That is certainly one perspective you can have.
Another perspective is that if the DNC hadn't engaged in corrupt practices then foreign intelligence services wouldn't have anything to leak.
The purpose of the 2016 political email "leaks" was entirely embarrassment and to create the aura that the emails were proof of corruption.
This also resulted in the DNC apologizing to Bernie. [1]
And did it not result in the DNC chair CEO, CFO, and Communication Director resigning? [2]
With actual email proof, public apology, and resignations it seems to me that there was more than just an aura of corruption. Or do you still disagree?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/24/he...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-dnc-statemen...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/02/politics/dnc-ceo-resigns-...
It is also not uncommon, as we've seen, for leadership to resign after large hacks occur. The infiltration and subsequent resignation of corporate leadership after data leaks does not indicate that there was any corruption. It may indicate some level of incompetence, but not corruption.
If the party claimed that they are in-fact biased against Bernie, as the evidence mostly shows, then this would have been fine. However, if the party claimed it was neutral but yet secretly worked against Bernie then this seems to me like it is corruption.
Or do you disagree?
Party leadership is allowed to have preferences; the party isn't the public, it's a party. The primary election's purpose is to show the party who the public favors (because it is, ostensibly, politically-suicidal to run an unpopular candidate).
And in the end, the actual votes favored Clinton over Sanders. These votes may have been influenced by the party leadership suggesting to the rank-and-file that Clinton was a better candidate, but as it's not a general election that's well within their purview to do.
(Whether state machinery should be used to run elections for what is essentially a private political club is a great question that I think people should be asking about the way elections are structured in each state).
EDIT: punctuation correction.
If people think it means the party doesn't reflect the will of the voters... Not exactly. That's always been the structure of the Democratic party. Popular will is tempered by party leadership. That's baked into the structure of the Democratic party itself. The party that lacks that kind of tempering is the GOP, and as a result it tends to run populists who may or may not actually have any government qualification (one won the Presidency in 2016; a couple have won state governorship over the years).
The resulting apologies and resignations were an attempt to reconcile with voters who, fundamentally, did not understand how the party they support actually works. No shame in that; it's a big and complex machine. But it's never been a machine that just reflects the unmodified will of the people who toss ballots into the box with a 'D' next to their name in the primaries. That's one source of signal the party uses to decide who it will run.
To give another example: in 2008, in response to the Florida party leadership running their primary earlier than the national committee authorized them to run it, the committee stripped all the Florida delegates of their vote in the national convention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Florida_Democratic_presid...). Then, it compromised (at its discretion) by seating them but only counting half of each of their votes. That is the nature of the power the democratic party national leadership has to wield at its discretion, without oversight, as per its charter.
People just don't know this because people don't know the parties.
This would have been fine the DNC came out and said that this is what they are doing. But the DNC has explicitly stated that is unbiased in action (in the [0] of my earlier post) and then they go and do the opposite. This is just plain corruption.
If the contents of the food product you just bought are not the same as the label of the product then fines are levied against the company that sold it.
"Courts have uniformly rejected attempts to litigate on the basis of purported political promises, including ‘statements of principle and intent in the political realm’..."
The DNC can say it's unbiased, but the rules-as-written allow broad, sweeping bias in how the Democratic party conducts its affairs. It's a party. They're biased by default. The whole point of parties is, basically, as you put it, "The peasants don't know what is good for them." There's a reason so many politicians throughout history have been anti-party. Unfortunately, they stick around and grow in power because they tend to work; focused political alignment beats unfocused noise consistently.
What happened with the Sanders campaign is a whole bunch of voters crashed headlong into a system that works other than the way they assume it does.
Which seems to fit the description of the events and my arguments. You argue that because court rules this as political promises (regularly broken and legal to do) then it was not corruption as the court saw it.
This then seems that politics can be legally corrupt (deceitful). You don't have to agree with me but I vote out candidates that lie even if they fit under my political umbrella. In my opinion this machevellian behavior will end up more painful down the line and it is better to lose one election than to have a broken political system long term.
If anything the party always staying out of primaries would be a much larger issue.
Being truthful isn’t the goal, achieving the parities political goals is. Gerrymandering for example is a perversion of the core idea of democracy, but failing to use it when your opposition does is a problem. Politics exists in the real world and what should be often takes a back seat to what is.
Party leadership could very well prefer candidate X personally, but promote candidate Y strategically. Politics goes beyond the election into actually implementing the candidates proposals, which adds yet another dimension here.
It's a club and you ain't in it, isn't really going to get the young people to the polls.
Every alleged slight the DNC made against Sanders would not have excluded him from the party nomination if voters had voted for him in the primary. But at the end of the day, the numbers didn't manifest.
But sure, continue snarkily throwing away your vote, continue whining about disastrous elections. Who cares if you have to live in the society you threw away your vote in, as long as those snooty leadership preferred candidates suffer it's all worth it.
https://libraries.wm.edu/exhibits/irrepressible-conflict-or-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders#Party_affiliati...
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/donna-brazile-wikilea...
Ethically weak? Sure.
To me, when I first saw this news story, I felt it was one of the most shockingly corrupt things I had ever seen. The fact that you could see this news and find that it "would hardly qualify as corruption"... this gives me hope that philosophers can gleefully debate reality forever without messing things up by accidentally tripping over the truth. No sarcasm implied!
I struggle to think of a situation as public as this that could be more corrupt.
>Brazile, on two separate instances, tipped off the Clinton campaign ahead of time on questions that might come her way at CNN events
It's pretty wild that you don't consider this corruption.
No need to question anyone’s sincerity.
The reality is the emails were hacked and released in order to damage the Clinton campaign by a foreign power that wanted her to lose (or win but severely weakened). This is much more serious than some unseemly infighting within the DNC. Nothing in the Clinton emails was a crime, right?
The above article mentions leaked emails that bashed Sen. Sanders.
That is not an example of corruption.
There are many ways to rig an election without altering any of the votes cast. The clearest example is elections in one party states, where your only choice is to vote for the approved candidate. But there are much less overt ways too
"The 2016 Democratic primary wasn’t rigged by the DNC, and it certainly wasn’t rigged against Sanders."
so, i guess it was rigged
For example, the 45th President of the United States never won the popular vote, yet was elected. Was the election "rigged?" Well, no; the laws of the US do not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the post popular votes and they never have. Or, yes, because the laws of the US are stacked against the demonstrated will of the people via the vote.
It's the same with the DNC. The DNC leadership did some things that can be considered subjectively unsavory. But they broke no laws, nor party rules. The rules themselves do not favor a candidate like Sanders (the Democratic party tilts heavily towards something like seniority, especially relative to their peer major party; Sanders was an outlier who ran an outlier campaign).
'You have nothing to hide so what's wrong with everyone checking out what's there in your search history and what's on your hard drives.'
You sound like the same people that want to make encryption illegal: politically naive and maliciously, selectively ignorant.
Next you'll be arguing for less oversight for the 3 letter agencies because they should have strong privacy rights!
Is there a stronger argument to be used in place of that one?
The key thing is that conservatives don't care about corruption itself, just the opportunity to smear their opponents.
I'd be more than fine with even more sunshine exposing the workings of the DNC and addressing what was found. Can you say the same about the GOP?
Edit: I'd like to be proven wrong, so tell me what I missed.
I read no such implication.
Disclaimer: I have no party affiliation (political parties are a pox), but I do tend to vote for one side as the least bad option.
> Disclaimer: I have no party affiliation (political parties are a pox), but I do tend to vote for one side as the least bad option.
Yes, most formally unaffiliated voters are still close to single ticket voters.
That is not my belief nor the point of my post. I am only stating that the way the NewYorker looks at this is not the same how some other people look at it.
Also I'm not from the US nor do I really care about US politics, I do love pointing out obvious things like these :).
There was no leakage of GOP emails, therefore there was nothing to leak, i.e., no corruption of concern.
If I misread your intent I apologize, it can be challenging in the most benign situations and it's more so tricky when its a subject of disagreement.
But my claim still unfortunately holds. The DNC leak was a political hit job that only intended to smear the opposing party. A better example is Hunter Biden -- his employment really was with corrupt intents and if there really was evidence that corruption was rewarded it should be prosecuted.
But if that very concern is legitimate, then it should be applied to all. There's plenty of evidence of that a certain son-in-law engaged in far more egregious affairs and there is not a peep about that.
So I couldn't help but read your comment as yet another "gotcha" that fuels this false narrative.