You are mistaken about my argument, pretty much across the board. First, Hillary, Biden, Kerry, and Warren are not center-right. They are center-left. Your terminology, though it may serve a rhetorical purpose from your vantage point, renders the left-right spectrum meaningless. Any of the four of them advocate significant change. The right is opposed to change, by definition.
Second, I am not arguing here for a particular ideology to win the nomination, though of course I have my preferences. I am arguing that the process of choosing a nominee must take into account experience, and ability to do the job, rather than focusing on campaigning.
Third, I did not say that people with experience would have trouble beating Trump, as I do not believe that. I did say that people with longer records are open to more attacks. Of course, Trump had plenty of obvious problems in his past; his voters chose not to care and the press failed to cover any of them with the sustained focus to break through with swing voters.
Fourth, I didn’t say that “the primaries favor the more radical candidates”. I don’t even know where you got this impression. I do believe that the primary electorates in both parties are more representative of the left/right wings of the parties than the political center. But that’s not the same as favoring “radical” candidates.
Those are all corrections of your claims about my essay. But two other responses to things you’ve expressed. First, the assertion of “Hillary’s absurdly poor campaigning” reflects a popular charge but has no basis in reality. She ran a competent, professional campaign, with no more than the expected mistakes of the sort that every campaign makes. If your analysis of 2016 is just down to a badly-run campaign, you’ve missed the story. As I said: “Trump won because of a perfect storm of media malpractice, FBI malfeasance, Russian interference, and miraculously-favorable population distribution.”
Second, Tulsi Gabbard would be the worst choice I can think of, among all the elected officials who have been mentioned. She’s an opportunist, and the best defense of her foreign policy is that she hasn’t thought it through. Dismissing all of Assad’s enemies as “terrorists”, doubting his responsibility for chemical attacks, and being grateful for Russia propping him up: how susceptible to a foreign dictator’s propaganda do we want our next president to be? And it would be surprising if the same people who love her anti-interventionism when it comes to dictators would be cool with her hyperinterventionism when it comes to jihadism, or her Trumpian approach to Muslim immigration.
