The Russians may or may not have also released emails showing that Clinton's cronies on the Democratic National Committee wrongfully sabotaged the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Again and again, Clinton contemptuously assaults Sanders for his allegedly lukewarm support of her candidacy. But she completely ignores the massive grass-roots social democratic uprising that continues to make him America's most popular politician.
Instead, she locked up her boring, uninspired candidacy behind the mighty fortress of corporate Democrats who seem to fear the social/green democrats to whom the party must ultimately belong if it's ever again to take power. She let her personal hatred of Vladimir Putin convince even many of her followers that she might well spark a new Cold War with Russia.
Thus, she still misses and disses the activist nation that nominated Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, helped him survive the GOP's strip-and-flip assaults, and thus escape the Electoral College death trap.
In 2016 the grass-roots "Hope and Change" tidal wave segued into the "Sandernista" uprising. It became the most powerful grass-roots movement for eco-social democracy in modern U.S. history. The latest incarnation is now in a desperate struggle to take the Democratic Party back from the "Clintonista" corporate elite that has gutted it. Its agenda is to turn the party into a force for peace, social justice and ecological sanity that can actually win elections.
Had Clinton lowered herself to embrace it, she might well have overcome a thoroughly corrupted electoral system and kept Trump out of the White House.
But as of now, there is no indication that either she, Al Gore or John Kerry are awake to the power of that movement, or to the need to confront an electoral system that strips millions of citizens from its registration rolls, flips electronic vote counts, and has used the Electoral College twice in this century to elect the likes of Bush and Trump as president.
With the corrupt remnants of the Clintons' corporate-owned Democratic Leadership Council (which Hillary praises in "What Happened") still in control of the party machinery, more than a thousand federal, state and local offices have slipped to the Republicans since 2000. Much of that clearly stems from grass-roots disgust with a party run by a dull, tone-deaf corporate cabal whose agenda on war, trade, welfare and more, is often indistinguishable from that of the GOP.
But much also has to do with the death grip Republican governors and secretaries of state have on the electoral apparatus. In 2016 and 2018, six U.S. Senate seats went to Republican candidates who lost in the exit polls, a virtual statistical impossibility. With those races went control of the upper House -- and the Supreme Court.
Trump's federal commission on "voter fraud," headed by Kobach, with Blackwell by his side, is escalating the Jim Crow assault on our voter rolls. Easily hacked electronic voting machines guarantee flipped outcomes. The Electoral College still lets small red states deny the duly elected presidential candidates rightful access to the White House.
The reforms we need to our electoral apparatus include universal automatic voter registration, transparent poll books to guarantee duly registered citizens can actually vote, a four-day holiday for voting, easily accessible polling stations, and, above all, universal hand-counted paper ballots, to stay where they are cast in translucent containers with clear chain of custody until they can be tallied in full daylight, with open national oversight.
We also need an end to gerrymandering, the death of the Electoral College and an end to corporate money in campaigns.
All this seems beneath the corporate Democrats. But without such reforms, it's a sad illusion that the Congress can be retaken in 2018, or that the GOP rampage through state and local legislatures can be reversed.
As for 2020, with the current electoral claptrap, a progressive presidency is almost certainly out of reach.
It will be up to the grass-roots sequel to the Sandernista movement to end this nightmare.
If "What Happened" and their timid inaction are any indicator, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore still don't get it. That they opened the door for Donald Trump will be their most profound collective legacy.
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