Was there something Bush did that you think Clinton should have, starting in his first 6 months? 9/11 and the War on Terror is what reversed the 90's drawdown.

Well, if you know of a way to create an actual credible deterrent to the worst-case scenarios of Russian invasion of NATO or Chinese invasion of Korea/Japan/SE Asia that doesn't involve stationing hundreds of thousands of troops abroad, that allows keeping the defense budget under half a trillion while funding requisite naval and nuclear renewal, I wouldn't be unhappy to consider myself strong on defense.

It's part of a good turn around (in my mind) so that the Republicans can stop pretending to have ownership of American patriotism. It what's allowed things like the NFL kneeling controversy go from a free speech issue to a patriotism/respect our veterans thing.
I don't understand, what are you saying about the NFL protests? Anyway, it's not a turnaround, Democrats have been doing it for a long time. Your idea of moderation in red states is exactly the disastrous bet Democrats have played since you were born. Just the opposite is indicated. Democratic policies, including (especially!) the hard-left ones are overwhelmingly popular among the general population including red states. It's hard to convince oneself why Democrats should reject the exceedingly simple and intuitive platform of promising to give people what they want, actually doing it, and doing it well and enduringly. And I repeat, I am referring to the popular policies. If there is dismay at the prospect of the unpopular ones (especially concentrated in hard-left proposals on policing and immigration), in the words of LBJ: "What the hell else is the Presidency for?"

Even the type of firebrand arch-populist leftism epitomized in this frissonating polemic -

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articl...sexy-colu.html

I’m a leftist. Our political platform is simple and straightforward. The public doesn’t have enough money or power. Their money and power were stolen by elites. We will fix this. We will take the power and money and give it back to the public. We will elect politicians who believe in this program. We will oppose the politicians who don’t.


can be expected to attain viability over the current national model.

Susceptible to propaganda equals politically toxic in my explanation. A generation of her being painted a witch doesn't make here a viable candidate in the solid Republican states that hate her.
Very interesting: Clinton's favorability, according to Pew Research, was between 1992 and 2015 almost always above 50%; even the 2008 election saw only a minor dip. I don't think many could have predicted, for the right reasons, that her favorability could drop so much so suddenly in 2015 and 2016. Clinton announced her candidacy in April 2015. Look at the favorability plummet starting exactly a month prior, days after the NYT first reported the existence of the private email server issue. Suggests that Clinton's failure to properly explain the email controversy cost her comparably as much as decades of prior Republican defamation (though this at least served as primer). As much as we might hate to think it, the 2016 election will become one of the most studied in American history.