There's a curious desire out there to mythologize the '08 primary. Maybe it was "nastier," maybe it wasn't, but it's not obvious either way.
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The candidates themselves were prob. nastier -- HRC tarred Obama as in hock to a Chicago slumlord and beholden to anti-American preachers.
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But is candidate rhetoric the only relevant metric? There are different dimensions of nastiness.
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The DNC is now openly warring with one of the candidates and accusing him of "condoning violence." Nothing like that happened in 2008.
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Operatives associated with that race have an interest in mythologizing it, so they can maintain this air of battle-hardened sagacity
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Irony: these Dem operatives tell war stories about how nasty that race was, yet gloss over all of HRC's anti-Obama slurs as irrelevant.
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The two biggest proponents of the Bill Ayers conspiracy in Spring 2008 were Sean Hannity and Hillary. Yet she now pays no price for this.
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Social media amplifies already-existing sentiment, but it also generates new sentiment. Somebody called me a friggin' "Bernie Bro" last week
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That happened in real life, at a Clinton event. Social media isn't just one exogenous variable, it suffuses the whole discourse.
End of conversation
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