledge to work that much harder for their candidate, and will make it much harder to get those people to enthusiastically support your candidate(who is simply one candidate among several)if she does get the nod in Philadelphia.

The best approach is humility, mutual respect and the acceptance that every other candidate seeking the Democratic nomination has as much right to keep fighting for votes as your candidate does. That's how you create the conditions for party unity after the nomination is in and that's how you make sure the party wins in November 2016.

I'd be writing the same OP if the poll positions of the leading candidates were reversed, or if some other candidate were suddenly in the lead. The whole "get used to it" attitude from supporters of an early frontrunner, any time it comes up in any primary season, always does far more harm than good. You don't bring people together by taking a "know your place, peasant" attitude towards others.

[liberal_at_heart]

1. Oh, this happens every election. They say once the nominee is elected then we have no choice

but to get behind the the nominee. That is why they think they can bully and berate us. They didn't learn anything from 2014 midterms. Over half the country doesn't vote and if Bernie does not win the nomination there may very well be many here that don't either. But will the candidate, the party, or the bullying on political message boards be blamed if the Democrats don't win in 2016?. No, they will blame the voters. Same bull, different day. It never changes.

[Ken Burch]

5. Well, once the nomination comes in, two things need to happen...

1) The nominee and her or his supporters need to reach out and do what they can to heal the hard feelings they may inadvertently have caused during the run-up to nomination(I'd actually extend this to the days before the nomination, when the nominee should always agree to include some major platform provisions supported by the other candidates and allow some open, respectful debate and free votes on issues during the convention, thereby easing the sting of defeat for the supporters of those who didn't get nominated, and apologies for harsh things said about the other candidates and their supporters in the heat of the moment).

2) The supporters of the defeated candidates need to begin to accept that someone else will be the nominee, work to get that nominee to include their concerns and their values in his or her campaign, and then, as soon as possible, need to get behind the nominee and work for victory in November.

I would refer everyone to the wonderfully magnanimous speech newly elected British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn after his victory in the leadership contest was announced.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1017293526


The other leadership candidates ran very harsh campaigns against Corbyn, yet he used the most healing inclusive phraseology I've ever seen.

If Bernie gets nominated, I'm sure he will give a speech that has that same healing quality. HRC will need to do the same. She can't just demand that everyone "fall in line". And I think she realizes that.

The

[liberal_at_heart]

7. That may work for party loyalists. Some of us have left the party. I voted Democrat for

20 years and have seen both parties accept money from lobbyists and Super PACs and now they don't legislate based on what is good for the American people. They legislate based on what is good for their donors and their pocket books. I am no longer a Democrat so I cannot say that I will work to get the nominee to include my concerns and then get behind the nominee. I don't trust politicians anymore. They all make pre-election promises and they all break them. The only reason I trust Bernie is because he has the voting record to back up his promises.

[Ken Burch]

12. Then just keep working hard for Bernie now.

And deal with the future when it comes.

I hear your anger and despair about our system and the state of our parties, and share it.

If anyone is to beat the right-wing, as a Democrat or on any other ticket, they will need to take the steps to unity I've outlined. Not sure how we get there, but we have to.

[Hortensis]

38. Exactly. !Go Bernie!, but keep your eyes on the prize. The candidate is never the GOAL.

[Le Taz Hot]

41. +1

I vote for the most progressive candidate and, if one is not available, I write one in.

[vadermike]

2. Well

I see what yiu are saying but we can't just give up cause we didn't get who we want. We will never recover from a GOP trifecta next year. We will be completely fucked for a generation or more.. Just IMO.

[Ken Burch]

4. Not saying anyone should give up.

But the work of creating unity involves the vanquished AND the victor. The whole "shut up and take your medicine" approach that a lot of nominees' campaigns have used towards their defeated opponents at and after the convention has had a lot to do with the failure to bring the party together and win in the fall.

Some gentler approach by the winners is needed.

It's just about mutual respect.

We pull together by reaching out.

[AgingAmerican]

3. Shrug

Some people are convinced she is the only possible chance.

[Fumesucker]

8. Oddly enough some of them are the same ones who supported Obama against Hillary

So it's not that they are really all *that* fond of Hillary, some other motivation is at work.

[liberal_at_heart]

9. It is curious isn't it? I was going to say maybe they assume the candidate with the most money

and power is always the best candidate to beat the opposing party, but Obama didn't start out with money and power. I do think that was a motivation for supporting him for re-election though.

[delrem]

15. "Obama didn't start out with money and power"

Yes. Obama was and is a phenomenon.
His second term, free of Clinton, has been his best.

[cheapdate]

6. Well, she most likely will be.

[Ken Burch]

10. If so, there's no need to keep preemptively proclaiming it, before anyone has voted.

It just looks like a weird combination of presumptuousness, "coat-trailing", and insecurity, and I think most HRC supporters(like the supporters of other candidates)are and need to be better than that.

Better to act on the assumption that nothing is settled. We do still have to have the primaries and caucuses, and there's no real need to try to preempt them. Let's have a real contest and a real debate. No harm can come of that.

Whatever is destined to happen will make itself known in the proper course of time. Leave it at that.

[vadermike]

11. Maybe

And if she is she will have fought to get it. Which will be a good thing , she needs practice for the GE!!!!!

[Warren DeMontague]

13. Funny how they all seem to turn up at the same time, innit?

As if all the radios are tuned into the same station.

[delrem]

14. I have to get behind a candidate on economic and foreign policy issues,

first and foremost. And Hillary Clinton doesn't meet the test.
With respect to foreign policy, she was behind the destruction of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and is a total hawk who hired Dick Cheney's chief adviser to be on her own team.
With respect to economic policy she's totally on the team of international investment capital. End of story.

[YabaDabaNoDinoNo]

16. I am of the opinion that HRC and her supporters are in a bubble right now just like the

GOP, soon the bubble will burst and they are going to get hit in the face hard with reality. There will be lots of butt hurt and tears which I personally will enjoy but that is besides the point.

IF they think HRC can actually win that is fine and dandy but they will destroy the Democratic Party in the process which may very well be the goal. Marginalize traditional liberal and progressive party members and like magic the democratic party becomes the new corporate party just like HRC and the 1% want. Which IMHO has always been the goal of the corporate and 'moderate' dems.


HRC and the 1% sounds like a band name!

[randome]

17. Are you arguing against the math, then? Hardly seems like a worthwhile position to take.

Numbers don't lie and right now Clinton is the projected winner. Of course it's early so anything is possible.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]“If you're not committed to anything, you're just taking up space.”
Gregory Peck, Mirage (1965)[/center][/font][hr]

[jeff47]

19. There's a difference between "she's the projected winner" and

more-or-less shouting "LOOOOOOOOOOOSERRRRRRRRR!!!" to anyone who doesn't support Clinton.

[reformist2]

21. Not if you extend the trend lines. That would indicate Hillary could be down near 20% by early 2016.

[Ken Burch]

22. Actually, all we have now are some polls. They could be right, they could be wrong.

In any case, it serves no purpose to keep acting like we shouldn't even be bothering with the primaries and that it's silly for anyone to still be running against her.

What's the harm of easing off on the premature triumphalism and letting the contest play out in real time? There's no particular hurry to settle this, after all. We won in 2008 after a primary battle that wasn't settled until a couple of weeks before the convention. And the GOP field this year is even weaker than the one we faced then.

I'm not "arguing against" anything other than overconfidence and a hard-sell push to end the race before it begins.

If your candidate is meant to be nominated, it's enough that it will happen WHEN it happens.

[jwirr]

40. Numbers don't lie. Not when they are talking about

concrete evidence. Polls are not concrete evidence they are an assumption. A random test of the probable.

At this point national polls are useless. We have had not debates and little exposure but that is going to change. State polls are somewhat better. Many polls include probable voters or something like that. There is every indication that is not what it is all about this year. A lot of voters who have dropped out of the system a long time ago are coming back for Bernie put since they are not known on the voter rolls they are probably not in the polls. And then there are the young. They also are probably not in a lot of polls.

I think it is way too early to claim victory.

[Metric System]

18. I've mostly seen threads stating that Sanders will be the nominee.

[Ken Burch]

23. There's a few of those(most Sanders supporters don't actually feel that overconfident, btw).

But none of them argue that people who back Bernie are the only grown-ups or the only members of "the reality-based community".

It's just about respect and about not trying to hardball everyone into accepting any one candidate as nominee before anyone has even voted. What's the rush? What harm comes of having a full debate and a primary season in which the voters in most Democratic primary and caucus states have a real say in who the nominee is, get a chance to vote or caucus while the race is still in play, have a full hearing of all the issues we need to address?

There's simply no need for anyone to be heavy-handed about this.

If Bernie is meant to be nominated, that will make itself known in the fullness of time. Same with HRC, or O'Malley, or Webb or the guy from Rhode Island that everybody has kind of forgotten about.

[NanceGreggs]

34. You have GOT to be fuckin' kidding me!

You labelled Hillary as the "pro-slaughter candidate" because she said she'd do whatever is necessary to keep the country safe.

And now you're arguing that "it's about respect", and there being "no need for anyone to be heavy-handed"?

"But none of them argue that people who back Bernie are the only grown-ups or the only members of "the reality-based community".

No, what THEY argue is that anyone who supports HRC is a war-mongering, status quo loving, Wall Street adoring, MIC-admiring corporatist who is against middle-class hard-working Americans, and are intent on seeing the total destruction of everything the Democratic Party stands for. HRC supporters have been labeled as all of the above - and then some - by the Bernistas.

Now that it is obvious that BS's support has flatlined, and that he's not going anywhere (especially without the support of the AA demographic that he has even further alienated by his association with Cornel West), you are calling for everyone to "play nice".

Your OP is far more than a day late, and a brazzilion dollars short. The BS supporters on this site have insulted, ridiculed, and disparaged every poster who even hesitates to drink the BS kool-aid, no less those who refuse outright to do so.

Calling Hillary the "pro-slaughter candidate" renders anything and everything you have to say about "not being heavy-handed" nothing less than a desperate attempt to call for civility among people who have yet to demonstrate their ability to be civil.

The polls - much-touted when they showed BS on the rise - are now "too early" to be taken seriously, now that they demonstrate BS's failure to overtake the front-runner in across-the-board surveys.

But, hey, good luck with asking for anyone on this site to be "grown ups" - that ship sailed years ago, but there's something to be said for those who now want to pretend it hasn't when it suits their purposes.

[Ken Burch]

35. I don't condone personal attacks on HRC supporters.

You think it's possible to use phrases like "whatever it takes" and NOT end up in the "bear any burden, fight any foe" zone that doomed us to Vietnam. I don't and I'd guess half the party doesn't. Why you think that, I don't know. But that's your call.

And for whatever reason, you think it's still possible to have a hawkish foreign policy(in a world where there's nothing to be hawkish about now)and still have progressive policies at home(despite the dead stop in progressive policies under LBJ once he escalated in Vietnam.

And you think that it's possible to nominate HRC and still be able to nominate actual peaceloving progressives in elections after that (even though her nomination would basically end all chance of anyone but a Scoop Jackson-type ever winning again). I'd sincerely like to know why you think a HRC nomination wouldn't end history and freeze time and opinion in the party, how activism for change would even still be possible when all activism for changed stopped between 1993 and 2001. You think there would still be space for moving the discussion to the left in the future in that instance...please say why.

If you want to believe those things fine. No one should be insulting you for that and I don't. You and I just disagree.

What is the POINT of chanting "HRC has it won already, everybody should just get used to it"? What purpose does that serve? How does that help anything positive happen?

Democratic primary campaigns that are over before they started never produce anything good and seldom produce victory.

We went through that with Mondale in '84...with Dukakis in '88...with Gore in '00...with Kerry in '04. That's what happens when supporters of the always-temporary frontrunner pressure everyone else to just shut up and know their place. The better choice is to relax, treat all candidates and their supporters as equals, and just things play out.

This is supposed to be "the party of the people", not the party of the "pros"...especially since the pros don't seem to know anything about winning elections anymore.

The fact that I spoke roughly about your candidate on foreign policy(when there is a history of good reason to distrust her on that and when there is no broad public demand for us to send a message that we're as willing to use force as the right wing is)does not mean I don't respect you personally (I used to like your posts here when you attacked the OTHER party) or that I don't think you have the right to campaign for your candidate. Fine you do. And even though your candidate is massively less progressive than mine, I still accept that you are progressive/ You think she's the only one that can win. Fine. All I'm saying here is that there is no good reason for your candidate's supporters to try to force people to accept that the race is over before there has even been any debates and before anyone has voted.

Why want this to end early when having it end early only benefits the Republicans? When it only benefits the rich? When it means the voices from below and outside that are not heard now will continue to not be heard?

That is what drives those of us who want a real contest and a real debate in the primaries, who want a contest in which the primaries and caucuses in all states will actually matter.

[Hortensis]

39. Keep on slogging the good slog...

[JTFrog]

37. + 1000 n/t

[reformist2]

20. Inevitability is really the only thing she's got going on... and even that not so much.

[Ken Burch]

24. Many frontrunners have started out inevitable and ended up...evitable.

As Don Henley put it "In a New York Minute, everything can change".

[Chan790]

25. I think her supporters don't see how counterproductive it is either.

It's not doing a lot for their candidate but it is galvanizing opposition to Clinton and insuring an ever larger number of DUers (and on a more universal scale: Democrats (because they don't just do it here, they do it IRL as well)) will never be able to find it in themselves to fall in and support Hillary if she does in-fact win the nomination. With supporters like the archetypal vocal Clinton supporter, Hillary has no need of enemies, even if she already has enemies in droves.

If Clinton supporters want to lose the GE before the primaries have started in earnest...well, they're doing a bang-up fucking job of that.

[GoneFishin]

26. "Hillary 2016. Like it or lump it. Woo hoo. "

[Thinkingabout]

27. Bernie will not be the DNC nominee.

[Ken Burch]

28. The Democratic nominee, not "the DNC nominee".

Despite what Debbie Wassermann Schultz might believe, the nominee isn't chosen by the Democratic National Committee.

What's the harm of letting the primaries play out?

We won by nine million votes in 2008 after a nomination contest that went down to the wire.

[Thinkingabout]

36. Bernie will not be the Deocratic nominee, I know very well the DNC nominee is seleced by delegates

and superdelegates. A candidate has to win a major portion of the delegates, and those delegates and there will not be a coronation of a candidate who does not get a major number of delegates. I will be very happy to see the primaries play out, no coronations from me.

[Aerows]

29. This is part of a larger trend

Americans of all walks of life that are the 99% are fed up with the DC elite crowd.

Like it or not, Hillary Clinton is a DC elite. Jeb Bush is a DC elite.

Hillary is about as authentic as a 3 dollar bill, and after the stunts she pulled in 2008, I find it curious that so many are now pulling for her.

I'd carry a bucket of gasoline through hell to get the opportunity to vote for Bernie or O'Malley in the GE.

We need good, stable Democratic leaders. We don't need people that can't say what they support until they get elected, don't answer questions and are only decisive in their rhetoric that they are decisive.

[SonderWoman]

30. Thread after thread? There's been like 2.

There's probably 20x that many Bernie will be next prez threads.

[Aerows]

32. When Hillary speaks to the American public

and takes questions from them, instead of $2,700 a plate dinners for exclusive supporters, maybe the American public can decide what they think about her.

So far it is looking like she wants a party with donors and none of those icky voters.

[Aerows]

31. I guess some think

that if they bash us over the head enough, we'll forget the reasons why she wasn't elected in 2008 and the same reasons why many don't support her in 2016.

[Motown_Johnny]

33. Visceral v. Rational

Support for Hillary tends to be more visceral. Her supporters Feel that she will win, therefore to them it is a done deal. They accept it as a fact.


You can't make rational arguments against this type of support.



Nobody knows what is going to happen. It is still far to early to even make solid predictions.

Anyone who claims to know what is going to happen should just be gently reminded that they don't really know and are just making a prediction. Once that is done, let it go. Anyone who accepts their feelings as fact isn't worth arguing with.