Democrats need to let go of the revisionist “she did very well compared to Obama” bullshit.

It was her job to win the election, a job she fought bitterly to have, and she didn’t. She failed. She failed the party, and she failed America.

And you need to let go of the “nobody saw this coming” bullshit. Plenty of people saw it coming, but they were dismissed and ignored.

She lost because she was an establishment candidate, doing typical establishment things (very successfully) at a period of time of strong anti establishment

The modern Democratic party had never won an election with an establishment candidate. Carter did not have the support of the party, Bill Clinton invented his own “new Democrats” because all of the establishment Dems thought HW was unbeatable, and Obama had to squeeze out Hillary, Biden, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd as the disruptor. Meanwhile, Mondale, Gore, Kerry, Dukakis, rank and file candidates all, and all of them losers.

There is no such thing as a “typical politician” or a “typical race” at the presidential level. There is no one winning strategy that works in all elections, no national map that tracks across generations, no conventional wisdom that holds up to scrutiny.

Clinton was responsible for developing a strategy to beat her opponent. She wasn’t running against Obama. She didn’t need to beat Obama’s turnout, she needed to beat Trump’s turnout.

She wasn’t a bad a candidate, just the same old at the wrong time.

She was, objectively, a bad candidate. Trump was beatable, and she had a massive advantage in fundraising and experience and campaigning. She was smarter and more capable than her opponent, and had the money and infrastructure to monitor his moves and outmaneuver him at every turn.

Instead, she shat the bed. It wasn’t even close. There were five states where she thought she was winning and was exposed to be completely out of touch. That’s not someone else’s fault. There wasn’t some magical intervention or deus ex machina at the last minute. Hillary simply failed to convince enough voters to show up for her.

Having lived through it, watching it happen in real time, that was extremely frustrating. Having someone tell me after the fact that “well, actually she had statistically more of the base than previous elections” is maddening.

But the real kick in the balls is watching Biden make the same mistakes, try the same strategies that failed before, recognizing that Biden is our best hope to avoid catastrophe, and realizing that Trump is on track to move back into the White House.