The Opposition Research On Bernie Sanders Shows Why He Was Never A Viable Candidate
excerpt
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/12/the-2016-election-is-a-disaster-without-a-moral.html
"... The Democratic Establishment cleared the field for Clinton, whose favorable ratings had risen during her time away from the partisan conflict, and who they assumed was a fully known commodity. In reality, Clinton had not actually been vetted. In the time since her last presidential run, she and her husband had allowed their foundation work and private speech business to become enmeshed in ways rife with ethical conflict . The revelation that Clinton had inappropriately used a private email server came out in March 2015. This resulted in new batches of her emails being published every month for the remainder of the campaign.
The email story dominated coverage of Clinton’s campaign, creating a hook upon which the public and the media could hang the long-standing (and mostly, if not entirely, irrational) distrust of her that Sullivan had described a decade before. It was compounded by a series of aggravating factors. A two-term Democratic presidency had created a backdrop of liberal complacency and elevated expectations. The Democratic primary took place in a mood that took winning largely for granted, and focused instead on extracting maximal ideological concessions. In that atmosphere, Bernie Sanders’s success was a warning sign that the party’s base had come to see the alleged timorousness of its own leaders, rather than a Republican Party that controlled Congress, as the primary obstacle to social reform. Month after month of his slashing attacks on her as an untrustworthy shill for Goldman Sachs left an indelible residue of distrust.
It never went away. Russian intelligence carried out a successful campaign to steal emails from Democratic officials and use them to seed anti-Clinton stories in the mainstream media. And then FBI Director James Comey made the extraordinary, precedent-breaking decision to float the prospect of new charges against her, re-centering suspicions about her character and causing undecided voters to break sharply against her in swing states.
Sanders loyalists saw all the above as a reason why the party made a horrible mistake in nominating her rather than their man. Of course, how Sanders might have fared as the nominee can’t be proven either way, but the evidence suggests that his liabilities were at least as large. He identifies his policies with a term, “socialism,” that is wildly unpopular , as well as with specific policies, like higher taxes on the middle class, that are also highly unpopular . Reporter Kurt Eichenwald , who saw the Republican Party’s opposition research on Sanders, called it “brutal,” and described a small taste of it:
Then there’s the fact that Sanders was on unemployment until his mid-30s, and that he stole electricity from a neighbor after failing to pay his bills, and that he co-sponsored a bill to ship Vermont’s nuclear waste to a poor Hispanic community in Texas, where it could be dumped. You can just see the words “environmental racist” on Republican billboards. And if you can’t, I already did. They were in the Republican opposition research book as a proposal on how to frame the nuclear waste issue.
Also on the list: Sanders violated campaign finance laws, criticized Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that he voted for, and he voted against the Amber Alert system. His pitch for universal health care would have been used against him too, since it was tried in his home state of Vermont and collapsed due to excessive costs. Worst of all, the Republicans also had video of Sanders at a 1985 rally thrown by the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua where half a million people chanted, “Here, there, everywhere/the Yankee will die,’’ while President Daniel Ortega condemned “state terrorism” by America. Sanders said, on camera, supporting the Sandinistas was “patriotic.”
Clinton barely aired these themes in the primary — in part because some of Sanders’s general-election vulnerabilities were popular among primary voters, and in part because she led the race all along and deemed it counterproductive to attack an opponent whose supporters she knew she would eventually need. Once Clinton had elbowed out every other plausible nominee — like Elizabeth Warren, or Joe Biden — Democrats’ only real alternative was a message candidate who had no remotely plausible strategy to overcome his glaring general-election liabilities. Clinton would have beaten Trump anyway, if not for the combined efforts of Russian intelligence and the FBI to bring her down.
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Would there have been enough people to elect Bernie Sanders president after the oppo research was dumped on him? I don't think there is any serious chance of that.
Hell no Bernie never planned on winning. His job was to pull the democrats farther to the left and that helped the Republicans to win it all.
The dumbest people in America elected Trump despite the tonnage of baggage he is handcuffed to. It seems like it wouldn't matter who the democrats nominate - unless the nominee was willing to appeal to the lowest of the low information voters with lies, false promises, and dog whistle politics, they wouldn't stand a chance. We'll just have to let Trump drive us off the cliff to slap some sense into the morons who put him in office.
In a post-truth world they won't feel the slap.
Trump will take every loss that he will now endure and frame it as a personal victory by him. If terrorists blow up a Trump hotel in some third world country he will frame it as their fear of him. If his plans lose a vote in Congress he will say that he never intended for the proposal to succeed anyway and was only "testing" Congress. And a thousand other things will happen that he will lie about and his zombies will believe him.
Kellyanne Conway will be there to spin gold for Trump the whole time. I think it was Dan Rather who said she "could talk the legs off a table."
Probably shouldn't have cleared the field for Clinton. By handing her the nomination and squashing dissent, they nominated about the only candidate in America who Trump could beat.
Maybe the democrats will allow their voters to think for themselves in 2020.
This is what Bernie ran on exploding government spending it was never going to fly and it was never feasible.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed a whopping $33 trillion federal spending increase over 10 years, according to a new report likely to fuel complaints his campaign promises are unrealistic.
His proposed tax increases would not come anywhere close to covering those costs, the centrist Tax Policy Center said Monday, and his plan would drive federal debt to “unprecedented” levels.
Still trying to convince yourself and everyone else that if the Primary wasn't rigged and the DNC had not tried to shove a criminal puppet down the people's throat you still would not have lost huh? I think that is awesome. Please keep it up.
The fact that you believe the Democrats had no one better than Hillary to run is priceless.