No, I don't think Hillary and the dem establishment can put the party back together again

[Peace Patriot]

35. You don't seem to realize what's happened to the Democratic Party...

...over the last couple of decades (and with roots back to the Reagan junta). We've been bleeding working class Democrats, leftists of all kinds, environmentalists, professionals, Vietnam vets and others to the "independent" non-party, which now comprises over 40% of the electorate.

Democratic Party "closed" primaries measure only what remains, not the full demographic of progressives. Clinton has an even narrower constituency, the half of the reduced party that buys into her worthless, lying bullshit, unthinkingly, in my opinion.

The other half of the current Democratic base are either young and new voters drawn in by Sanders, some returning leftists and others drawn in by Sanders, and old Democrats like me, who remain Democrats only out of loyalty to ideals that this corporatized party has long since abandoned, or out of nostalgia or family feeling. I'm an o-o-o-o-old Democrat who feels loyalty and nostalgia. I remember my mother making all her kids get down on our knees, on election night 1954, to pray the Rosary for Adlai Stevenson to defeat Dwight Eisenhower!

That's the kind of Democrat that the Clintonites have spat upon with virtually every word and action, along with their spitting upon the young.

Our party is NOT "just fine." It is losing Democrats like me, "born" Democrats, people whose parents and grandparents were New Dealers, people who canvassed for JFK, people who joined the civil rights movement though they were white and relatively privileged, people who did things because they were RIGHT and ETHICAL and MORAL, not because of self-interest and greed, but because they belonged to a "big tent" party and, by God, they were going to expand that "tent"!

I don't think Clinton has any clue what the Democratic Party is about. She doesn't want people like me in it, and many of her supporters seem to have the same attitude (unless they are bots, which we've seen some of here, and for those I feel the same compassion I would feel for any workers who have to do things they know are wrong, in order to keep body and soul together).

Clinton has contempt, also, for the young. She is rigid that way. Dissent annoys her. She wants to stamp it out. She likes controlled venues with small audiences of vetted people. And when she happens to meet a hard question or opposition, you can see her eyes harden with hatred. She is no kind of Democrat, who relishes discussion and new ideas and grants people leave to oppose her, as anyone who believes in democracy ought to. She reminds me of Nixon. She has a lot of his flaws.

She is no leader for the Democratic Party I was born into. Money and ambition are okay, especially for women who have been denied money and access to power, but they are not everything, or even a tenth of everything, or anything at all, if you don't have a base of ethical principles and generosity.

Clinton does not qualify. She has nothing inside of her but desire for money and power. That is not a leader. That is a cypher, whom our financial overlords and war profiteers will use for their own purposes. I've known a lot of strong, ambitious and even well-heeled women in my lifetime, many of whom were or are real leaders due to their ethics and their generosity. They went far, and I'm very proud of them, but they never regarded power as an end itself. Those are the kinds of women who would make great presidents. Clinton is not one of them. She is already a disgrace to feminism, with her actions in Honduras, Libya, Syria and Iraq, and hers and Bill's policies that have greatly increased poverty here. She's hanging out with Henry Kissinger these days. Jeez.

That's not my Democratic Party. And that is not "just fine." It's awful.