Sorry. I hit publish instead of save. I was debating posting this and did the classic draft thing. What was interesting to me about this argument against HRC wasn’t getting attacked like, say, a Young Turks video (despite some stylistic similarities). More interesting was that pro-Sanders types – who are now trying to defend the legitimacy of having been or continuing to be supportive, or trying to justify his persistence as a candidate – are posting it like crazy in my part of the world. People who were going quiet because they thought they had crossed the line and were supporting Trump, got active again around this post. More interesting still was that nobody was piling on about how deluded, arrogant, privileged, Naderite, or a-historical she is. It might be because she’s pretty, likable, and isn’t lily white (which is to say I haven’t unpacked her ethnicity). But that didn’t help Rosario Dawson . . . So probably more just wondering if she was making an argument that wasn’t easily dismissed.
I think, had I returned to this, I might not have published it at all, but one of the good things about blogs is that it catches in-between moments, so rather than take it down, I’ll just leave the initial thinking.
In at The End of The World 
This feels hectoring and poorly informed, but I’m not in her target audience, so I don’t know how it lands. But here’s a thing: among some Sanders partisans, there’s a weird conflation of supposedly hardnosed analysis, like this woman’s, about electability, numbers, polls, etc .– i.e., Hillary can’t beat Trump, and Bernie can, and here’s why, according to various sobering metrics and big data — combined with passion about voting for the good and the true regardless of such petty calculations. So if you say you’re voting for Clinton against Sanders because she has a better chance of being elected, they tell you “only old establishment shills vote out of fear!” If you tell them you’re voting for Clinton because she’d make a better president, they go all Gopnik on you and say “But TRUMP! TRUMP! DONALD TRUMP! Only Bernie can defend us from THE TRUMP! Check out this [usually meaningless] POLL if you don’t believe me!” None of the analysis (on either side) feels like analysis to me, because it isn’t, it’s deploying an analytical tone to persuade people to go one way or the other. I wish this woman — and I’m fighting every ageist, sexist impulse I have, and that’s saying something, not calling her “girl” — would just argue for Bernie and against Hillary on the merits, instead of setting herself up as a yet another hot-air pundit.
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I will rant on about this. If Sanders had gotten the nomination and then lost the election, every Clintionite would have said, “See, we told you idiots this would happen.” If Clinton wins the nomination and then loses to Trump, every Sandersite will say “See, we knew it, only Bernie could have won.” If by some statistically anomalous chance [sarcasm], Clinton actually defeats Trump in November, the Sanders crowd will have a rationale for why they were right anyway: she stole it or Trump blew up or whatever. All supposedly sober people thought Trump and Sanders had no chance. That wasn’t true. Now Sanders people pick up the same pseudo-predictive bullshit, and when ( I hope, but I’m have no problem saying I’m not so sure) Clinton beats Trump, they’ll already be off on some other bullshit. In the establishment, in the insurgencies, the bullshit just goes on and on, and nobody ever gets called on it. The *really* revolutionary thing would be to take a totally different approach.
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This kind of bullshit happens at a lot of levels though right? Cokie Roberts called the Woman Card campaign brilliant and effective, but what makes it either? Conventional wisdom says Sanders is weakening Clinton, but how? The Republican Party has become the _________ thing that _________ thinks the Trump voter believes. CW says Sanders has pulled the Democratic Party to the left, but what’s the left? What’s the Party for that matter? I feel tedious even saying it – everyone wants clicks and views and predictions get them.
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Yes, at every level. After Bill Clinton’s grand jury testimony regarding whether he lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was aired on TV, Cokie Roberts informed us that Bill had surpassed the limit of what the American people and Washington, D.C., would tolerate; Tim Russert said stuff like “stay tuned, the President may have only hours left in office…” WJC’s approval ratings shot through the ceiling, and yet from that day to this, Cokie Roberts confidently makes utterance after utterance with no clear relationship to evidence, and nobody ever asks her “why are you employed, again?” Yeah, it’s tedious: “clicks and views, and predictions get them.” It would be interesting to see people who hope for fundamental change try something fundamentally different. i don’t know what that would be. But then again I’m not a revolutionary.
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It’s also that people think predictions of events can actually bring those events about or at least improve odds. I’ve been studying older conventions, and one of the tricks for non-frontrunners was to have your numbers guys come up with scenarios purporting to show how you could get growing delegate leads on successive ballots, then tell the press about those numbers, hoping a sense of groundswell would feed back to the delegates themselves and make them want to get on board. It was all made up. I feel like that’s happening now on a public clicks-and-links-and-views level: state that things are shifting your way, show a bunch of stats, and maybe people actually *will* shift your way.
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The Sanders campaign has been the greatest thing that’s happened to the party and, ultimately, potentially, to Hillary this year. Can’t disagree with anything that the young woman in the video says. Hillary will be the nominee, but she’ll have to run on a platform heavily influenced by Bernie. Which, hopefully, the woman in the video will recognize as a win. But, even more importantly, she’ll have to campaign on that platform. An even bigger win. And, she’s young enough to be making videos for a long time.
Once Trump is impeached or deposed in the coup (keep laughing, my friends, but download some movies to your hard drive just in case the broadband is out for a few days), Sanders has tapped into something. We’ll see if it’s a movement.
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“Which, hopefully, the woman in the video will recognize as a win.”: Well, if Clinton beats Trump, it won’t be a win for the young person’s prediction that Clinton is tailormade to be destroyed by Trump. Which won’t keep her from making videos long after I, happily, have departed this vale of tears.
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