Bernie Sanders: Trump Infrastructure plan a "scam that gives massive tax breaks to large companies"

[Tom Rinaldo]

45. You are not the only one who cares about progressive policy.

If you need scapegoats pin it on Comey, Hillary would have won without that letter to Congress. Or how about Anthony Weiner? If he wasn't dicking around there would have been no renewed investigation weeks out from the election. But since you went there, allow me to join in...

First off Hillary was not a hell of a lot sooner in conceding in 2008 than Bernie was in 2016. And her chances of winning had already been dead for weeks prior to her doing so. But at root you are blaming the messenger, and not putting any responsibility on Hillary for the loss of the White House and all that will follow. In reality any serious blows Bernie landed on Hillary happened prior to the New York primary - and he was still very much in the race at that point although she was a strong favorite. Hillary landed some pretty hard blows on Obama too during her losing effort in 2008 - but Bernie did not run a viscous campaign against Hillary. Remember "I'm tired of hearing about your god damned emails"? It seems your basic premise is that everyone should have simply gotten out of Hillary's way and just let her have the nomination on a silver platter.

You remain willfully blind to facts that were blindingly clear a year ago. Hillary was a deeply unpopular candidate with the electorate then too, before she felt seriously threatened by Bernie. There was little public enthusiasm for her outside of selected activist ranks. She could not draw major crowds. She was distrusted by the public all along, more so than Donald Trump ever was. Independents never warmed to her, and they are the biggest voting block in America. And that killed her this year Sanders did extremely well with Independents throughout the campaign, Sanders became the most trusted national politician in America. Sanders was consistently matching up better against Trump than did Hillary, since before the NH primary.

And about those god damn emails. Ultimately Hillary brought that on herself, she can't shift the blame to anyone else regarding that. And they killed her - that's what most of the "Lock Her Up " chants were about at Trump rallies. You know how Trump got enough strategic votes to win the electoral college (or at least close enough that a hack could put him over)? Republicans who hated Hillary and/or distrusted her turned out to vote against her. She was the motivation that allowed so many Republicans to come home to Trump. That's on top of the fact that she never did find a way to appeal to rust belt voters, or even make much of an effort to do so. For Christ's sake if Bernie did nothing else for Hillary than deliver a stiff wake up call about where and why her candidacy was inadequate. - that should have been favor enough. But no, Hillary counted on the same old Obama coalition turning out for her - which had already peaked in 2008 and receded some by 2012. Even though she knew from day one that she had serious popularity problems with youth - a key pillar of that coalition.

Hillary never even visited Wisconsin, and she scrambled to add events in Michigan and Pennsylvania at the last minute. She never honed a strong populist message on economics - she included a few lines about it in her stump speech and almost all her ads were targeted at Trump's character with a few talking about her life long commitment to kids. Hillary was focused on winning the votes of white moderate Republican women in the suburbs instead of the displaced working class. That didn't work out as well as she planned on.

We ran a generally unpopular candidate for president who epitomized the status quo in a strong change election ear and you are looking for scapegoats to blame her loss on? OK, start with Hillary. She made two fatal errors in judgement that doomed her. One involved using her personal emails to run State business. But that alone was survivable, had she gone transparent on it early - but she didn't. She mastered the art of parsing words as well as her husband did when the Monica scandal first flared for him. And she chose not to reveal that not only did she use her own email account for state business, but she maintained her on private server also. Hillary kept that secret until it got uncovered ad blew up in her face during the last of countless Republican fishing expeditions against her. If there was one person on the planet who could have predicted how relentless Republicans would be going against her, it was Hillary Clinton. And she left that for them to find rather than getting out in front of it herself when trouble first started brewing. And that opened up the door for the FBI to start to investigate her in the middle of her presidential election campaign.

If you don't think it was an insane liability to Hillary to be out there running for President while there was an open FBI investigation to determine whether there was a basis for prosecuting her, I don't know what world you live in. I'll be blunt. Hillary could have taken her chances with revealing the existence of her private server when her email issue first emerged, but she chose to roll the dice instead. She gambled that it would never be revealed and she almost won that gamble. It was only the last in a long series of Republican Congressional inquiries that finally turned it up. I can understand her deciding to play those odds, but she lost. Once the FBI got involved she was putting the whole nation at risk of exactly what will now happen, by refusing to bow out of the race. She could have done so in time for other Democrats besides Bernie and Martin to run - but she chose to push her way through it instead. We all know the results. The truth is she was reckless with her emails, and by hiding her personal server she managed to push off an FBI investigation of her to the worst time frame possible.

The other fatal judgement flaw? Hillary became Secretary of State when the Great Recession hit. In that post she could not dabble much in domestic issues, but she had a front row seat to how thoroughly the middle class got wasted by it. Anger over it kept festering and boiling. All of the recovery that followed went to the top tenth of one percent of Americans. So what did Hillary do when she left the SOS position and began planning a presidential run. She hit up all of her friends and connections on Wall Street for every penny she could pull in. All quite legal I'm sure. No proof of any quid pro pros quos, but the optics were astonishingly bad. She and Bill entered the top one tenth of one percent exactly while the recovery was funneling truck loads of money to that tiny sub set of Americans - and no one else. It's not like they needed all that money they raised from Wall Street concerns, they were already filthy rich by average American standards. That was her choice. It made sense to her at the time. I think it showed both how terribly out of touch she was to think that was a good warm up to running president in 2016, and it showed horrible judgement for a Democratic politician with national ambitions to do so. Bernie didn't make her do it. She could have plotted a very different course and be President Elect today.