No, pretty much all of the Bernie campaign was at least defensible -- i.e., stuff you can reasonably argue was a good decision at the time. "Really stupid shit" is stuff that is so obviously wrong that there isn't even a plausible excuse for doing it.
What do you mean "allowing"? Could he have cut Biden's mike? Could he have put on the video evidence right there in the debate? No, the best he could do is reply "that's not true and there's video to prove it, you can go see for yourself" -- which is what he did. I think he would have benefited from a more aggressive tone and a more pointed approach at that last debate, but now we're talking about precisely calibrating the tenor of 90+ minutes of extemporaneous speaking. This is fine detail, not unjustifiable, unforced errors.
"Really stupid shit" is stuff like ignoring important states, making a huge issue out of things people don't care about, being unprepared on major topics, falling for obvious bait (Warren's DNA test comes to mind), etc.
Biden was dead in the water before the last debate; this is just hindsight bias. I don't think Biden won a single delegate until South Carolina, and even then it took Obama's coordinated drop out/endorsement ratfucking to revive his campaign. Why didn't Bernie go out of his way to kick Biden in the Nevada debate? Because Biden was a non-factor then.
I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking at here. Those polls only show Biden and Sanders, so they're not an accurate look at the race from about the Iowa caucuses to Super Tuesday. And results matter more than polling anyway, and all the results prior to South Carolina showed Biden dead in the water.
OK, clicking through a bit more I can see the other candidates.
He was losing in early voting rounds and was a nonfactor alone after them, until centrists merged, but he was the front runner out of the gate, and Sanders did not attack him until after the centrist merged.
Agreed on all of this, but I don't see how it makes not attacking Biden indefensible. If anything, Biden polling well out of the gate and then getting nothing out of the first few states suggests the polls overestimated his support, and focusing on him was not needed.
In hindsight it might have been better had Bernie attacked Biden earlier, but his actual approach was justifiable, and the evidence is that he won the first four states while Biden was sagging hard.
Bernie won those early contests in spite of not attacking Biden.
But he really needed to attack Biden, and it was a major fuckup not to...? The fact that he swept the early primaries and Biden didn't even get a single delegate means Bernie probably made the right call up to that point. If it takes an rare degree of ratfucking to derail your campaign, your early campaign decisions were at least defensible, if not good.
the REASON that he was not attacked is indefensible, because it was due to their personal friendship and not strategy
We don't really know this. Maybe he thought a collegial tone was a better look than "you're not really a threat so I'm not even going to waste time on you."
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No, pretty much all of the Bernie campaign was at least defensible -- i.e., stuff you can reasonably argue was a good decision at the time. "Really stupid shit" is stuff that is so obviously wrong that there isn't even a plausible excuse for doing it.
For instance, you can make a reasonable case that going negative on Biden would not have worked. You might still disagree with that assessment, but even if it was a mistake it wasn't so far outside of the realm of possibility that it qualifies as "really stupid shit."
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What do you mean "allowing"? Could he have cut Biden's mike? Could he have put on the video evidence right there in the debate? No, the best he could do is reply "that's not true and there's video to prove it, you can go see for yourself" -- which is what he did. I think he would have benefited from a more aggressive tone and a more pointed approach at that last debate, but now we're talking about precisely calibrating the tenor of 90+ minutes of extemporaneous speaking. This is fine detail, not unjustifiable, unforced errors.
"Really stupid shit" is stuff like ignoring important states, making a huge issue out of things people don't care about, being unprepared on major topics, falling for obvious bait (Warren's DNA test comes to mind), etc.
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Biden was dead in the water before the last debate; this is just hindsight bias. I don't think Biden won a single delegate until South Carolina, and even then it took Obama's coordinated drop out/endorsement ratfucking to revive his campaign. Why didn't Bernie go out of his way to kick Biden in the Nevada debate? Because Biden was a non-factor then.
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Biden was a non-factor until the last debate; handling him in literally any way was a defensible decision because he didn't really matter.
Arguing that Bernie absolutely, unquestionably needed to rip a guy no one was voting for is nonsensical.
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I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking at here. Those polls only show Biden and Sanders, so they're not an accurate look at the race from about the Iowa caucuses to Super Tuesday. And results matter more than polling anyway, and all the results prior to South Carolina showed Biden dead in the water.
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OK, clicking through a bit more I can see the other candidates.
Agreed on all of this, but I don't see how it makes not attacking Biden indefensible. If anything, Biden polling well out of the gate and then getting nothing out of the first few states suggests the polls overestimated his support, and focusing on him was not needed.
In hindsight it might have been better had Bernie attacked Biden earlier, but his actual approach was justifiable, and the evidence is that he won the first four states while Biden was sagging hard.
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But he really needed to attack Biden, and it was a major fuckup not to...? The fact that he swept the early primaries and Biden didn't even get a single delegate means Bernie probably made the right call up to that point. If it takes an rare degree of ratfucking to derail your campaign, your early campaign decisions were at least defensible, if not good.
We don't really know this. Maybe he thought a collegial tone was a better look than "you're not really a threat so I'm not even going to waste time on you."
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