"Greenwald: With Trump Looming, Should Dems Take a Huge Electability Gamble by Nominating Clinton?"

[berniepdx420]

By geebeebee

Glenn Greenwald weighs in on the risk of running an unpopular candidate who polls poorly against Republicans, when there is an extremely popular candidate who polls phenomenally against Republicans. In other words, what many of the Bernie crew at DK have been screaming for weeks.

On positive/negative opinions of the candidates:

A Gallup poll released this week reported that “29% of Americans offer a positive observation about Clinton while 51% express something negative.” As Gallup rather starkly put it: “Unfortunately for Clinton, the negative associations currently outnumber the positive ones by a sizable margin, and even among Democrats, the negatives are fairly high.” Sanders is, of course, a more unknown quantity, but “the public’s comments about Sanders can be summarized as 26% positive and 20% negative, with the rest categorized as neutral, other or no opinion.”

...snip

Greenwald then speaks of the rising anti-establishment attitudes that have given rise to Donald Trump, and how the Democrats should best combat that.

In this type of climate, why would anyone assume that a candidate who is the very embodiment of Globalist Establishment Power (see her new, shiny endorsement from Tony Blair), who is virtually drowning both personally and politically in Wall Street cash, has “electability” in her favor? Maybe one can find reasons to support a candidate like that. But in this environment, “electability” is most certainly not one of them. Has anyone made a convincing case why someone with those attributes would be a strong candidate in 2016?

Despite this mountain of data, the pundit consensus – which has been wrong about essentially everything – is that Hillary Clinton is electable and Bernie Sanders is not. There’s virtually no data to support this assertion. All of the relevant data compels the opposite conclusion. Rather than data, the assertion relies on highly speculative, evidence-free claims: Sanders will also become unpopular once he’s the target of GOP attacks; nobody who self-identifies as a “socialist” can win a national election; he’s too old or too ethnic to win, etc. The very same supporters of Hillary Clinton were saying very similar things just eight years ago about an unknown African-American first-term Senator with the name Barack Hussein Obama.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/2/24/1490788/-Greenwald-With-Trump-Looming-Should-Dems-Take-a-Huge-Electability-Gamble-by-Nominating-Clinton

[peacebird]

1. Nominate Hillary and lose the WhiteHouse and down ticket races

[Downwinder]

2. The Republicans got away with it nominating Nixon.

[phleshdef]

3. Ugh. Bernie supporter here STILL wishing Greenwald would just go away.

[berniepdx420]

4. why ?

[phleshdef]

5. Because he is an insufferable condescending jerk

It's not about the things he is right or wrong about, it's just the fact that I personally cannot stand him. I don't like the way that he talks to people. I don't like his demeanor. He is just extremely unlikable to me.