and a bit hawkish on foreign policy, even during the campaign. He did say so. I was in love, but not so much in love that I didn't read his policy positions. The reason I supported him so enthusiastically and so early on was his promise to make us the UNITED States of America. I knew that being united meant compromise. And I was ok with that. Unfortunately, Mitch McConnell and company had other plans. They would rather wreck our democratic institutions than compromise. That was where I was blinded by love. I thought everyone would succumb to his charisma and that they wanted the country to be united and strong too. Wrong. So deeply, painfully wrong about that one....
But I felt like I got pretty much what I bargained for with Obama. He was inexperienced at the beginning, just like Clinton supporters warned us about. But he had the temperament and intellect to grow into the job. Which he did. And he got the ACA passed. People were mad that it wasn't single-payer, but he did it without a single Republican vote. Single-payer didn't have the votes, was never going to have the votes. It was ACA or what we had before, which was HORRIBLE. Passing ACA, as imperfect as it is, was a huge accomplishment. A legislative accomplishment that Trump will never be able to mimic.
Sanders main flaw as a politician is his inability to enlarge his base of support. People who like his message really like his message. But part of his message was he never changes his message which means that he could not enlarge his message for those who do not respond to his original message. As an activist, I disliked him BECAUSE he never varied his message. It was clear that he had different priorities than I did and was not persuadable to any other POV. He is not interested in building consensus, which limits him immensely as a politician.
Don't get me wrong, I would have supported him ENTHUSIASTICALLY if he won. But I doubt he would have gotten any of his agenda done. In fairness, not sure that anyone could get anything done in the current climate. But his policy positions just don't work in any realistic scenario.
As far as Hillary Clinton, I have been following her career since I was young so I already knew that much of the negative press was manufactured. I have decades of practice with rolling my eyes at fake news about Hillary Clinton. I just tune the BS about her out automatically now. Yeah, she is not perfect. But she is not the conniving beotch that people make her out to be either.
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