I totally agree. It’s a delusion to think Bernie would have won the general. Telling ourselves lies is not a way to fix this situation.

That’s true.

Edit: retracted.

I don’t think we have to resort to believing she cheated. The thing is, it should have been a wake-up call that a dyspeptic septuagenarian socialist was able to do as well as he did when up against the party’s elite consensus figure.

Uh, that’s the point. That does not look like the handwriting of a typical high school student.

Okay. Turns out, the State Department audit found that it broke their internal rules. Which is what I said. That’s what I had thought the situation was.

Of course I voted for Hillary. I voted for her in the primary, I voted for her in the general, I donated a bunch of my money to her campaign.

He’s already showing the kind of man and leader he is by not speaking out against the violence and thuggery being perpetrated in his name.

I agree, but at the same time I’m worried that the Dems will slide back into the kind of ineffective complacency that I remember from the mid-2000s.

I’m so sorry you have to go through this.

I voted for her in the primary and the general and donated a bunch of money, so trying to convince me that she’s the right choice is pointless. I’m a safe Dem vote no matter what, but we are hurting ourselves by focusing on candidates that don’t have broader appeal.

I like Bernie’s positions on the issues better than Hillary’s, but I think he was far less effective than he could have been because of his distaste for doing the regular politician stuff. We need a candidate who can do both — someone who can articulate good policy positions (rather than having to be pushed into them…

Yeah. We had every advantage this cycle and we still fucked it up. Telling ourselves comforting lies about how we won a moral victory or something just makes it likely we’ll do this again.

That’s right.

You’re talking about voting for the candidate who ran against those things in 2008, though.

I think it’s necessary, but not sufficient. Bernie did poorly with black voters, so it’s important that we don’t just reach the conclusion that we should have gone with him. We need candidates who are able to successfully reach both segments of the Democratic electorate.

I hope that’s a comfort to you. Dark days are ahead.

Okay. We don’t have the luxury of waiting until the media are perfectly even-handed in order to win elections, though.

For the sake of the country, though, we can’t afford to have a coalition that can only win when things are in the toilet.

All of those things were very good reasons not to tie our party’s fate to someone so unpopular and with such a record of political incompetence.