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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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The irony is this is still better than Hillary's "donation sharing" scheme that bankrupted the DNC and left down ballot Dems screwed...
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/dnc-leak-clinton-team-deflected-state-cash-concerns-226191
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774/
trump is obviously worse in lots of ways, but that isn't an excuse for Dems to pull the same shit just to a smaller degree.
But what trump is doing today (in this one narrow aspect) isn't as bad as what Hillary already did almost a decade ago.
We need to start running candidates with more integrity
Clinton is as responsible for the four years of Trump as any individual not named Trump. I know you're going out of your way to be explicit that Trump is far worse than Hillary, and I understand why, and he is. But Democrats need to be looking in the mirror, watching game tape, and recognizing their own flaws. Because Biden is making a lot of the same mistakes Hillary made in 2016.
Nah, Comey gets that nod by bucking FBI policy not once but twice to publicly fuck Clinton during the campaign. The second time just days before the election. Had he just done what the FBI has always dose, and silently open and close cases they are working on, Clinton likely cruises to win the election.
I agree Comey is a ratfucker, but Clinton dropped the ball so many fucking times. She failed the ground game in Michigan and Wisconsin, she failed in Pennsylvania and Arizona, all states that were entirely winnable (and she thought she had them in the bag) but voters didn't show up for her. She pulled money from the "safe" counties, but worse than that she failed to make a case why anyone should vote for her. She had no platform, she was out front on zero wedge issues, and spent more time antagonizing progressive voters than she spent courting them. And they still showed up to vote for her, because progressives didn't want Trump. It was the moderates who shrugged and said "what's the worst that can happen?"
She followed the standard Democrat strategy in PA and successfully did it better than Obama, at least on the base. She only slightly underperformed vote totals in rural counties. The issue is that trump brought people into the vote. Not moderates, but non voting rural voters who believe they had been left behind. And did so in droves.
She lost because she was an establishment candidate, doing typical establishment things (very successfully) at a period of time of strong anti establishment...and here comes this guy, whose genius is in the ability to sell himself, who said all the right things about being anti establishment.
Clinton was your typical politician. She played by the book and did so pretty well. And of course this includes focusing on a swing state like pa. Can we look back and think of things she could have done better? Of course, hind sight is 20/20. But the issue is that they didn't sense, noone really did (Im not even convinced trump did), how much people were desperate to vote for a non establishment candidate.
She wasn't a bad a candidate, just the same old at the wrong time.
But comey legitimately did things that they pretty much never do that fucked her. It was a knowingly harmful action, right before the election, where she lost some places with razor thin margins. He fucked us, very intentionally, even if he didn't think it would swing the election.
Democrats need to let go of the revisionist "she did very well compared to Obama" bullshit.
It was her job to win the election, a job she fought bitterly to have, and she didn't. She failed. She failed the party, and she failed America.
And you need to let go of the "nobody saw this coming" bullshit. Plenty of people saw it coming, but they were dismissed and ignored.
The modern Democratic party had never won an election with an establishment candidate. Carter did not have the support of the party, Bill Clinton invented his own "new Democrats" because all of the establishment Dems thought HW was unbeatable, and Obama had to squeeze out Hillary, Biden, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd as the disruptor. Meanwhile, Mondale, Gore, Kerry, Dukakis, rank and file candidates all, and all of them losers.
There is no such thing as a "typical politician" or a "typical race" at the presidential level. There is no one winning strategy that works in all elections, no national map that tracks across generations, no conventional wisdom that holds up to scrutiny.
Clinton was responsible for developing a strategy to beat her opponent. She wasn't running against Obama. She didn't need to beat Obama's turnout, she needed to beat Trump's turnout.
She was, objectively, a bad candidate. Trump was beatable, and she had a massive advantage in fundraising and experience and campaigning. She was smarter and more capable than her opponent, and had the money and infrastructure to monitor his moves and outmaneuver him at every turn.
Instead, she shat the bed. It wasn't even close. There were five states where she thought she was winning and was exposed to be completely out of touch. That's not someone else's fault. There wasn't some magical intervention or deus ex machina at the last minute. Hillary simply failed to convince enough voters to show up for her.
Having lived through it, watching it happen in real time, that was extremely frustrating. Having someone tell me after the fact that "well, actually she had statistically more of the base than previous elections" is maddening.
But the real kick in the balls is watching Biden make the same mistakes, try the same strategies that failed before, recognizing that Biden is our best hope to avoid catastrophe, and realizing that Trump is on track to move back into the White House.
This is why I keep saying Hillary Clinton should not be running for president and should not be in charge of the DNC. . . . . . .
...
I'm sorry to break this to you...
The "Hillary Victory Fund" I was talking about didn't disappear...
It's just now called the "Biden Victory Fund".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donors-can-now-give-620600-to-biden-and-dnc-expanding-democratic-big-money-fundraising/2020/05/16/d2bf51cc-978a-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html
By saying it's a "fund" it lets billionaires donate over half a million, and it's legal.
A small amount goes to down ballot politicians, but most goes to the DNC operations and Biden.
I didn't really get into that in my last comment tho, when we're talking about fundraising by "the fiscally conservative" there's often too much shady shit to cover at once.
Quick edit:
We didn't know how bad Hillary's was till her people ran away from the DNC after 2016. Biden's people moved in after a couple years in anticipation of 2020, and since he won. They stayed.
We won't really hear how bad his was/is unless his people leave and someone with integrity is allowed to see the DNC's books while trump is in office. After Donna Brazile went public about the numbers, we might not get another person with integrity again.
Up till the handover was complete in 2016, Hillary's people were very secretive with the money and just kept saying everything was "fine". We can't trust neoliberals running the DNC to be honest, and since they're a private organization, they don't have to tell anyone what's happening.
This isn't a "Hillary" problem, it's a fundamental problem with how our system is set up.
Opening the floodgates for huge donations from billionaires won't fix it, it'll only make it worse.
Let me see if I follow all of this
I'm actually fully in agreement with you about the poisonous influence of legalized big money in politics and the overall incompetence of the DNC and Hillary Clinton specifically, but I'm not seeing how having most of the "Biden Victory Fund" go to Biden, is worse than extracting money directly from your downballot candidates
Because:
And Hillary's agreement was 50%, but in reality it was hardly anything making it down ballot. There was even more shady shit going on where they changed to not splitting the money till very very late in the election, at which point the DNC said there wasn't any left to give.
Like I said, the only way we'll know what happens this time, is if someone with access to the DNCs books admits it later. After that happened following Hillary's loss, it's very likey a prerequisite for those positions involves not snitching on the last group.
But between those ~~two~~~ three articles I linked, it covers most of what was going on.
Surely it would be easier to read the articles than me trying to explain it?
You'd get the full picture (that we knew at the time it was written) instead of me trying to summarize.
Yes, I understand the gist of the victory fund thing.
My question was, why is that worse than what Trump is doing? Even if we posit without evidence that Biden is guaranteed to do exactly the same thing with it that Hillary did.
...
Because trump is just demanding a cut.
Biden's 2020 campaign are the ones that structured it so billionaires can give 625k, which is much larger than the normal 2.5k you can give to a candidate.
PACs get around it by not being allowed to "coordinate" with the campaign legally.
This allows the DNC to essentially be a PAC, except they can legally coordinate with Biden's campaign...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/donors-can-now-give-620600-to-biden-and-dnc-expanding-democratic-big-money-fundraising/2020/05/16/d2bf51cc-978a-11ea-82b4-c8db161ff6e5_story.html
It's all there in one of the links you haven't read.
trump is doing a small time grift, Biden significantly expanded how much the wealthy can influence an election far and above citizens united. Which you just said was a problem...
So I don't understand how you don't see how what Biden is doing is worse.
If the problem is me explaining it, please read those articles and see if that helps. I'm not sure how else to put it that's simpler, and don't see the point of me going as in depth as those articles you won't read.
I understand perfectly well, you don't need to keep repeating or pretending that the issue is that I don't understand.
Trump is siphoning money that he didn't raise away from downballot candidates
Biden is raising money, then you're saying that he's probably not giving enough of it to downballot candidates (while admitting you have no idea whether that's actually happening; you're just assuming it because of what Hillary did)
Right? Do I have that summary correct?
If your main concern is that you're upset that all this stuff is legal in America, I fully agree. I think directing anger at the system that made it legal and try to make it illegal again sounds like a great idea. Since it's legal though, it seems weird to say that it's a huge problem that the better candidate in this election is doing it (to try to raise money and win the election).
I don't even understand how Biden's name came into this and why you're trying so hard to link this particular type of legalized corruption with his name, specifically under an unrelated story about Trump inventing a whole new type of kneecapping-downballot-candidates to do.
(I mean, I have a theory for why you're so eager to bring Biden's name into it and bring up shady things Hillary Clinton did 8 years ago; I'm just pointing out that it's an odd thing to be so eager to bring into discussion about this story.)
You literally said:
So I took that as meaning I needed to repeat what I already explained because you didn't understand...
You keep asking me things that are explained in the articles you're not reading.
If the problem is me, take me out of the equation and just read the articles man.
That comic is actually a really good illustration of how to use propagandistic framing (take a sensible thing and put it in the mouth of a character who's dislikeable) -- in this case, making it seem like "Sounds like you're talking bollocks about something I care about, can you justify what you said?" is a rude thing to ask.
(Edit: He edited the comment maybe? This is the comic which was part of the comment before he edited it)
Again this is completely uncontroversial. This is how party funding works.
I find this completely uncontroversial. Both parties do this as their standard agreement with leading candidates and nominees.