But if she knew she was terminally ill and had two years to live, would she actually tell us? I think we all know the answer is no. It's the lack of transparency that opens up the possibility that they could hide a bigger issue from the public, just as her e-mail response continually changed with the public's growing knowledge of what happened.
It's just so much work. Making Hillary the nominee is like picking the dog from the shelter with an abundance of issues to deal with...this would have been a lot easier with someone that brings in millions like Bernie or someone safe like Biden. But people are in such a rush to elect a woman. My response? Baby steps.
Right. So the best Democrat that could have been the nominee and in the most favorable environment ever for Democrats with a high approval rating sitting President, a great economy and a historically massive demographic advantage is the woman who can't even clear 45% in the polling averages? The one who in four-way polling is now merely two points ahead of Donald Trump - the lowest polling Republican since Goldwater?
Not to mention that a great share of the third party vote is in fact a reaction to her candidacy (usually harming her more than Trump in the polls) or that there's at least a few million young Democrats that won't even vote for her according to a recent FiveThirtyEight article.
No, she's absolutely a weak candidate when it comes to campaigning. Historically terrible, in fact, for this party.
And of course it fucking matters. It's all about getting people to the polls and the many down ballot elections and propositions that are occurring across the country. Clinton is muting enthusiasm and could cause millions of those on the left to not even show up. But I guess we should just ignore the ample evidence of how general voters, the public and left-leaning minds feel and act like she's some legendary political figure that everybody secretly loves.
Again, being the nominee does not make you the strongest candidate. I can't begin to understand why people can't wrap their head around that logic.
BMP, you are making assumptions and generalizations.
You keep going on and on about how everyone is in a hurry to elect the first female president and that's the only reason Hillary is the nominee, but I'm not sure you realize how reductive that is, how insulting it is to so many people who are supporting her. As though it can't be any other reason.
Furthermore, if we're just talking about the Democratic political establishment, the elected class, I would argue that if there's a strong bias towards Hillary - and there is - it's not simply because she's a woman, it's at least as much, if not more so, because she's center-left and Bernie isn't. The party has seemed to be hellbent on retaining its centrist credentials in recent years. I mean, it's been centrist for the better part of forty years, but under Howard Dean's chairmanship, it seemed to be drifting leftward - we had the 2006 waive elections where we gained control of both houses in Congress and Pelosi, a native of San Francisco, one of the cradles of progressivism in America, became the Speaker of the House(and yes, the first female one), and we had the 2008 election where Obama became a phenomenon.
And then Dean's term ended, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz became chairperson, and the party has seemed to want to correct its leftward lurch. So if you want to make generalizations about an institutional bias towards Hillary, it might be more appropriate to make it about the DNC being afraid of being too leftist than making it solely about wanting to elect the first female president(though I'm sure there isn't a Democrat or a Progressive who doesn't like that idea because, frankly, we should all want to break that glass ceiling).
Another generalization you're making is that all Hillary supporters - whether originally Bernie supporters or Hillary from the start - thought she was going to have an easy campaign. I can't speak for everyone, but I've always felt that a Hillary Clinton general election campaign would be brutal simply because I'm not sure I've seen an institutional hatred for a political candidate as ugly and fierce and relentless as the hatred the Republican Party and the right-wing have for Hillary in my lifetime(only ones that come close are Bill Clinton and Obama). It's one of the reasons I was so happy for Obama to come along in 2008, because I knew the GOP would make a Hillary general election campaign unbearable.
Now, this is the part where you say, 'but we could've had Sanders this time', but what you seem to refuse to want to admit is that a Sanders general election campaign would've been unbearable too for different reasons. We would've heard the words socialist and communist approximately 1000 times a day, and Bernie did not, from my point of view, give any indication during the primaries that he could adequately combat that line of attack. I mean, he wasn't even asked the question enough, but the few times he was, his response was too broad, too gentle, and too bland. He would just go into his, 'you know, if you poll people policy by policy, they actually like the sorts of policies we're talking about', and 'we already have socialism here, medicare is socialism, public education is socialism, the post office is socialism, etc etc'.
The GOP's socialist and communist attacks would have been vicious and relentless, and I wanted to see him be able to combat that by saying, listen, in a soviet-type communist system, the government owns everything, there is no freedom of the press and freedom of speech is very limited. We would have to repeal several amendments from the bill of rights including the first amendment. And do you seriously think this is what I want? Do you think I want to take away your freedom of speech, have you live in a society where the only news you get is the news the government produces, where every good you buy is manufactured by the government, etc etc, is that really what you think I want? That's ridiculous! All I want is for everyone to have healthcare, for the minimum wage to be higher, and for quality education to be available to everyone, that is it!
I wanted to see the ability to mount that kind of a vigorous counter-attack on the inevitable socialist/communist attacks and I didn't see it.
So either one of them would've given us a brutal general election campaign and to say that it would've been easy-peasy if we'd just nominated Bernie is just denial. I mean yeah, we wouldn't talking about the nominee's unfavorables or e-mail or pay-to-play every day, but we'd be buried in other nonsense about how electing Bernie would mean the end of our country as we know it.