I'm AllTheCheese's hero and it's 62 in my house right now and I don't have air conditioning.

Man, you're way better than this. I know, I read all your posts, even the long ones.

It's 70 degrees in here right now, 35 outside. I'll be rocking that temp all winter during waking hours. And my house isn't insulated.

bush 43 dismembered the civil rights division. why would trump/sessions not do the same?

Like hiring chuck schumer, as new senate leader? who was directly responsible for the horrific campaign of targeting republican voters and ignoring actual democrats, and who is another wall street shill? Good lord.

The party is finished, it totally needs to be cleaned out.

According to multiple polls, during the primaries, Bernie beat Trump hu, by an average of 10% He had none of the negatives of Hillary plus held the same positives Trump ran on and hijacked from Bernie, so I can't see how you can say he was a terrible candidate. He was the right man for the right moment but his own party establishment hated him and screwed him over, and rightfully paid for it.

ya im gonna go out on a limb here and say that i probably listen to more rap music than you do

Climate Science research funding by the US govt has increased steadily over the last two decades and there is no reason to believe that this trend won't continue. So funding for Climate Science research is like irrelevant, is a minor issue? Interesting, wouldn't a larger than anticipated increase in Climate Science research by the US govt be very beneficial for Climate Science? There is a couple of threads already regarding discussions about interpreting the results of Climate Science research. No need to start another one here.

Ezra Klein has a really interesting talk with Heather McGhee at Demos that I think a lot of you would enjoy.
http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/pano...acism-45209350

'dems screwed bernie' is the worst narrative

he lost the dem nomination because about 3 black people voted for him, not because of wasserman-schultz machiavellianism

he had basically no negative campaigning directed at him.

he spent 40 years to the left of the democrats. by the end of the generel election he would have looked like a communist. betting markets had him as doing worse than clinton against trump.

I just told you that according to 10 different polls he did far better than Hillary against Trump, so I really have no idea where the betting markets got their numbers from, as they were clearly bogus.

The core of Bernies campaign was anti establishment, anti tpp, anti interventionist foreign policy, which is mirror of Trumps main strengths over Hillary. What negatives could they have attacked Bernie with? Taxing the rich and universal heath care? Policies that even republicans support when polled?

This communist, socialist rubbish targeting Sanders was rubbish and was exposed as such the longer he campaigned. He would have beaten Trump imo as he actually energized support rather than suppressed it like Clinton. Trump won because he was a populist, Bernie was a populist, there is no way he was a terrible candidate.

Yeah, the point that you can't just slide in one counterfactual element with no knock-on effects is as valid for Bernie running as it is for direct election via popular vote. Trump even talked at rallies about how he was basically fine with Bernie unless Bernie won, chuckling about what he'd do to him etc. If even Trump can grasp this, it probably shouldn't be too controversial here.

Also note that "Bernie was beating Trump HU in poles" -- remember that as late as like early October, Hillary Clinton was up 10%+ in respectable polls. The strategic wisdom that Bernie was obviously the choice to win seems at least highly temporal. Any purely strategic voter (e.g., I just want any Democrat to win, Never Trump) -- at least betting markets and most public opinion polls and models -- you'd have had to look long and hard for evidence HRC wasn't a decisive favorite. Only with the benefit of hindsight can you look back and be like "well obvious strategic mistake, should have been Bernie." The only person I'm pretty confident had the courage of that conviction or anything related was Awice.

Have to also consider Bloomberg 3rd party run if it was Bernie v Trump.

This is veering into a mish-mash of the same sort of signaling you're decrying, and still not at all responsive to the points others have made that and are backed up empirically, that the intersection between campaign themes and promises and governance are actually pretty large. .

So: in one paragraph we go from "left's concern for social justice has to do with appearance rather than genuine conviction" and then you go on to ratify a strategy where Democrats posture working class virtue signaling ("you need to understand the role of faith in their communities, adopt religious metaphors, understand the language and the concerns of the working class, learn to empathize with the downtrodden.")

I'll repeat yet again but this seems like just well-articulated but ultimately trite wisdom: Democrats need to hire better actors and faces and pivot their messaging to be more explicitly in-line with working class interests. Fine, whatever, do that. But then you don't get the whole "oh look how cynically working class blacks view the Democrats, just like the working class whites view Democrats, it's all a bunch of empty messaging right now!"

I agree on the merits that Democrats are maybe far too wedded to modern cosmopolitan norm signaling and you can flip it around and be more genuine populists. That will help with working class whites, blacks, Latinos, and others -- agreed. But let's face it, any dime store pundit is saying that thing, neither you or are I are adding much here to nod along with it.

I'll just caution yet again -- points you have yet to really address and instead repeated some ultimately banal pop-psych stuff we all intuitively understand (e.g., Democrats lost working class whites and didn't inspire blacks because of too much identity politics and not enough messaging working class people understand; e.g., they sound too much like America's professors, they don't sound enough like America's pastors.)

The cautions:

1) this strategy has been tried and the Republicans were pretty good at recognizing and undercutting the Democrats ("Billy Bob Clinton loves plowing white trash, but also, they're poseurs, elite Yaliens!") and moving the Overtone Window further and further into the right-wing populist sphere such that Democrats could never satisfy a lot of white working and middle class types because the GOP always had a more sincere option that held closer to white identity politics than Democrats ever could be.

That is to say: Democrats tried this, it did not lead to a durable winning coalition, and the GOP had answers for it.

2) Democrats had a very hard time during this period separating the campaign from governance. Valenzuela has made this point, and I've made this point. You've just hand-waved it away and then pivoted back to referencing some 4 year old posts on affirmative action but still, that Dick Morris and Mark Penn and Doug Schoen were political message makers during the 1990s, advocated more or less what you are ("white working class sees you as weak! Get tough on crime! Mandatory sentencing!") and that Democrats like Clinton and Biden not only followed but led here, and they've now had to walk into black communities for the last ten years and apologize profusely for it -- that's a pretty strong refutation of your point that Democrats can simply flip the switch and just become the World's Best Bait-n-Switch Artists.

It's fine if you want to argue it honestly and say, well, look, Clinton-era Third Way strategies are better than Trump, but that means you will have to walk back the identity politics in both message and policy. Just at least be honest with people it's not some magical solution and that the political class is just as unprincipled as voters and if they see defeat on the horizon (1994) will pivot hard to acting on white working/middle class grievance instead of just pandering to it and there's a whole generation of black guys rotting in prisons due to non-violent drug offenses because of it. I know you'll be here with some 4 year old posts with ham-handed pop-psych about how that's not important and not even policy and doesn't even matter and no liberal actually worked hard enough to avoid that, shame on them.

But the actual realistic, predictable outcomes is that if you aggrandize working class and middle class virtue signaling there's no reason politicians won't see fit to act on them, and to the extent those virtues are wrapped around dealing with black protestors authoritatively and deporting migrants and stuff, you're basically playing with fire some behind the scenes Bait-n-Switch political actors can withstand the understandable political self-preservation pressures that go with appealing to the working classes bad impulses.

Can we put this ridiculous hypothetical to bed? Clinton barely lost. It was a result of a few things leading to 1% losses in a few swing states. She was not popular, not a good campaigner, not trusted enough...Bernie being an alternative fractured the base. low turnout. Immature Bernie voters refusing to vote Hillary. Independents refusing to vote for Hillary.

If Bernie wins the D nomination, then there is no fractured base. That alone closes whatever small gap Hillary lost by. If that's not enough, then consider the fact that Bernie's popularity grew as time went on. He never hit his ceiling, he just didn't get his name out there early enough. I doubt anyone would argue turnout for him would've been lower than turnout for Hillary. I'd argue he'd have had Obama '08-like turnout. I'm not sure, but I'd like to think Bernie would've crushed with Independents too.

I think people too quickly forget it's not like Hillary got demolished. She barely lost. The EC makeup which we all thought would let her cruise to victory ultimately fated her to be edged out by slim margins in a few swing states. This does not happen with Bernie Sanders in the race instead of Hillary Clinton.

I agree with all of this. I also think a big reason that is true is that the Dems have allowed their party to be hi-jacked by non-liberals like the Clintons who are obviously transparently power hungry rather than people who believe in much of the liberal platform.

The country is trending more and more liberal and so we nominate a scandal riddled, unlikeable centrist (at best) that we dress up in Bernie's skin and who then unconvincingly parades around most of his ideas. It came off as a fraud and people saw through it. An actual competent sincere liberal would do well I would think as you saw with Bernie. I mean he was like 95, not good looking and a poor public speaker. But people were hungry for someone sincere with his message.

Clinton obviously is and was a liberal. Everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders is not a Republican. The purpose of this little game here totally mystifies me.

What's your view of Russ Feingold on the "sincere liberal" or "Bernie versus HRC" scale?

You are right. Someone who said they weren't a liberal until about 12 months ago and held almost no liberal positions until 12 months ago outside of health care is our true champion. The purpose of continuing to deny that Hillary was the majority of the problem totally mystifies me.

I had to re-read this poorly phrased gibberish a couple times to fully parse it, but I can assure you that your claim of "only with the benefit of hindsight can..." etc is wholly ignorant nonsense.

that's interesting. she just pretended to be a senator for eight years?

Pointing to polls of working-class whites showing Bernie>Clinton>Trump is innately suspect when polls of the same cohort also showed Clinton>Trump.