I'm not sure the DNC could have won with any candidate. We left has been meeting the right halfway without the right budging anywhere but further right that Obama, nominally the "extreme left", is actually center right. Eisenhower's (R) platform is, but today's standards, rather left wing.

If the left refuses to back down or pulls even further left, suddenly we're hypocrites and everything the right ever did is retroactively justified because we're as bad as they are. That has always been their justification: they have to cheat because they're certain the left is cheating. If they steal an election it's justified because they contend that otherwise the left would stolen it.

It is a political game of "Having you stopped beating your wife yet?" We're always already guilty of whatever awful things they're doing, and the only way to compete at this particular game with the rules as they are is to sink to those lows. They win either way. They already "know" we're cheating liars, and if we don't cheat and lie, that won't change it. If we do, they have real proof now.

It's time to break the game by explaining to the average voter, in short sentences, exactly how it works. But it has to come from what is perceived as a non-partisan source, and it can't be obviously about politics. More or less, this is a job for Hollywood. The masses need to learn this lesson through a clever analogy and then we have to hope they notice a parallel when they see one.

We're not fighting over facts or how to run the world anymore... we are fighting for what people believe in, for how they're going to believe the world exists and functions. If you want to fight a war of imagination, imagination is what it's going to take.

Apologies for the typos. I proof read but before my coffee I just don't catch things. If anyone needs clarification, that's fair.

tl;dr: Berne gives his stump speech.

I would also like to point out:

When the right lose, they blame the left.

When the left lose, we blame ourselves.

Do you see why we have a hard time winning? We are trying to rationalize with a toddler who knows that if they get us to throw a tantrum back at them, we'll look like a bigger dick than they do.