In 2008, people from all over the political spectrum were enthusiastic about electing a new voice. We will probably never know why Obama listened to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod instead of Howard Dean.
Like most people, I completely missed how Bernie had talked about primarying Obama in 2012. Making it worse, whoever talked him out of it in 2012 forgot that the same rules applied in 2016. Most of us — including some very knowledgeable people on this board back then — had no idea that we'd be setting ourselves up for many years in the wilderness if Bernie "ran" against Hillary. And I'm not going to lie — I bought what Bernie was selling back in 2016 and only realized just how stupid I had been a few weeks before I voted for Hillary. Far too few of us knew what a toxic sludgefest social media was turning into (and we only learned later about Cambridge Analytica or how Bernie had hired Paul Manafort cohort Tad Devine to run his campaign).
How many of us posting here remember how the Bernie bros were caustic, toxic, and misogynistic (and probably were part of the reason that DU went dark on Election Day 2016)? And that makes it all the more frustrating to see that his Rage Against the Oligarchs Tour is still splitting Team Blue instead of building it up. (He and AOC seem more than happy to collect the money through ActBlue, but his group does not appear to be sharing information with Dems.)
I wholeheartedly agree that the Harris/Walz campaign understood the assignment — at least initially. Walz was as close as you were going to get to Howard Dean since he's both a Paul Wellstone Democrat AND a guy who understands why you need to be able to have good, honest conversations with people down at the local hardware store. As time went on, you could tell that Walz was being coached to be what he wasn't, which hurt the campaign.
(Do I believe that Harris | Walz lost? Hell no. But that's a different post.)
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