@105, Hillary was upfront about the need for voters to mobilize and turn out to avoid a president trump. you should have listened.

@108 I'll take that as a big fat Yes. She lied about being the most electable candidate in the primaries.

@109- If only she had presented an appealling alternative! If only half the electorate felt like anyone was worth voting for. If only the Democratic Party had made a compelling case FOR something. Almost every Hillary ad I saw was "I am not Trump." Every Trump ad was "I am gonna change things." Yeah, I wish the electorate was more interested in issues and details of policy. They aren't.

@110 That may be the most absurd statement you've ever sent out into the universe in your entire life.

In massive majority of brown people picked Clinton and bothered to vote for her. According the loogit-me-I'm-so-politically-superior crew these people's opinion that she's a fine candidate has no value because she didn't pander to you just the way you'd like it. It's soft racism from people who will largely be untouched by the negative effects of Trump. But hey, someone's got to be the rebel rebelest political narcisist at the bike shop/grad student mixer/PCC/kickball game/drum school.

The notion that Hillary was a bad candidate because she couldn't sell herself well enough to you priveleged non-brown fuckwits is laughable. Try she was a very good candidate, but you were awful at being citizens, largely because hating on Hillary projected the self-image you like.

@113 I wholeheartedly agree. "[Y]ou were awful at being citizens, largely because hating on Hillary projected the self-image you like."

That was the key thing I saw, even among people I know were planning on voting for Clinton and did vote for Clinton, Clinton voters who never stopped "liking" and passing on mindless cartoons and ridiculous articles that equated Clinton with Trump or randomly maligned her character with no supporting facts. I came to the conclusion that Clinton bashing was so fashionable in their white or rural circles that they completely failed to process that the internet cuts across state lines and into all minds. they couldn't get themselves to stand up and say "This is the right choice." She lost in the end by the drip drip drip of baseless innuendo, which was passed on by thousands upon thousands of Clinton voters themselves who lack all political sense.

We know now that many of the pictures, cartoons, and stories were actually created by professionals just creating masses of juicy click bate to generate income 0.0001 cent a click for their company in the Balkans. God, what a bunch of internet lemmings we've become!

Also, I'm becoming more aware of whitesplaining, as you describe, about why Clinton was a bad candidate chosen by the DNC, as if POC are primitives who can't choose for themselves when they vote in primaries or general elections. Face it, self-absorbed white lefties let us all down, but especially brown voters. Now those same white lefties think they are the obvious people to lead the rest of us. [Not sure how to categorize Sawant anymore. She's gone from being an effective inspiration for the idea of socialist party building on the local level - to now seeming like the reincarnation of a self-aggrandizing 1970s splinter party Trotskyite man who happened to die the year of Sawants birth, mumbling "chicks up front" under his last breath]

Sheesh. This whole thing just keeps getting crazier and crazier

@107 I hear you. She made the mistake of believing the polls and going for the super victory, while neglecting to shore up her campaign in many key locations where she was more vulnerable than her campaign understood. That still doesn't let people off the hook whose actions undercut her campaign and helped Trump. the election was too close to say it wasn't important. The saddest part was ignorant disaffected lefties who talked more about emails than about Yemen or Kissenger, helping Trump and the GOP with the game deciding "character defining" non-issues, without educating anyone. The drip drip drip of innuendo.

@113: A candidate's ONLY job is to win an election. Clinton did not win the election against one of the most hated candidates of all time, so she was a bad candidate. Hell, I voted for her, and I wish she would have won. But I guess to you that doesn't count, because I dared to be born "non-brown."

I am sure she is proud that she got the most votes from non-whites, but I am afraid votes from non-whites are not worth more than votes from whites. Wrap yourself up in that cozy "But non-whites chose her!" blanket if you must, but no one cares, and it does not matter a tit. Step into the real world, where only real things matter. It is a lot colder, I know, but you can actually achieve something here.

I get the feeling people like you would rather lose so you can continueto be outraged martyrs. Blaming the voters for a candidate's loss is loser talk of the highest order, and shows that you learned nothing, and will therefore accomplish little.

I also have to remark how hilarious it is that you have twisted it so much that you believe it is "soft racism" to not vote for the insanely privileged, establishment backed, fabulously wealthy white woman. Talk about privileged "non-brown" people.

What I'm saying about non-white votes Theodore is that you're discounting the bulk of brown people as being too stupid to pick a good candidate - according to you in massive numbers they voted for Hillary in complete opposition to their own interests. So yes, you are calling most brown people stupid, or at least ignorant.

I'm saying that stance is patently incorrect - that non-white Americans did pick a very good candidate, but she was undercut by petulant, image-focused, privilege-protected white voters like you and Susan Sarandon grandstanding against her because she didn't get her tongue up there just the way you like it. Enjoy feeling like the brightest political bulb at work! So worth it ...

@113-115 My favorite part about this hypocritical assessment of white people hating on Clinton is that you're also denigrating a brown person - Ksama Sawant - for not supporting your candidate.

It's only racism if you don't agree with us.

Hey, it's a big country - plenty of room for POC like Sawant to also ignore the collective wisdom of the bulk of POC.

You do realize that Clinton won more that 1 million more votes than Trump? And yet your camp keeps lunging at the "bad candidate" theory of why she lost. Wrong. You need to look at the self-involved, grandstanding, privileged white-left poor citizen theory for a better answer. We all live here - we all know exactly who this type is. You all fucked up but given the mindset of course you'll never own that.

@117: My god, can you not understand anything without putting your "you disagree with me, therefore you must be racist" filter over it?

No one is saying that people who voted for Hillary are stupid. I voted for Hillary. But that does not change the fact that, by virtue of her losing to the most reviled candidate of all time, she was not a good candidate. You seem to think that elections exist in a vacuum where the electorate does not actually matter. Well, unless they are nonwhite, I guess.

A "good" candidate is not one who agrees with you. A "good" candidate is one who wins elections.

Ever watch sports? You know how sometimes the better team on paper loses? That does not mean the fans of that team are stupid.

It is so laughably bizarre that you seem to think that only the non-white voters are "real" voters, and the white portion of the electorate is somehow not as valid, despite being a huge part of it.

Also, what exactly are you trying to say? That elections should work based on only what non-whites want to vote for? That individuals should consult some kind of monolithic non-white oracle and vote accordingly? What a bunch of racist claptrap.

@119 Yup. Your candidate was good. That's why she won. Congratulations.

@107 I voted for Nader and for several years after I blamed Gore's loss on selected campaign mistakes, but in the end I just admitted to myself that I had just fucked up. I played are part in all the subsequent war and destruction, and missed opportunity to address climate change earlier. But you've reminded me of that and it has taken some of the fire out of my anger. We probably did a poor job of making that argument to our friends and associates. But damn it. Many of THEM were there then too. Perhaps none of us, including the candidate, believed in our hearts that Trump could win, so we played a lot of psych games.

Anyway, appreciate your linking to that Huffpost piece. I think you would have more success getting people to read it without the confusing sarcastic paragraph. Since it is hard for me also to avoid making all my comments as pure sarcasm, I've been going out of my way to say things directly - even though it makes counter-argument easier.

It is somewhat interesting that just about every one of the 'told you so, Clinton was the worst candidate ever' crowd seems to be a white dude bro. White dude bros, this does not make you the least bit uneasy?

123: You have a serious problem with race since you seem to believe that the validity of an argument is somehow tied to the race of the people making it. This is probably why there are so many surprised and shocked liberals in the wake of the election. Your dehumanization skills rivals the far right.

123: Also, every white "dude bro" (whatever that fucking means, I guess white male) I know voted for Clinton so maybe you stop trying to subtly suggest that they're all in on it.

#119: Yes, she won the popular vote. But the election isn't for the popular vote; it's to win the states that will bring you electoral votes. She lost the election because she failed to rally the states that could have given her the electoral votes she needed. You win an election based on the metrics of the electoral college. End of story. She wasn't a terrible candidate, but she wasn't great. Not for the times.

There will never be a left coalition again because half the left doesn't trust the other half. You hate each other more than you hate the right. One half racializes everything and dismisses class or the reality of electoral politics, while the other half seems to believe race or sex doesn't exist as a real category. In this state, the left and liberals are basically worthless as an opposition to Trump. It's amazing how when the center-left loses and election to the far right, the first reaction of the left is to hound other people on the left.

@123 Gay Latino Male here.

But, feel free to think I'm a white dude bro. It will make you feel better. Plus, you'll continue to be wrong.

@124 Well to be clear I'm also suggesting there's an element of misogyny operating here.

The real problem is that when people live in their hermetically sealed bubbles they are prone to wild, often laughable, assumptions about what viewpoints are outside of them (and also prone to venturing ever farther into the fringy wilderness). I'm inclined to take what Trump supporters say literally. Literally they are primarily motivated by an animus towards political correctness. They are almost so universally ignorant of what the real issues of the day are that they think political correctness and immigration are it.

Given this pretty obvious fact, the fringe argument that what we really need is (surprisingly enough) someone from the far left who 'listens to the concerns' of these hypothetically left behind working class whites, is fairly ludicrous. Who is out there on the far left who would not be seen as even more politically correct than establishment liberals by the deplorables? Do we have any white supremacist leftists?

The Dems do need leaders with charisma and some degree of gravitas, that's for sure. What they don't need are ideologues that are going to inflexibly push fringe policies that are in fact extremely unpopular everywhere outside of deep blue enclaves.

Check out right wing Democrats claiming that those who disagree with business as usual are far left.

Really stranger? I mean really?? Fucking Newsweek?! Kurt eichenwald? What's next, Charles krauthammer? Jesus!

@129 yeah... economic populism and justice is not fringe left. But I see how you could make that mistake if you think deregulated international corporate finance, our drone wars, and current surveillance state represents a liberal agenda

To Trump supporters, you will not understand the pain the rest of the country suffers. To you it is thin-skinned weakness and a vast conspiracy against your interests veiled by inarticulate accusations of racism and xenophobia and all sorts of nasty terms that I am sure you don't believe is true about yourself because by some force I cannot fathom, you can convince yourself that you mean it when you say that "illegals aren't a race so I can't be racist"" or "Islam isn't a race so I can't be racist."

Maybe that's not you and I'm getting you pegged all wrong, maybe you agree that Trump is a very bad person socially but boy, you live in small town America and you are just struggling so hard economically and what was Hillary going to do, after all?

I get it (as much as a dirty city liberal can, I'm trying here), Trump voters, I do. You were angry about the accusations from mean screechy college students, and how Hillary was doing something with her emails that seemed fishy and it was on Wikileaks so it had to be bad. Whatever your reasons, you had them, and because of the electoral college, you won, and congratulations are in order.

However, the rest of the country will suffer. In fact, you, too, will suffer under Trump unless you are masochistic or that certain smart breed of sociopath. Liberals are over-empathetic, I know, but conservatives, especially know, respond as if empathy itself were weakness, a disease to be excised from the body politic, so maybe that's what you're going for. I ask only that you reflect on what you--and you personally--did in the years and months leading up to these events, as your hispanic neighbors are taken back to Mexico (healthy if they're lucky) and your Muslim neighbors are registered, perhaps even badged, or kept in their own neighborhoods--and how generous of us, after all, if we were to set up camps for refugees.

It may dawn on you one day that evil doesn't start by goosestepping right in and declaring itself, but it comes on bit by bit, piece by piece, until you wake up one day and there it is, goosestepping and hailing just as sure and as clear as if it had started that way, but it didn't, and now it's around.

The ball is in your court.

If only Jill Stein had NOT been running for president, but for the sake of preventing a nuclear war with Russia, I would've been forced to vote for Donald Trump ----

Can anyone explain how is it possible to call Hillary Clinton the "lesser" evil when the entire oil-investing billionaire class, including Bush Sr, publicly prefer Hillary Clinton because they knew she'd do a better job serving THEIR INTERESTS than Trump would?! (sources globalresearch.ca and blackagendareport.com ) What could be a more ultimate stamp of approval from the very heart of evil itself, than endorsements from the entire billionaire class and George Bush Sr himself?!!! ...Since 2000, for 16 years now, I have been listening to abusive media comments about how I caused Bush to win because I voted for Nader (twice!), only to watch these same cunts turn around and align themselves with George Bush Sr and his values in supporting Hillary and Obama??!! (example- Name ONE Bush policy that Obama has not expanded!!! Name ONE, you fucking Soros-funded-Stranger CUNTS!!! Wasn't the whole purpose of "defeating the republicans" to put a stop to their ugly policies? Wasn't it?!! And Obama's expanded them ALL and no one says a word of protest? No one?!)

For too many years now, these hypocrite-cunts at the Seattle Stranger, along with their endless supply of pathetic sycophantic wanna-be-cool readers, have been hard at work promoting hatred of anyone who dares to dissent against their newly republicans-on-steroids party values that both Obama and the Clintons clearly represent. And now they have the nerve to make a huge show of themselves "fighting hate" ??? Their "anti-racism" farce is especially nauseating after their inexcusable silence when their preferred racist candidate, Hillary Clinton (who has a far more heinous, well-documented history of racism, and homophobia, as well as sexism against women -and has anyone seen Abby Martin's recent 23 min TeleSur doc on Podesta?!) "won" by election fraud against Sanders!!!. Oh, but now, all of a sudden, the popular vote means something to these people?

Which part of "no" did you Hillary supporters not understand the first time around, when she was already the least popular candidate in American history at the DNC primary?!!! And you thought you could still force her on us again?!! Really??! YOU DROVE US TO TRUMP!! YOU FORCED US INTO VOTING FOR TRUMP OUT OF PURE SELF-DEFENSE BECAUSE HE WAS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE WE HAD AGAINST HILLARY!

The only people who "caused Trump to win" were Hillary's hypocrites! Every last one of you. So you can take your little hate/love-fest and shove it right back up your own little faggot-asses where it belongs YOU FUCKING WORTHLESS HYPOCRITE CUNTS!!!

It was bad enough in 1988 dealing with the hypocrisy of people gushing on and on about what a great "Christian" George Bush Sr was, but you Hillary/Obama supporters surpass them all and are more sick in the head than I could've ever imagined possible. It is so much more toxic to be around cutesy Hillary supporters than Bush supporters because they keep assuming I'm "with" them when I am opposed to everything they represent, not least their hypocrisy.

@135 I like how you say I Get It and then the rest of the paragraph proves that you don't.

Anybody who thinks putting the Clintons back in the White House was anything less than a catastrophic idea is either (a) a neoliberal neocon or (b) somebody who gets spoon fed their world view by the corporate mass media. She was a criminally-corrupt politician who put national security at risk to conceal the pay-to-play operation she was running out of the Secretary of State's office. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a well-established fact.
If you are a neoliberal neocon, it doesn't matter, because morals and the law don't matter. All that matters is furthering the agenda of the oligarchs and America's drive for global hegemonic power.
If you let the corporate mass media tell you what you think, then it isn't real. All that is real is what the mass media tells you is real.
But those of us who can think for ourselves, and who believe in democracy and the idea that we are a nation of laws, not of men (or women) know that keeping Clinton out of the White House was imperative. In addition to being a criminal, she wanted to impose the TPP on us, followed by the TTIP and the TISA, and she wanted to provoke a military showdown with the Russians in Syria.
Now we'll deal with Trump. And with the Clintons out of the way, we can run a progressive Democrat against Trump in four years. Or if the Democratic Party is corrupt and amoral enough to nominate another Clinton Democrat, maybe it'll be Trump for 8 years.