A Landslide will bring it down

Happy Memorial Day everyone! Hope you are having a great day. The weather in Pittsburgh is perfect today. I’m going to do some yard work and painting and head on over to the other side of the river for dinner. Maybe relax in the cool breezes high above the river and watch the lights come on in the valley below. Ahhhh….

In the meantime, Krugman is trying to talk sense to the Bernie supporters. Butcha know, I wish he would just stop. He’s doin’ it worng. Take this bit, for example:

It’s true that her lead isn’t as big as it was before Mr. Trump clinched the G.O.P. nomination, largely because Republicans have consolidated around their presumptive nominee, while many Sanders supporters are still balkingat saying that they’ll vote for her.

But that probably won’t last; many Clinton supporters said similar things about Barack Obama in 2008, but eventually rallied around the nominee. So unless Bernie Sanders refuses to concede and insinuates that the nomination was somehow stolen by the candidate who won more votes, Mrs. Clinton is a clear favorite to win the White House.

Gosh, I know some of us were ‘silly’ for refusing to jump on the Obama bandwagon after the 2008 primary debacle. But Paul should know that I continue to run into die-hard, civil rights loving Democrats who absolutely could not, under any circumstances, vote for Obama in 2008 or 2012. The reaction to being pressured to vote for him is instant nausea, a rise in blood pressure and anger. Why?

It’s because Obama’s campaign made zero attempt to reach out to us. No, it was more like roll over us, back up, roll over us again, stomp on our heads, call us racists, threaten us, make fun of us, call us stupid uneducated losers and the people who were going to deprive women of reproductive choice. All this from the campaign of the guy who couldn’t be bothered to immediately rescind the Bush conscience rule when he took office. Was that so much to ask from the Feminist in Chief? They treated us so tenderly, those Democrats for Obama. Bernie supporters are going to get a lot more consideration from Hillary than we ever got from Obama.

The difference this year is, as Nate Silver writes, Bernie has had an unusual advantage in the nominating process due to open primaries and caucuses. He has been given every opportunity to win. And he simply hasn’t had the numbers. As Silver points out, the proportional distribution of delegates, open primaries and number of caucuses allows Bernie to pile up delegates from voters who are not all Democrats through a process that is pretty undemocratic.

By Silver’s logic, the same could be said of Obama’s win in 2008. He piled up a lot of delegates in caucus states and in the Republican states in the south. He won very, very few of the delegate rich solid blue Democratic states. The way the media portrayed it, you would have thought Obama won the primary nomination in a landslide when in truth, he barely squeaked by in delegates, lost the popular vote and was the recipient of a wholesale defection of superdelegates from Hillary to Obama in May 2008. Hmmm, right about now, eight years ago…

My point is, and I do have one, is that the count isn’t anywhere near being close for Bernie. I can see where his supporters see the same patterns of wins and think they can pull off an Obama. But even Obama couldn’t pull off an Obama without a lot of help (cough, *media*, cough). And that help cooled some Clintonista’s support for Obama- permanently.

In other words, stop trying to help, Paul. The only ones who are going to be able to help Bernie supporters to move on are Hillary, Bernie and the party, who needs to make a unwavering commitment to stand behind its nominee. It would be wrong to keep taking Bernie supporters votes for granted. That’s going to make them balk. Well, at least some of them. Just give them time to adjust to the numbers. This is not 2008. It’s not that close. Not even a little bit.

This part Krugman did get right:

And no, saying that the race is effectively over isn’t somehow aiding a nefarious plot to shut it down by prematurely declaring victory. Nate Silverrecently summed it up: “Clinton ‘strategy’ is to persuade more ‘people’ to ‘vote’ for her, hence producing ‘majority’ of ‘delegates.’” You may think those people chose the wrong candidate, but choose her they did.

She did it the same way she did it in 2008. She relied on the solid Democratic machinery, unions, hard work and by excelling in messaging and preparation over the other candidate. She is a good candidate. She knows how to win elections and has proven to win elections to the senate, twice, and in the 2008 primaries. The left blogosphere guys who are freaking out need to calm their tits already.

Let me make this absolutely clear  about where we stand to those of you Bernie Bros (and right wing trolls) who can’t help throwing out word salad nonsense in our comments sections. The people on this blog are some of the most pragmatic voters you will ever meet. They have a set of standards and they challenge their candidates to meet them. They are enthusiastic about Clinton but they are also not carried away by emotion. You can’t win us over by the breathless panic you feel when the demon, female incubus mind controls us to vote for her. I assure you, we did this all on our own by researching the issues and weighing the pros and cons of both candidates. There was no electronic signal to the chips embedded in our brains.

Your attempts to highjack the nomination away from Hillary a second time and nullify our votes will provoke a very strong reaction in us. You really ought to think long and hard about this. I don’t think it’s something you considered. We are not going to just roll over and take it when we do not see Bernie as coming close to winning.

Also, you won’t find commenters here who use a lot of jargon. That’s because they prefer to do their own thinking and don’t want someone with an agenda substituting shortcuts to the thinking process. Try it sometime. I mean, try to write a comment that doesn’t contain the words authoritarians, DLC, neoliberals or corporatists. I challenge you to use real thoughts and words. I might even let some of you out of the spam filter where no one can currently hear you scream.

Otherwise, you are wasting your time here. This blog was created eight years ago so that Clintonistas could feel safe swimming against the tide and saying what they thought without someone bullying them or forcing  them to shut up. We’d like to keep it that way. That doesn’t mean you aren’t welcome here but you need to realize where we are coming from. The vast majority of Clintonistas are no longer persuadable to abandoning her for another candidate. In all likelihood, most Clinton supporters in the remaining primary states are pretty much the same. We are sticking with her no matter what gets thrown at her.

What is important is whether your candidate is damaging his own reputation and legacy. I’ve noticed in the past couple of days that he’s backing off the scorched earth tactics. Probably because he’s a smart man and he also knows that there’s nothing hinky about this process this year and that he is simply losing in the old fashioned way like other people we liked. You know, like Paul Tsongas and Gary Hart. Ok, maybe some of you are too young to know. For some of us, those were our first crushes too.

We learned to love again.

In the meantime, it’s not over yet but this story has a somewhat predictable ending. You may find out that the nominee is better than you thought. I would only ask that you give her a chance with a more open mind.

What we need is to send a clear signal to the right wing extremism that is giving us Trump so that a landslide can bring him down.