j.r. leonard

If you were ambivalently supporting a racist because you were misguided or temporarily uninformed, would you not want to be reached and persuaded? Would’nt you want the other candidate to give a shit about you and say we need to reach out to you and NOT give up?

Having it both ways was the whole point of my original comment. Trump is president because he manages to be explicitly white supremacist but make his followers believe that they are anything but. We’re Americans. We like to live in denial.

HRC and the Democrats have been pitching a different form of denial and it just hasn’t been as persuasive to a whole bunch of Americans. And believe me, I wish that this wasn’t the case

Denial of what, exactly? Do you just mean a general skepticism that Trump bootlickers won’t vote for us? Because to me that seems perfectly rational.

No. That’s not what I meant. My one big problem with HRC’s campaign is that she tried to run a sort of populist-lite campaign, which was completely ineffective against Trump.

From my perspective she isn’t a populist & didn’t run a campaign like that. I thought it looked like a traditional “Al gore”style campaign emphasizing aisle-crossing and bipartisanship & inclusiveness of a diverse array of Americans. It was ultra-carful, as in: try not to lose.

I watched her in the first debate, stand next to Trump and attempt some version of ‘I’m against bad trade deals, too.’ Trump had already staked out the nationalist/populist lane. Why try to beer towards it. It made no political sense

I think opposition to international trade deals is more nationalist than populist. I wish she had not changed her position on TPP. I think she was drawn there by Sanders during the primaries.