How many on the progressive wing of the Democratic party were duped by Putin?.

[Ken Burch]

115. OK, so examine it. But we can't work on the assumption

that what Putin did was the whole story, that we could be sure we'd have won if only it hadn't been for that.

The danger in taking that view is that it becomes justification for a "stay the course" mentality(or worse, a go further right argument, when we can't go to the right of where we were this year and still be Democratic or in any sense progressive).

Some people would like us to go back to the '92 and '96 platforms, when winning on those was in some senses worse than losing, becaues we ended with a Democratic administration that accepted deeper cuts in social services than in any Republican administration since 1952. Defending funding for social services and standing with the working and kept-from-working poor in their fight for dignity ad survival are the main reasons the Democratic Party exists. They are what the difference between being progressive and conservative-abandoning that mission means abandoning our purpose.

We can't go back to being the party we were in the Nineties...a party that was nominally pro-choice and barely pro-LGBTQ, but militaristic on foreign policy and in essential agreement with the GOP on the idea that Wall Street and corporate power should be given special deference in all major decisions in American life.

We didn't lose because Bernie ran. We lost because our fall campaign didn't reference anything in the platform including any of the large numbers of Sanders ideas included in it-ALL OF WHICH were and are popular. I'm convinced that had we led(in addidion to Hillary's personal qualifications, which essentially didn't need to be mentioned in the fall because everyone already knew what her qualifications and story were)with the platform and had we run ads in states where Sanders did well praising the Sanders kids, many of them first-time political activists, for what they had achieved, we could have brought them to the polls and we could have added to our total from other quarters.

Instead, we ran a campaign in which the only issues referenced was the need to defend choice-a point we'd already made and on which no significant number of people disagreed and about which little still needed to be said, really-and an endless, pointless reiteration of the shocking fact that Donald Trump was a misogynist bastard-a fact that, at that time, most voters didn't see as a deciding issue.

I WANTED Hillary to be elected. All I've said was that I think we'd have been much more likely to elect her had we led with what she and the party were FOR and why progressive policies were actually a GOOD thing than were going to by running a campaign that made us look twenty degrees further to the right than we actually were. We didn't win any votes in 2016 by hiding the progressive parts of our agenda.