Never mind the Berniebro crap. What about Biden?
Why didn't Joe Biden run in 2016? He was the Vice President, the guy who would ALWAYS be in the mix to replace a sitting President. (And, yes, if Cheney didn't have one foot in the grave before his heart transplant, he'd have been a candidate in 2008.) Did Joe Biden take a look at who had "purchased" the Democratic Party and read the tea leaves?
Think of other Democrats that would have been viable candidates in 2016 besides Hillary Clinton. Besides Biden, there was Deval Patrick, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Claire McCaskill, Amy Klobuchar, Andrew Cuomo, Steve Beshear, Joe Manchin; all of these folks were capable of entering the Presidential race and mounting viable campaigns had a void arisen. That's what tends to happen when there is an open Presidential race. That didn't happen; the only real opposition to Hillary was from someone who wasn't even a Democrat (Sanders).
Why the cleared decks? It's simple; the folks that could have offered a challenge to "the owners" (most notably Biden) were vested in the Democratic Party and kept their mouths shut about "the arrangement". In doing so, they arranged the kind of coronation of a nominee that hadn't happened since Richard Nixon in 1960. The Clintons BOUGHT the nomination; that's the reality of this. Donna Brazile, who is a sleazeball opportunist, nevertheless did a public service by bringing this out into the open.
You're right that there were "gatekeepers" who kept challengers to Clinton out of the race, but if you think that was primarily the DNC's doing, then I think you're blowing way out of proportion the amount of power DWS and the DNC had.
The gatekeepers were the same gatekeepers who operate in every presidential primary race: big money donors, party elites, and political operatives, the vast majority of whom are operating as independent agents and aren't part of the party's national committee.
These are the folks who, on the Republican side, told Mitt Romney not to run again in 2016 because he wasn't going to be getting enough of their support for him to mount a credible campaign. On the Democratic side, they sidelined Cuomo, Gillibrand, Klobuchar, and other "establishment" challengers to Clinton who might have run if she wasn't in the race, because they made it clear that there wasn't room for a non-Clinton establishment candidate in the race. But this wasn't because of some DWS-run conspiracy. It was individual big $ donors buying into a groupthink that Clinton was the inevitable candidate, so it was in their interest to join her and be on the winning side. As long as everyone was buying that groupthink, there wasn't any room for a challenger.
