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Comment by RobotToaster | Hacker News Reader

The last person to stand for president who managed to get political momentum and wanted real change in the system was Eugene Debs, and they arrested him.

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Two others:

Bernie Sanders (prevented from winning the primary via unelected superdelegates)

Ross Perot (suddenly withdrew under murky circumstances and later claimed his family was threatened)

Both wanted significant change, although they were reformists rather than revolutionaries.

Am I missing something here? Perot was on the ballot in 1992, and he won a bunch of votes. IIRC he was the most successful independent candidate in modern times, by vote count.

Sanders ran an insurgent campaign while denigrating the party, and didn't win more votes. I seriously don't understand the argument that the person with fewer votes should win the nomination, although I am receptive to hearing a coherent articulation thereof. (Superdelegates did not enter the picture until tens of millions of votes were cast, with Sanders trailing by millions of votes.)

Perot dropped out, then reentered the race at the last minute. This cost him a lot of votes and the media framed him as unstable. He had many more votes before withdrawing.

Sanders was on track to win in 2015 but the media counted all superdelegates for Clinton throughout the campaign, costing him votes in later states where voters didn’t show up, assuming he lost. I guess this isn’t entirely the party’s fault and they did reform the system somewhat afterwards.

> This cost him a lot of votes and the media framed him as unstable

This was...an eminently reasonable response to Perot's own actions?

> Sanders was on track to win in 2015

Yes, like Clinton was "on track" to win in 2007. "On track to win" is necessarily filtered through a set of lenses that don't mean anything compared to actual votes. He didn't earn the votes, so he lost. There's nothing unfair about that.

there was a ton of ratfuckery. clinton's team got debate questions ahead of time from a friendly moderator. debbie wasserman schultz resigned as dnc chair because it was shown that the dnc tried to undermine the sanders campaign in favor of clinton. the clinton campaign was given operational and fiancial control of the dnc prior to the end of the primaries.

The debate thing was clownish, for sure.

My recollection of the DNC linkage was that the Clinton campaign agreed to help the DNC in a set of ways (likely raising money for the DNC and helping Democratic candidates) in exchange for some affordances and Sanders refused to do likewise (which, to his credit is on brand). Is that not accurate? I admit it's been 10 years and there have been a lot of claims made as to why Sanders should have been given the nomination in spite of not winning more votes.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16599036/d...

Brazile gives strong evidence here that the process was rigged against Sanders, inside the DNC. No, votes themselves there not altered, but when the arbiter of the process itself is not neutral, that is completely damning, and honestly, i think that behavior has just continued to this day such that we are seeing fed up Dems on the left revolting against the legacy party, causng it to look like it is about to fracture, and become the mirror image of MAGA.

It portends badly for our country.

Perot’s actions were atypical for him, and should be viewed in light of both his statements about personal threats, which he viewed as credible, AND George H. W. Bush’s deep intelligence connections (including his role as DCI and his connection to illegal and brutal Latin American operations). You also have to remember that Perot was siphoning more votes from Bush than from Clinton. Dirty tricks and general ratfuckery were extremely common in this era.

I think the sibling comment addresses Sanders very well.

Just to make sure I'm reading this correctly, are you saying that Perot thought there was a credible threat that a sitting vice president was planning to have him assassinated?

He apparently said there was a plot to release compromising (altered) photos of his daughter, just before her wedding, which is very specific. Small potatoes for Bush, who oversaw projects that created death squads.

We also can't definitively state that the reason we "went off track" and lost was the superdelegate counting. It's certainly a plausible factor, but there are so many factors that go into trying to predict how situations like this will end up playing out that I think it makes sense to start with the baseline assumption that there isn't one direct obvious cause and then try to disprove that if you suspect it's wrong.

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