@EricBoehlert I disagree. He began his campaign with some critical errors at the outset. First, the people he hired were the most disliked & distrusted from 2016, people who voted for Jill Stein and made a production of it with selfies and op-eds.
@EricBoehlert Hiring Nina Turner whose convention behavior was contemptible, who went full Jill Stein was a big fuck you to the party. Adding Briahna Joy, David Sirota (dozens of anti-Clinton Fdn articles, not 1 tweet about Trump Fdn) whose been ratfucking elections since his first campaign.
@EricBoehlert So, his staff announced that he was not seeking to expand his base within the Democratic Party at all because his entire staff was people who held the Party in contempt, but he wanted and needed our votes.
@EricBoehlert His second big error was to embrace the rigging lie and run with it rather than honestly address his failings in 2016. I thought he was just being spiteful, but perhaps he really believed it because he did nothing to do better other than lie about his record to Latinos
@EricBoehlert But remember, claims to the contrary, his big advance among Latinos was really youth-based. He was winning youth who happened to be Latino rather than Latinos who happened to by youth. His failure at building a real racial coalition was obscured by his success at attracting youth
@EricBoehlert So his campaign staff and surrogates told him "look a multi-racial" movement but it was always and only a youth movement. That is not enough to win.
@EricBoehlert Because he never assessed his failure, he did not do the real work of reaching out to communities of color. Worse, instead of doing outreach in person, he did it through surrogates like Turner, Cornel West, etc. These are people who lost their credibility among many Black voters
@EricBoehlert with their hostility to Hillary (Turner) or Obama (West). Surrogates cannot do your outreach to communities of color for you. You have to do that yourself, but he didn't do it.
@EricBoehlert His fourth error was never reassessing his ideology to see if it really makes sense in America. Marxist rejection of racism as a foundational vector of oppression is rooted in its European origins and even then, it is wrong. It certainly is a false understanding of the US
@EricBoehlert Racism is the fulcrum on which inequality is leveraged. It is racism that makes economic justice wins impermanent and fragile. The American South loved the New Deal and the safety net until it was available to Black people and in a generation turned on a dime against government
@EricBoehlert intervention for economic justice, choosing their own poverty over equality. The New Deal was only passed by excluding Black people from its benefits. When Black people were included, the safety net was eroded. White people like the ACA, but hate ObamaCare.
@EricBoehlert So long as racism is the most powerful animating force in American politics, economic justice wins are ephemeral. The idea that economic justice wins will decrease racism is historically disproven and disrespectful of the lived experiences of Black people & their history
@EricBoehlert This fundamental misunderstanding of our society and history made him incapable of connecting to Black voters. His whole argument sounded misguided, utopian, and ignorant of their lives.
@EricBoehlert The fifth is running at all. He should have stepped back and got out of Warren's way. That would advance his policy agenda if not his democratic socialist revolution. He does not have the personality to be president. He cannot project optimism. He runs by dividing, not uniting.
@EricBoehlert There are other mistakes, never dealing with trolls honestly, amplifying Joe Rogan, disparaging Obama (so in Mississippi, whose votes did he want?), always always always centering whiteness, campaigning for anti-choice Democrats, but the first five are critical
@EricBoehlert And of course, his strategy of replicating Trump by winning with a plurality among a divided field was predicated on Democratic candidates being unwilling to put their country and party ahead of their ego & staying in too long to unite a plurality against Trump.
@EricBoehlert He made the mistake of projecting his egoism onto them. They are better patriots than he or the GOP 16 candidates and they stepped back for the good of the country. Portraying their patriotism as rigging showed his gracelessness & inability to understand greatness of spirit.
