It's time to pull your party together, Democrats
Current DNC chair Tom Perez points out that Sanders tended to lose primary elections, which are controlled by the states, but won caucuses, which are run by the DNC.
Even so, it still would be hard to argue that the Clinton campaign didn't get special benefits from its cozy arrangement with the DNC. Why couldn't she have reached out sooner to Sanders and his mostly young and anti-establishment supporters?
That sounds like past Clinton-related questions. Why, we ask, did she not avoid sending emails over an unsecured server in her house? Why did the Clintons not avoid even the appearance of corruption in donations to the Clinton Foundation?
After their many years of persecution from the right and the nosiness of us journalists, the Clintons too often have seemed care about legality but not enough about the appearance of impropriety, which can be just as damaging in politics as the real thing.
Like Richard Nixon, the Clintons seemed to build a fortress mentality that, in Hillary's campaign, shut her off from the pro-Trump rebellion building outside Washington's Beltway.
Now, of course, it is a time for both parties to be looking to the future, not rehashing the past. Yet Democrats need to understand where they've been in order to avoid snatching more defeats out of the jaws of victory.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
