See, I don't know if Bernie would have stood against the tide of angry white supporters that Trump managed to wrangle out of the rust belt. He is a Jewish Atheist with a progressive pseudo-socialist platform. Maybe he could have won, given how hated Hilary was and is, but if you recall, Donald Trump led a vicious and demeaning campaign against her. Secretary Clinton handled Senator Sanders with relative ease during the primary because if she was too hard on him she would have lost his supporters in the General...but that happened anyway... so maybe Bernie's candidacy, fully backed by the DNC, could have stood up against whatever opposition research Trump's team would have found on him. Maybe the character contrast between the two of them would have been enough to put him over the top in key places like Florida and elsewhere so we wouldn't be sitting around reading posts and comments like this. Personally I don't think that would have been the case. But, hey, quite a few of us were wrong in a big way earlier this week.
I liked Bernie as a candidate and many of my values as a voter and citizen aligned with his, but I had a feeling that he wouldn't have much political will and capital to accomplish what he sought to do. He would have to work with a Republican majority in both the House and Senate, and given their obstinate nature under Obama, they probably would have doubled down on keeping anything remotely progressive out.
I voted for him in my state's primary back in March--he lost to Hillary here by just 40,000 votes. I just looked that up. I didn't know that until I looked into it now for the sake of this post. We could have all done more, I think. And now we gotta swallow that very bitter pill.
She cut corners, and cheated, but maybe she didn't need to. Her own undoing was her lack of transparency. Her guarded nature has always been a problem with, well, pretty much everyone. But she was in deep with the DNC from the get go too and that in and of itself is problem that the DNC should address--but will they? I hope so, but, let's not kid ourselves they probably won't. And that is another numbing cause for despair here. We the masses who find ourselves feeling like Zach in that meeting need to have a come to Jesus moment about what we want the Democratic party to really stand for, or perhaps leave it all together. I don't know, honestly; the new thing now that a lot of us feel is uncertainty about how bad things are going to get. We are in uncharted territory here, and we need to find our bearings sooner than later because if we all truly give a shit, it has got to start with more than just self serving posts on forums like this.