The DNC is Giving Trump the Greatest Gift of All – a Weak Opponent

stevenmsinger Bernie Sanders, capitalism, Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, Election, Green Party, Hillary Clinton, Journalism, Media, Obama, Politics, President, Republican, voter suppression, voting, , , , , , , , , ,

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The latest polls have Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton by 15 points.

No, not a Fox News poll.

This is from Nate Silver, the FiveThirtyEight numbers wizard who correctly called both the 2008 and 2012 elections. He says if the race were held today, Trump would win the swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire, thereby assuring an easy victory.

Some will say this is just an inevitable boost in the numbers coming as it does right after the Republican National Convention. But need I remind you that the convention was chaos? The speaking roster was dominated by Trump’s family and a never-ending cavalcade of D-list celebrities. It reads more like the cast of the next Celebrity Apprentice than the best and brightest of one of our nation’s two major political parties.

And don’t forget Trump’s own acceptance speech. They’re coming to get you and only I can save you! Trump 2016!

THAT’S what you’re saying gave the Republican nominee a boost!? It should have hurt not helped him!

But let’s put that aside for a moment. Clinton has never polled well against Trump.

Occasionally she has topped him in polls in the past, but rarely more than the margin of error! Usually Trump comes out on top.

No. Hillary Clinton is a terrible challenger in this match-up.

Why?

There is one common factor during this election season that goes beyond political affiliation. People want change.

It’s one of the reasons Barack Obama won. He was seen as the change candidate. Heck! It was his campaign slogan! Hope and Change!

Unfortunately, he didn’t really deliver. Instead of a revolution, he gave us fiddling around the margins. Whatever the reasons for that – Republican obstructionism, his own centrism – it only frustrated the electorate further.

The economy stinks. There are endless wars. Yet the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. People are so starving for change today they are even willing to vote for fascism to get it. Because that’s what Trump offers. It’s change alright. Not good change. Not positive change. But at least things will be different under President Trump. The status quo will alter. America will be “great again” just as Germany became great again in the 1930s by doing a lot of the same xenophobic, racist, sexist and homophobic things Trump champions.

You can see a similar thirst for revolution with the Democrats. We, too, have a change candidate but it’s not Hillary Clinton. It’s Bernie Sanders.

He offered voters a return to the New Deal of FDR. He offered the kind of Democratic Socialism that saved our country from the Great Depression, gave us the strength to win WWII and became the greatest super power the world has ever known.

How does this poll against Trump? It’s devastating. Bernie beats Trump in almost every poll. He always has.

Why does Bernie do so well while Hillary doesn’t? Clinton is not seen as a change agent. She is the status quo. She is politics as usual. She is at best like Obama – fiddling at the margins. At worst she’s a neoliberal hawk that will make things worse – though probably not as bad as Trump.

So what can we do? Democratic Primary voters chose her over Bernie.

Or did they?

The recent leak of private emails from the DNC paints a picture of favoritism. The party unequivocally worked with the media against Sanders. (And, no, it doesn’t matter so much who leaked these emails and why, if they’re authentic.)

Add to that the widespread allegations of voter suppression in the primary match-up between Clinton and Sanders. In districts that leaned Bernie, voters had to face long lines. Voters registrations were mysteriously changed or they were purged from the rolls so they couldn’t vote for him. Bernie rallies were held in over-packed stadiums while Hillary’s were in much smaller venues – yet the results in these areas somehow favored Clinton. Exit polls consistently showed Bernie winning but the actual votes somehow went to Hillary. Meanwhile the media falsely painted the picture of Clinton inevitability even calling the election for her before all the votes were in.

It is hard to prove that all this subterfuge was enough to sway the election against Bernie. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. However, it is naive to think it didn’t help Hillary to some extent. Maybe quite a lot.

So what we have is a presumptive nominee who can claim no legitimacy. Sure Bernie has done the classy thing and endorsed her. But it’s easy to see why his supporters have a hard time accepting that Clinton will do even a fraction of the things Bernie would as president.

So we’re left with a very weak Democratic nominee against Trump.

And this is not voters fault. This is not because Bernie supporters are just stubborn or should just get over it.

In our capitalist system, presidential candidates are products. We are the consumers. And the Democrats have floated an inferior product. It’s not enough that Trump is worse. Because there are other choices.

No one wants to take third party candidates seriously. We ignore the Green Party and the Libertarians because we say these interlopers can’t win. And there are plenty of good reasons why that may be so. However, the existence of these other options in light of a weak challenger on both the Democratic and Republican side all but guarantee each will get significant support.

It doesn’t matter if Jill Stein and Gary Johnson have little chance of winning. They will serve as spoilers for the major parties. Who will take the most?

Well, hard-core conservatives can find much to like in Hillary Clinton. Many of them are lining up to join her ranks. However, Bernie supporters find little to recommend them on Trump’s side. He is the antipathy of everything Bernie stands for. However, Jill Stein is very inviting. If anything, she’s more progressive than he is.

As such, look for the third party option to hurt Democrats more than Republicans. In fact, had Sanders been the nominee, the Democrats could have looked forward to many independents joining the ranks. They overwhelmingly favor Sanders but not Clinton. And there are more independents than either Republicans or Democrats.

So here we are.

There is next to no chance at this point that the Democrats won’t nominate Clinton. She will almost definitely be the standard barer against Trump.

And it leaves him with a huge advantage.

If he wins, it won’t be the fault of disaffected Bernie voters. It will be because of the cynical hubris of Democratic Party leaders.

The seeds of the Trump Reich have been sown right here.

33 thoughts on “The DNC is Giving Trump the Greatest Gift of All – a Weak Opponent”

  2. I’ve been saying for years that nominating Clinton would be essentially ceding the Presidency to whatever loon the GOP nominates (I didn’t even consider the possibility of Trump when I first said this). It’s looking more and more likely that I was right. I hate being Cassandra.

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  3. If Trump wins, I think it will be Hillary’s fault. It’s obvious that she is obsessed with becoming president. How many times has she run now — 3 or 4?

    Trump couldn’t win running against my grandmother and she died decades ago, but Hillary has been repeatedly demonized by the right for decades and even if 99 percent of the allegations made by the far right autocrats, frauds and frequent liars that want to control life on the planet or crush it (and that includes the climate), are false, that doesn’t matter, because there is a lot of truth to the fact that if you keep a lie simple and repeat it often, over time the easiest to fool people will see it as the truth.

    And that’s why I will blame Hillary for Trump’s rise. Her own ego and hubris blinds her to the fact that she is probably un-electable no matter who she runs against because of that public perception that, as Trump puts it, she is ‘Crooked Hillary”. He’s now calling her “Rotten Clinton”. But it is Trump who is crooked and rotten. Hillary’s problem is her blind hubris and not all the alleged crimes the far-right hate media has heaped on her repeatedly for years.

    I don’t think Hillary is crooked or rotten any more than most politicians. If she wins, it will be against the odds. For her to stand a chance to sin, she will have to get down in the mud and use the same tactics that Trump is using and do everything possible to reveal just how dangerous this rotten crook is.

    Hillary should step down and let Bernie run for President becasue I think he has a much better chance to beat Trump than she does.

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  5. A letter to the democratic party.
    Thank you for your apology to senator Sanders.
    Thank you for your acknowledgment of fraud.
    You, as the democratic party, have destroyed democracy.

    You say if we don’t vote for Hillary you will get trump.

    This is your only …reasoning. …
    If trump was not the republican nominee Hillary would have …only her voting record..
    She is lying to everyone. …especially you.

    Trump is NOT a threat.
    1. He and the Clintons have been friends for over a decade.
    2.He met Bill Clinton before he announced his candidacy
    3…..MORE IMPORTANTLY
    He is a business man. To get to where he is today. He DOESN’T believe the bull he says

    4. Everyone believes he it the worse nominee. ..EVER.

    I , personally, believe he is a plant. And I’m not alone.
    He will pull out of the race at just the right time…where the republicans can’t recover in Nov.
    Or He will win the presidency and quit,
    Giving it to his vice president
    And the republicans will STILL WIN.

    If you don’t nominate Bernie Sanders you get Hillary.
    She …and …you…will…
    And are
    Dividing the people.
    The true Bernie Sanders supporters will not vote for Hillary.
    YOU CAN NOT WIN
    AND YOU KNOW IT
    WITHOUT. …US
    Also your party has shown you are NOT democratic.
    We the people will
    Vote out of office all Hillary supporters
    Vote IN all who believe in our beliefs.

    you have the choice to nominate a candidate who will
    TRULY BRING UNITY
    or you can stay the course an
    lose everything. ..democracy stands for.
    Again Hillary will have
    NO CHANCE OF WINNING
    WITHOUT THE THREAT OF TRUMP.

    SO I AM CALLING
    YOUR BLUFF

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  7. I agree with everything you say (as per usual). I live in Ohio but I still want to vote Jill Stein and not Hillary. Clinton and her supporters say she didn’t know anything about what the DNC was doing, but who can believe that when DWS is her BFF and her former (and now again) campaign manager? Obviously Clinton, the DNC, and the media were all colluding. And I think the guy that looked at the data who was recommended by the Clinton campaign and the DNC was a plant — the Clinton campaign immediately jumped on Bernie saying he cheated; it was more dirty tricks to discredit him. I think the Clinton campaign got hold of Bernie’s data at the same time and that’s how people got purged from the voter list in Brooklyn. I KNOW that her ads in Ohio about Bernie’s position on the auto bailout were a BLATANT LIE and I think that’s why he lost Ohio. I think that Benghazi is not an issue . I think the private server is very sketchy but I could get past that. I could accept Bernie’s reasoning that the Democratic platform has been made more progressive and that he and we will hold her feet to the fire to not go back on it, but I can’t get past her warmongering, regime-change foreign policy (Iraq, Syria, Libya, Honduras, Ukraine). I can’t get past the fact that she lied and cheated to get the nomination. I had been waiting for someone like Bernie for 45 years. It just makes me too angry. I’m not convinced that Trump winning would be the end of the world; he wouldn’t be a dictator, and if the Democrats had any balls they could just block everything the way the Repugs have been doing. I’m not convinced that the DNC has had enough of a scare; if she wins, I’m afraid they would take that to mean they can just continue with their neoliberal, politics-as-usual, establishment practices. I’d rather she win than Trump, but if she can’t beat Trump without my vote, I feel like it’s on her and the DNC. And Julian Assange says there will be more emails coming out that will be even more damaging to her, so what happens then? SMH.

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    • Rebecca, HRC’s campaign manger is Robby Mook. HRC has not fired or replaced him with what’s her name, Debbie Wasserman Schultz (DWS)

      https://ballotpedia.org/Hillary_Clinton_presidential_campaign_key_staff_and_advisors,_2016

      Daily Koss clearly reports on July 25th that “Debbie Wasserman Schultz did not get promoted and she’s not running Hillary’s campaign.”

      http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/7/25/1551930/-Debbie-Wasserman-Schultz-did-not-get-promoted-and-she-s-not-running-Hillary-s-campaign

      Hillary Clinton made DWS the HONORARY CHAIR of her campaign What does that mean?

      Daily Koss reports, “Being an honorary chair of a campaign—a position that involves no responsibilities, no employees, no budget, and no duties—is not a promotion from being chair of the DNC.”

      “Being an honorary chair does not mean that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is ‘in charge of’ Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It doesn’t mean anything. That is, unless you think President Obama’s 2012 campaign was run by actress Eva Longoria; or former Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee; or high school guidance counselor Loretta Harper—all of whom were among 24 people who served as honorary co-chairs of Obama’s 2012 campaign.”

      But we can be sure that Donald Trump, a serial liar and bully, will claim repeatedly that HRC rewarded DWS by making her the campaign manager — just another Trump lie to fuel the fire fed by Hillary’s haters and any ignorant fool that falls for it without fact checking like I just did because I remembered the word “honorary” being used when the news came out.

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      • Is she getting paid for this honorary position? I’m betting so, in which case it was indeed a reward for services rendered. I’ve never known anyone before who was fired but then hired back in an “honorary” capacity. This is not a Trump lie, it’s something that Hillary chose to do – why is she not given credit for having agency for her own decisions? That smacks of sexism to me.

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      • Before you judge HRC guilty, verify without a doubt and from reputable, trusted data that there is a pay check that comes with this honorary position for her old friend. And the Democratic National Committee is not the same organizatoin as the Clinton Campaign, so what’s her name wasn’t hired back in an honorary position with the same organization.

        Listen very closely to what Trump is saying about this issue. Did he emphasize that Hillary hired what’s her name into an honorary position — and did he explain clearly what that honorary position has been in the campaigns of previous presidents (of course not, because Trump never explains anything clearly and leaves everything he says up to individual interpretations that can vary widely based on what people want to think) — or did he deliberately mislead by making it sound like HRC hired DWS into a salaried position as a reward?

        In addition, find out who Debbie Wasserman Schultz is before you judge her guilty based on this one issue. We too often pass judgement on individuals based on one mistake they made and ignore every other factor in their careers. Scroll down and discover DWS’s net worth.

        https://ballotpedia.org/Debbie_Wasserman_Schultz

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      • Then there is this from Politifact

        Wasserman Schultz’s net worth — all her assets minus all her liabilities — was somewhere between $235,000 and negative $290,000 in 2010, according to the most recent disclosure.

        In fact, Wasserman Schultz was one of the least wealthy members of Congress that year. The Center for Responsive Politics ranked her at No. 422 out of 440 House members. (The list is slightly larger than 435 seats in the House due to special elections.)

        http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2012/jul/18/mary-matalin/debbie-wasserman-schultz-had-offshore-accounts-mit/

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      • Google “payday loans and Debbie Wasserman Schultz” and you’ll see exactly who she is.

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      • No, I won’t google payday loans and her name, because that only comes up with hits and the number of hits is meaningless. Instead, I suggest you find what you think are reputable sources that will stand up under close scrutiny in that list of links and provide two or three of them. Was DWS found guilty of this issue in a court of law? Was she indicted by a grand jury? Was she then found guilty?

        I’d rather check out DWS’s profile on Vote Smart than read alleged propaganda pumped out by a media that I have little to no respect for.

        https://votesmart.org/candidate/24301/debbie-wasserman-schultz#.V5jdO7grKUk

        If Google doesn’t provide any facts to back up the allegations from believable sources, then it is just another scandal heading down a dead end street.

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      • So anything not illegal is automatically not immoral? Sheesh, no wonder you like Hillary. DWS has repeatedly shilled for predatory payday loan companies which reward her handsomely for it. Of course it’s not illegal – nothing is for the 1% these days. The fact that you seem to think that makes it okay is horrifying.

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      • I never said I liked Hillary. I have clearly said if given a viable choice, I’d vote for the Green Party candidate for president but voting for her would be throwing my vote away and end up leading to Trump being elected.

        Don’t let your hate of HRC put words in my mouth.

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  14. Hillary thought she was entitled to be president by divine right. She lost for a number of reasons. The democratic party will be “dissecting” this loss for some time. Obviously the DP overlooked the people in the “heartland”, ignoring the many millions of people in the inner states, who are hurting. In 2020, the DP needs to do some serious soul-searching, and reach out to the people in the interior. You cannot win an election with just the liberal elites from New York and California. The electoral college system is a fact of life.

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  15. I read the book “The Truth about Hilary” by Edward Klein . Her career, going back to investigating Nixon in Watergate, speaks for itself. Anyone can deduce her desire, her ambitions, her evil, by simply investigating her career. Even Nixon was afraid of her.

    I am so glad, that she is headed for political oblivion. Let her write books, and give speeches. At least she is out of government.

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    • “Even Nixon was afraid of her.”

      Hillary Clinton was 22 when Nixon became president. Nixon was president from 1969 to 1974. Hillary graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 and earned a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1973. She married Bill Clinton in 1975, one year after Nixon resigned from the presidency to avoid being impeached.

      Hillary Clinton wasn’t in any position of power until she was the 1st lady Of Arkansas (and that isn’t an elected position) and Bill Clinton was the governor from 1979 to 1982 and again in 1983 to 1992.

      IT was 1977 when Bill Clinton was the Attorney General of Arkansas.

      Hillary Clinton wasn’t even married when Nixon became president. She was basically a nobody when Nixon was in power, and Nixon was pardoned by President Ford so what exactly did Nixon have to fear from a twenty something Hillary Clinton?

      I think that book you refer to must have been more fiction than fact.

      Nixon died in 1994 less than a year after Bill Clinton became president the 1st time in January 1993.

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    • Who wrote the book?
      Who published the book?
      Who owns the published?
      How many other investigators were there?

      Again, I question the bias and validity of this book.

      The impeachment process for Nixon started in 1974.

      An impeachment process against Richard Nixon was initiated on February 6, 1974, when the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution, H.Res. 803, giving its Judiciary Committee authority to investigate whether sufficient grounds existed to impeach Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States[1] of high crimes and misdemeanors#United States, primarily related to the Watergate scandal.

      Where was Hillary in 1974?

      1st, she was 27 years old. Wow, she’d have so much clout at 27 before she was even married to Bill Clinton.

      Raised in a politically conservative household, Rodham helped canvass Chicago’s South Side at age 13 following the very close 1960 U.S. presidential election, where she saw evidence of electoral fraud (such as voting list entries showing addresses that were empty lots) against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. She then volunteered to campaign for Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in the U.S. presidential election of 1964. Rodham’s early political development was shaped most by her high school history teacher (like her father, a fervent anti-communist), who introduced her to Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative, and by her Methodist youth minister (like her mother, concerned with issues of social justice), with whom she saw, and afterwards briefly met, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. at a 1962 speech in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. …

      She attended the 1968 GOP nation Convention in Miama and was upset by the way Richard Nixon’s campaign portrayed Rockefeller and by what she perceived as the conventions ‘veiled’ racist messages, and she left the Republican Party for good. …

      In 1974, she was a member of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, D.C., advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate Scandal. Under the guidance of Chief Counsel Jon Doar and senior member Bernard W. Nussbaum, Rodham helped research procedures of impeachment and the historical grounds and standards for impalement. The committee’s work culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974.

      Key words:

      she was a member of a group ADVISING under the GUIDANCE, and she helped RESEARCH procedures of impeachment … She was not on the actual House Committee.

      She married Bill Clinton in 1975.

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    • What if everything you read in taht book that creeped you out wasn’t accurate – would you care or did taht book feed your personal bias of Hillary Clinton? Isn’t that why you read the book from Edward J. Klein (born 1937), who is an American author, tabloid writer and gossip columnist who has written about the Kennedys, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.

      Stop and focus on two words: tabloid and gossip.

      Klein received extensive criticism for his 2005 biography of Hillary Clinton, The Truth About Hillary. Politico criticized the book for “serious factual errors, truncated and distorted quotes and overall themes [that] don’t gibe with any other serious accounts of Clinton’s life.”[9] The conservative columnist John Podhoretz criticized the book in the New York Post, “Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower. Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be decontaminated. And 200 pages into it, I wanted someone to drive stakes through my eyes so I wouldn’t have to suffer through another word.”[10] In the National Review, conservative columnist James Geraghty wrote, “Folks, there are plenty of arguments against Hillary Clinton, her policies, her views, her proposals, and her philosophies. This stuff ain’t it. Nobody on the right, left, or center ought to stoop to this level.”[11] …

      Klein has also come under fire for his use of anonymous quotes, purported to be from the subjects of his books, which he claims he received from anonymous insiders. The credibility of such quotes has been questioned by writers such as Joe Conason,[15] Salon’s Simon Malloy [16] and conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh[17] and Peggy Noonan.[18] “Some of the quotes strike me as odd, in the sense that I don’t know people who speak this way,” Limbaugh said of Klein’s work, describing the sources as “grade school chatter.”

      What, Rush Limbaugh questioned this author’s credibility, and you still swallowed this swill as serious?!!!?!!!

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