What if Hillary doesn't get a "Bernie Bounce"?

[Virginiá]

I'm curious how exactly Bernie intends to "take it to the convention", because on the first ballot they will vote Hillary and that will be settled. What exactly is he planning? Begging superdelegates beforehand? He has to know this will never work.

This, 100%. The type of partisanship he's encouraging reminds me of the tea party. In the long run, if infusing the progressive wing with an inability to compromise and a divorcement from facts is his main contribution once all the dust is cleared, he will have left the Democratic Party worse off because of it. He's not the right person to implement any of his proposed policies, and many of them should be left on the cutting room floor to begin with.

I was pretty excited about Sanders at first, then I switched to Clinton after seeing too many pitfalls with him. One of them was this. I could see back in the Fall that he was stirring up a Tea Party-esque movement, which is great and all, unless it turns into an uncompromising hardline faction of Congress that creates perpetual gridlock and makes the party look bad.

Though that isn't guaranteed to happen, but when you see the behavior and the strategy, it does ring some bells. All this "if Democrats were more progressive, we'd win more often!" might actually be true right now (imo), but I have little doubt that this excuse will continue indefinitely just like the Republican's "not conservative enough" argument is continuing to box them into a corner.

Anyway, peoples really need to wait until the primary has been over for a few weeks at least before they go losing their minds.

[Virginiá]

For a lot of Sanders supporters, "the Democratic Party" can go stuff itself - from their perspective, they've been screwed for decades (if not their whole lifetime by the Democratic Party. Their quite rational goal is what the see as a better nation or government, or at least a better nation and government for themselves and people like them.

"The Democratic Party" has burned much its credibility over the Clinton and Obama terms. The whine that something is "bad for the Party" when The Party's chief function seems to be servicing the 1% will have exactly as much impact on the election as Hillary attacking Trump for supporting the 2nd amendment.

Ugh, that argument is such tripe. Obama did what he could, and taxes on high earners did go up under him. With Republicans in control of the House, anything more significant was out of the question. As for Clinton, say what you want about him, but an electorate trending conservative from the 70s+ was what resulted in his centrist approach. The people didn't want New Deal/liberal presidents, and the people (at the time, anyway) were clearly OK with what Clinton was supporting, given his constant huge approval ratings. The fact is, Clinton revived the Democratic party after years of defeats and marginalization. They moved right to win elections again, not to screw people.

If these people think Obama also completely sold them out, then they will never be satisfied, plain and simple. They have completely unrealistic expectations given the current situation, and unfortunately out of only two major political parties, the Democratic party is the only one who will come close to helping them out right now.

America has been trending left for years now, and it won't be long before we are back to having governing majorities where we can actually make progress on the issues these people care about. They just need to hang in there. After all, it's not the Democratic party's fault that the bulk of the American electorate swung rightwards for decades and only began swinging back fully under Obama.

[Virginiá]

If the Democratic party deserves none of the blame for its 80s-00s triangulation and gobbling up of lobbyist cash in exchange for supporting deregulation/regulation blatantly supportive of big corporations, patently wasteful and immoral foreign policy, and selective tax breaks for big corporations, because those shifts in policy were all due to the pressures from voters, then they also deserve absolutely no credit or loyalty now that the pendulum is swinging backward.

No, listen, I did not say they deserve no blame. I simply stated what happened and what Democrats did to get back into power. The Reagan era framed the political agenda for years and pushed power towards Republicans. Democrats took up items from that agenda to compete. Do I like that they did? No, but I understand why. The bonus of taking on positions like wholesale deregulation is that the special interest money starts flowing more readily and that perpetuates a corrupt process. I'm actually still rather sad that Democrats went that way because it's like getting hooked on heroin. Sure, it makes you feel better for now, but good luck getting away from it when your world starts imploding.

And in regards to foreign policy, Democrats have hardly been doves over any significant period of time. This isn't new, so Democrats readily deserve blame for that but unfortunately we are most likely always going to have to deal with war at one point or another. That seems baked into the American way of life at this point.

I realize I didn't explicitly assign blame but me defending them and explaining how I see it doesn't mean I'm absolving them of all blame, either.

Yeah, you're a moron if you don't have patience with the political process, you're a moron if you don't vote in every single election primary local and general and then complain, and you're probably also a moron if you don't always vote for Democrats in generals, but under your logic your hagiography of those figures is also illogical, they are merely vessels of the popular will and deserve no credit or loyalty, we deserve all the credit or blame.

My overall point(s) was more to say that Obama has been way better for liberals than almost any president since LBJ. I determine this by the effect the president has on the electorate's voting patterns as well, and not just policy, because a bad president with favorable policy can still result in voters turning against said party in the future (see: Nixon), and that hurts the goals they are working for sometimes more than short-term victories in policy (See: Bush43)

Further, blame should really be assigned in better ways. Runeghost's post ticked me off because it did not acknowledge the electorate at all. It blamed everything on the party. Millennials can't just get fed up with things one day and then justifiably blame the party for all that is wrong with the country, while conveniently ignoring some of the complex reasons things aren't getting done. The party responds to people, and the Democratic party's trajectory was set decades ago in their parent's time. Are Democrats responsible for getting themselves hooked on corporate cash? Of course. But at least acknowledge they didn't do it because one night they got together and decided to screw the people and maximize the amount they can sell out. They chose a bad strategy that led to mixed results, one being too much corporate influence. So many of my fellow Millennials don't even think about the intricacies of what led the party to this point.

I'm just tired of hearing gripes about the Democratic party from people who simply air a list of their grievances while expending approximately zero energy in trying to figure out why things are the way they are. Some issues the Democratic party deserves blame for, others they don't. This is one of the reasons why the president's party typically has trouble in midterms - People blame him for their problems, thinking that because their party is at the top, they should be able to fix things or that they are responsible for everything that goes wrong. This is hugely unfair, but it's always going to be this way and for both parties, so I digress.

Your point is taken, but I would still disagree at least somewhat, and say that while there is only so much politicians can do when the electorate is stupid, and making compromises is no bad thing, they also have a responsibility to fight to keep the overton window open in the direction of justice, not shut it closed with cynical phrases like "the days of big government are over," or pretending like the pernicious effect of campaign finance is no big deal instead of railing against it when it might not be politically expedient to do so in the short term.

You're right, but at the end of the day, after enough losses a party will change/adapt itself to begin winning again. This is the reality of our current system - A system, mind you, that would be extraordinary hard to change without the cooperation of the vast majority of voters and politicians. It's cynical for me to say, but there is a certain degree of bs we have to learn to accept, at least as we work towards a better system.

I have faith that this party is heading in a better direction, and I also understand the choices made in the past led us to a point where we had soul searching to do, but I'm not going to act it was all as simple as the party deciding one day it wants to be subservient to the 1%. The upside I see is that our generation is framed around the issues of inequality and special interest corruption, and the movements trying to enact reform and the constituencies to which they serve will eventually advance those issues once we have a governing majority again. I wish some people would have a little optimism here.

[Virginiá]

You say you "have faith that this party is heading in a better direction", but Sanders supporters look at the party and see Obama's Attorney General, headed back to a corner office in the same law firm he worked for before becoming AG, and which has as clients some of the very people he ought to have been prosecuting for lawbreaking (and didn't). They see Secretary Clinton, and her massive collection of what are, at the very least, amazingly terrible optics and tone-deaf responses.

This kind of stuff has always happened, even before the party took a right turn. I see the kind of party you want, but it's unrealistic to expect everything to change so quickly.

The reason I said I have faith is that my generation (Millennials) and possibly the generation after that has been framed around the ideas of inequality and anti-corruption views. Once politics begins to be dominated by such values, changes will come. I'm sure of it. There is already a lot of pressure from outside groups and voters to change the way things are done. We are 1 justice away from being able to reverse CU - A spot that will be filled within the next 2 years.

I'm not saying I have faith in the government and current crop of politicians so much as the people who will make things tick in the future. Things could change for the better before then, but I'm focused on the long-term potential. I think I understand why you see things this way, but I also think the system can and will be improved. I'm not going to day-to-day thinking the worst of everything.

You say that the electorate isn't taking responsibility, while the electorate is putting unheard-of levels of support, including money in the range that was previously believed to be impossible without corporate, blunder, and billionaire support, into Sanders campaign. And rather than adopting their fundraising model with glee, the response of the DNC is to ignore them, and pray that they'll go away. And that's when, from the perspective of Sanders' supporters, they're not busy trying to rig the election against them.

It takes a rather extraordinary candidate to to be able to raise that much money from small donors - Especially on such a small average donation amount as Sanders is bringing in. Not all presidential candidates can do this and it would be silly to think that every 4 years Democrats could put up a Sanders-esque candidate that can appeal to a larger slice of the electorate. I'm sure there are lots of potential candidates out there, but who are they? No one knew Sanders could make this happen.

And it's not like the Democratic party is avoiding small donor fundraising. Dean pioneered the idea, Obama implemented it with wild success (mainly because he was the kind of candidate who people wanted to donate lots of money to), and now Sanders has done even better. The problem is, as I said, is that not all candidates have such deep appeal that they can bring in that kind of money.

Plus, it's not exactly a given that Sanders or another appealing candidate can raise all the money via small donors that it would take to run a highly effective general election campaign from start to finish. Just because Sanders did so well up to this point doesn't mean that he could have kept going as strong month after month up to November.

We need campaign finance reform before we start placing these expectations on our candidates. It's either that or risk a significant cash disadvantage against Republicans every time we can't find a rockstar candidate, which will likely be more often than not.

The DNC is perceived as the classic self-licking ice-cream cone. And there's enough truth in that depiction to be problematic. Promises of incremental change have led to the brink of disaster, and like it or not, a good chunk of voters will not accept them any longer. And I can't even say that they're wrong to reject them, given how hard the DNC seems to want to fight against change, or its supposed goals. (It's practical goal appears to be, "how much can we sell out our constituents this time?")

That's a bit cynical, don't you think? You're acting like Democrats haven't done for or fought for anything for the people. I get you don't like the way things are now, but give them some credit.