Summary
Former vice presidential nominee Tim Walz criticized Trump for economic chaos while taking personal responsibility for the situation during an MSNBC interview.
“We wouldn’t be in this mess if we’d have won the election — and we didn’t,” Walz told Chris Hayes. He called Trump the “worst possible business executive” and praised the Wall Street Journal’s editorial criticizing Trump’s tariff war.
Walz emphasized Democrats must offer something better, not just criticize Trump. Recently, he acknowledged a leadership void in the Democratic Party and admitted spending too much time combatting Trump’s false claims about immigrants.
An article I read about this talked about how DNC-funded advertising discredited Bernie not by attacking his actual policies, but via a message of “his promises are good, and you may like them, but how many voters out there won’t vote for a scary socialist?”. I think that’s ultimately what did him in; it’s impossible to make a reasonable person hate the stuff Bernie was promising (unless they think it’s gonna placate the proletariat and make them lose the will to seize the means of production or some shit), but it is possible to convince them that some unspecified “many people” wouldn’t vote for him and therefore he’d lose the election.
They also banked on the sexist “Bernie Bros” and tried to paint the movement as majority male when it wasn’t. Plenty of women who liked Bernie. And a lot of that enthusiasm would have captured some youth that could have attracted young men wanting change and wanting to put their weight behind something.
Change was coming regardless. The DNC had an option for a brief moment to permit or encourage change for the better of all. Instead, they let our economic problems fester, accelerated the income disparity, and chose to back…whatever the fuck this shit show is now.
When parties get so arrogant that they think the people they represent are the enemy—they need to go. Unrestricted and fully backed? I think Bernie could have won against Trump in 2016.