I'm going to answer both your point and Jill's because they are valid. First of all, I agree that both Gore and Hilary were essentially coronated by the Democrats in 2000 and 2016 respectively before the primary voting even started, something I vehmently opposed at the time and still do today. Gore had only one real challenger Bill bradley and bRadley was essentially gone by New Hampshire. I don't recall how deep the bench for Democrats were in the 1990s, but they should have been able to come up with at least one or two viable alternatives.

Second while I believe that a fair amount of the Sanders vote in 2016 was anti Hilary more than pro-Bernie, I also had litle use for Hilary at any point in 2016. During much of 2015 I hoped that Biden would get in the raise and I my dream candidate would have been Jerry Brown who had just won reelection as Governor of California and had managed to bring California back from disaster. Hilary won the nomination despite herself.

Going further I honestly think any Democratic candidate in either 2000 or 2016 would have had difficulty winning the Presidency regardless. The nature of the electorate, as I actually wrote in an article I didn't publish, says that at the very most, every eight years the electorate chooses to vcte in the opposition. (sADLY we're now at a point where both sides consider this unacceptable) I think it's actually shocking that Gore came that close to winning in 2000 - and a measure as to how terrible a candidate Hilary was that she lost to Trump. I think any other Republican would have beaten her in a walk and that only Trump had a realistic chance of losing to her.

But that's not the narrative that the progressive ads I get and quite a few columns on this blog want to accept. This piece was more a challenge to them that honestly people like yourselves. If this election is as important as they say it is, then every medium article they write from now until November is full-throated support of everything Biden does. But ever since he was sworn, most of them have gone back to their post-Trump attitude that while the Republicans are fascists destroying America Democrats are as bad because...they're not doing the impossible. I sometimes think that many on the left regard so much of society - politics, journalism, even the idea of democracy - as something they're just renting until they can get their dream house in their dream neighborhood. They don't know what it looks like, only what it doesn't and that it's everyone else's fault that it isn't available. And they certainly have no more interest in living in a world with the right than the right does with them.

Once on Homeland I heard a President say: "Democracies die when we're not looking." The left has spent as much time not looking as everyone else and many of the columinsts think that pointed out what we've lost counts as looking. They love telling us the ship is going down but all many of them do is rearrange the deck chairs and complain how cold its getting as we slip beneath the water. This is my challenge to them and I write knowing in my hearts of hearts, they'll either ignore it or call me names. They don't really care about what happens to the world. They just want us to know it wasn't their fault.