Wikileaks Podesta/DNC emails megathread

[Mallow]

Tens of millions of people voted in these elections and chose Clinton. How exactly do you rig primaries?

Exactly. When Sanders talks about a rigged system, this is not what he's talking about. If it was, he wouldn't be fully supporting Clinton right now.

I'm still trying to figure out why it's a bad thing that the DNC has a preferred candidate. They're a private organization, not an official government-run group.

If we accept that it's okay that the DNC has a preferred candidate, I fail to see why they shouldn't be supporting their preferred candidate by any legal means they choose to. In this case, that meant "shilling" for Clinton over Sanders to try to get her more primary votes. Whether or not that was effective is not clear, but in the end, Clinton got more votes than Sanders (by a wide margin), so the whole complaining thing just baffles me. I voted for Sanders in the primaries, but he lost. And he lost because he legitimately got fewer votes. There's really not a whole lot more to say.

[Mallow]

These aren't even underhand tactics . just genuine political clashes to outmanoeuvre a political opponent. Anyone who has an iota of experience should know that this happens in every campaign.

Sure DNC shouldn't have favoured her but they did not rig the primaries. More voters did vote for HRC than Bernie.

In 2008, the establishment quickly fell behind Barack Obama when they saw he had the momentum. If it was a closer race, then the DNC would have had dissidents in its own ranks who wanted to go for Bernie

Again, why not? Shouldn't they have a vested interest in who gets chosen to be the Democratic presidential nominee? It's not like they were preventing people from voting for Bernie, or that Bernie was not being allowed to participate. Maybe if the RNC had been more proactive about favoring a candidate, we wouldn't be dealing with Trump right now.

[Mallow]

So they're really throwing everything in the air to see what sticks now, ya?

There's spin, and then there's this. You'd need a tornado to try to twist this story into anything actually significant.

[Mallow]

These aren't even underhand tactics . just genuine political clashes to outmanoeuvre a political opponent. Anyone who has an iota of experience should know that this happens in every campaign.

Sure DNC shouldn't have favoured her but they did not rig the primaries. More voters did vote for HRC than Bernie.

In 2008, the establishment quickly fell behind Barack Obama when they saw he had the momentum. If it was a closer race, then the DNC would have had dissidents in its own ranks who wanted to go for Bernie

Again, why not? Shouldn't they have a vested interest in who gets chosen to be the Democratic presidential nominee? It's not like they were preventing people from voting for Bernie, or that Bernie was not being allowed to participate. Maybe if the RNC had been more proactive about favoring a candidate, we wouldn't be dealing with Trump right now.

It's not so much that they favored Hillary, it's that DWS said publicly several times that not only was the DNC neutral, but that she personally was Neutral. And then all this stuff comes out. Honestly, if I was Bernie, at the time of the original leak in July  I would have withdrawn the Hilllary endorsement and said "nominate me or I'm going to be Stein's VP". (she did offer the position to him)

Obviously there was some public dishonesty, but there's nothing "rigged" here, and the DNC doesn't have an obligation to be neutral (even if that's the public image they chose to dishonestly maintain). The whole scandal seems way overblown to me. If I was Bernie, I would have done exactly as he did--accepted my loss and endorsed the candidate who had the best shot of getting my policies through.