"Wait, did you think nobody would notice the obnoxious double standard?"

[Ken Burch]

11. OK, the Comey/Russian thing mattered-and she has the right to defend her campaign.

Last edited Mon Sep 18, 2017, 08:45 PM - Edit history (1)

It's fine for her to talk about what her campaign did well-and it did a number of things well.

She ran a very effective primary campaign, winning demographics she had overwhelmingly lost in '08. She gets full credit for that achievement.

Defending her campaign wasn't what that section read as to a lot of people.

I read it, and I think a lot of people read it as her saying she'd have won in the fall if only she'd been nominated without a significant campaign, it only Bernie hadn't run. And I think a lot of his younger supporters, even the overwhelming majority who did work and vote for her in the fall, read it as a raised middle finger.

My loyalty is to those younger voters and to our need to connect with them.

We are not going to be able to do that if we essentially tell them "everything that went bad in '16 was YOUR fault-and if you want to be in this party, from now on you have to give up working for any of the causes you care about, settle for what WE give you, and do what you're damn well told!"

These are people who do not have a solid brand loyalty to OUR party yet. They won't go GOP, but they might go minor party or just drift away from political involvement.

We can't win in '18 or '20 if they do. There are no other blocs of voters whose presence at the polling booth is going to rise enough to make up for us losing those people on a long-term basis.

That's why I've sometimes seemed like a broken record on some things. We need those people to win and we need them to be the people who share the work of keeping this party going in the future.

And engaging them doesn't mean throwing any of our current supporters under the bus, because these people are all solidly pro-choice and solidly committed to social justice, as they are committed to the other causes they fight for.