No fucking way. I already insured it through Llloyds.

You don't plug a bunch of variables into the "candidate machine" and get a winning candidate out the end like a frozen pizza. At best, you get a patchwork homunculous that doesn't stand for anything and inspires no one.

People want to talk about "finding that Obama magic again"? .... Conventional wisdom had Obama pegged as the WORST possible candidate, the one our party would be insane to run. NO WAY was "middle America" gonna vote for the One Term AA Senator with the name that rhymes with "Osama". No fucking WAY. And his middle name is "Hussein"? Are you out of your minds?

The Conventional Wisdom people, the people who try to design a candidate by plugging in the "proper" electability variables, wanted nothing to do with Barack Hussein Obama.

And those same people told us Kerry was a shoo-in. War Hero? Gravitas? Oh, and he voted for the Iraq War (yay!), so he can't be hit with Nineeleven, amirite?

Derp.

That same conventional wisdom said Trump was FUCKED. Hell, I thought he was too, at least after the pussygrabbing tape- but remember all the jokes about "more electable than Trump"?

Whoops.

We need to put this bullshit beltway conventional wisdom crap out to pasture for good. And what we need in terms of a leader is someone who genuinely inspires and organically LEADS, and if and when that person shows up I guarantee you it won't matter what gender they are, what color they are, what their last name is or what state they're from.

And then, everyone should move on from the election and look forward. There are millions of people who didn't vote for Trump who also didn't vote for Hillary. We really ought to try and figure out ways to appeal to, or at least reason with, those people. We need to expand our leadership bench, particularly including younger voices, west coast voices, people who aren't afraid to lead, who actually understand the philosophical trends of the electorate.

I don't know about you, but I'm old. I'm okay with the fact that this isn't, really, my century. It's not Donald Trump's century, either. It's not Hillary Clinton's and its not Bernie Sanders's.

This century belongs, first and foremost, to those born in it. Maybe those born in the last decade or so of the last one.

Maybe, just maybe, time for the rest of us to accept the facts and shuffle on a bit. At least make a little more room for these whippersnappers.

Hillary isn't running again. Neither is Bernie Sanders. The primaries are over, so is the election.

But whether or not they add HRC to the list, there are going to be a shit-ton of people at that march, because despite our internal differences there are way more of us than there are of them, and that's what truly matters the most- not who organized the march.

Perfect example: With the exception of some of our leaders on the West Coast, our party has dropped the fucking ball on marijuana legalization bigtime, which is currently more popular than either party. Due to political cowardace we have failed to embrace an issue - and votes - which should be easily ours.

Millennials are an even bigger generation than boomers, and its important to remember that many who are voting age arent really old enough to remember much about what the Republicans do when they're in charge.

But they have seen "progressives" run around college campuses trying to enforce rules about what people cant say, sanction students for wearing the wrong halloween costume, ban people from speaking if they might express wrongthink opinions, etc.

They don't remeber Ed Meese waging war on free speech, but they do see "liberals" who think, for instance, that 'Blasphemous' cartoons arent protected by the 1st Amendment.

Too many people on our side have substituted lecturing and finger-wagging at people for actually communicating with them and accepting that sometimes living in a free society means people will say or do things you don't, personally, approve of.

We've been lazy and we have failed to rearticulate our values coherently for a new generation, thats part of it.

That said, its not "cool" to be a Republican. But the electorate is trending away from self-identification on everything from party to religion, and that's what we need to pay attention to. Younger voters in particular are more secular, and more committed to keeping government out of their minds, bodies, bedrooms and bloodstreams. They dont want Rick Santorum telling them they cant see full frontal nudity on HBO or watch consenting adults fuck on the internet, but guess what? They dont want Gail Dines telling them that either.

Lastly, it's always cooler to rebel against the powers that be, and we've had a Democrat in the WH for 8 years. I dont think you can underestimate the simply cyclical nature of some of this shit.

It has solved a longstanding laundry mystery.

I don't pretend to understand it.

Another thing is, there are sockpuppets all the fuck over the place. A lot of the sort of one-note axe grinding and DU-focused drama farming that happens on this board, it's designed to make you think it's coming from a whole big group of people, but it's pretty much the same crowd, they just use a whole bunch of accounts. Maybe 5-10 actual people, max.

They think they're being clever, but it's pretty fucking transparent.