Ken Burch
2 min readNov 19, 2021

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Yes, there are a lot of people who believe things like that- people who would never have voted for Hillary or ANY Democrat.

But she also cost herself a lot of votes- votes that could have elected her had she not spent decades going out of her way to alienate them- through her repeated practice, whenever accused of being "too left wing"- I still have no idea why anybody thought that of someone who could ever lower herself to praising Henry Kissinger, the war criminal she protested against when she still was a progressive- not by defending progressive ideas, not by making an actual case for progressive change or for the validity of being activists for a different, better vision of life, but by lashing out at progressives from the right and essentially endorsing the idea that being to the left of Nixon and Reagan was an inherent disgrace.

She should have remembered that, if she ever did get nominated, she would need the support of people like that, and that nobody has the right to ask support of people they have subjected to unjust attack and dismissal for decades.

Yes, she had horribly vicious enemies, but there's no reason to continue to deny the fact that her post-convention campaign was an unmitigated disaster and that it's largely her fault- I say this as a Sanders supporter who campaigned hard for Hillary after she was nominated, and who endorsed her a week before the convention, which was as early as I could endorse her and still remain a progressive, and who spent much of that time pleading with young progressives to come out and vote for her on antifascist grounds- that too many of those young people, and too many Black voters in the firewall states stayed away from the polls.

That's what had to happen when the message was reduced to nothing but "Stop Trump!". Victory can't be had fighting for nothing but defeat of the monster.

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Ken Burch
Ken Burch

Written by Ken Burch

Retired Alaska ferryboat steward, grandparent, sometime poet. Radical yet independent of dogma. Likes nice days, playing banjo and not as yet dying of Covid.

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