"No more dynasties"--for women, that is

[Ken Burch]

89. I'll explain, but I won't debate it if you choose to reject my explanations:

I felt that we needed someone who would stand up to corporate power and the very wealthy-the forces that does more than anything else to limit our ability to change things in this country. And I wanted a candidate who would not be casual about intervening militarily in other countries-especially since we are now in an era where military intervention isn't achieving anything.

I was looking for someone who cared as much about those on the bottom in our society-including those held down by class as well as those held down by identity-as those on the top. Someone who wouldn't accept the argument that we had to stand by and do nothing when "the market" decreed that whole regions had to be left to die out economically.

And I wanted a candidate who would reconnect the party with the idealists and activists who had elected Barack Obama, but who were essentially told to go away once the votes were in-people who had been given the clear impression they'd be given a role in shaping the agenda but found out instead that they weren't wanted for anything OTHER than getting the vote out-and would work with those people to win elections by winning the argument, by making a positive case for supporting OUR party rather than just saying how horrible the other party was.

Also, I felt that it while it was always likely that HRC would be nominated, the Democratic Party NEEDED and still needs to embrace the people the Sanders campaign connected with-to address what they cared about as much as possible and to make it clear to those people that this party was a place where they could work for what they cared about. I hope you don't disagree with the idea that we NEED them. Had we run a fall campaign designed to embrace those voters as much as those in the current coalition are embraced-and we could have run that campaign with HRC as nominee-I think we could have built a solid enough base of support to withstand what Comey and the Russians did.

Finally, while the Sanders campaign didn't express itself well at the start of the campaign on race and gender issues, I believe there was no actual difference in actual antiracist, anti-oppression commitment. Bernie was the only presidential candidate in 2016 to actually say the WORDS "Black Lives Matter", and had a criminal justice reform program on his website before Hillary did. There were flaws in the ways the Sanders campaign approached some demographics, but the campaign never deserved to be accused of not caring about the needs of those demographics.

Those were the reasons I backed Bernie, and I'd do it again.

I accept that HRC won the nomination and campaigned for her with good grace throughout the fall-but it's not necessarily correct to say Bernie's platform was rejected. A LOT of Clinton supporters, on this board and elsewhere, said they were with Bernie on the issues but simply felt HRC was "more electable". And a lot of Bernie's ideas ended up in the platform.

She was a qualified person, and would have been a good president. I mourned the result in November as deeply as you did. I respectfully disagree with your claim that she was our SOLE chance of holding the White House. There were few if any votes only HRC could get in the fall. Any candidate who put out a strong program for economic change, especially one that called for an economic revitalization strategy for the Upper Midwest, could have beaten Trump.