2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Three major tactical mistakes by the HRC campaign [View all]BeyondGeography
(39,370 posts)for the same reason she beat Bernie and was going to beat everyone else; she had the black vote pretty much locked up. Her lifetime of service to social causes and the grace that she showed after the 2008 primary earned their votes and no one was going to make much of a dent in that. Warren wasn't willing to pay the social costs of throwing punches at the woman who was going to break the glass ceiling and beat her anyway. Bernie only jumped in because she took a pass.
But as a result of our entire party tippy-toeing around Hillary, we ended up with a frontrunner who is a poor campaigner with historically high negatives and a self-described socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union (Trump would have had an absolute field day with him). We lost states we hadn't lost since 1984 and to an absolute train wreck at that.
Warren has more credibility than Sanders on economics (she's far more knowledgeable) without the commie baggage. She speaks directly and with urgency to people who know they're getting screwed and would have not been seen as a 3rd termer, which never works. I think she was the right candidate for the moment, but we'll never know.
These statements that Warren lacked ambition are laughable. Does Joe Biden lack ambition, too? Hillary had a hammer-lock on the nomination, which wasn't healthy in retrospect because she still couldn't get key Democratic constituencies to vote for her in sufficient numbers when it really mattered. I hope the party learns something from this, but, then again, you won't see an ex-First Family like the Clintons again for a very long time.