If HRC runs in 2016, who should be the pro-worker, pro-peace, pro-justice candidate in the race?

[Ken Burch]

46. Actually, "that play" hasn't ever been DONE by this party in the fall.

In 1972, McGovern was sabotaged by the party regulars just because he beat them fair and square in the primaries-nobody really even HEARD his platform in the fall. And with the Nixon "dirty tricks" team and the consequences of the China trip, NO Democrat was going to have a real chance in November anyway...Scoop Jackson would likely have lost 49 states too, since there was no appeal for a Democrat running on a "we can do it better" platform on Vietnam(the fact that the war was still going when Nixon was sworn in took the "we can do it better" option away from us from the get-go.

In 1984. Mondale didn't run as a progressive...he ran as a Lutheran deficit hawk an opponent of the nuclear freeze, and a supporter of a hardline economic blockade policy towards Nicaragua-deliberately ignoring the proposal that he base his fall campaign on bringing back industrial jobs to the Northeast and engaging with the massively popular anti-Reagan activist movements across the country. Mondale's defeat was also due to his being Carter's vice-president...It was as if the Republicans had nominated Hoover's vice president against FDR in '36(if they'd been THAT stupid, they'd have lost the OTHER two states that year).

In 1988, Dukakis lost mainly because he was an emotional iceberg who didn't fight back against the smear campaign the 'pugs ran...he'd have lost even if he'd been a death penalty supporter with the way he campaigned.

So no, progressives aren't to blame for Democratic presidential failures of the past. We don't have ANY way to know how we'd do if we nominated an unapologetic progressive and gave that candidate the wholehearted support of the whole party, at least not in the post-FDR era(FDR could fairly be called an unapologetic progressive in 1936, the year of his greatest victory).

Not sure why you hold such a grudge against them, really.