I think it's parliamentary syndrome. In Canada MPs aren't allowed to tweet anything at all until it's approved by the leaders office. Instead of unique individual persons representing constituents there's effectively 1 dictator with a hundred faces. Same issue for the democrats where everyone has to be sanded down to fit the mold.

Americans don't actually understand how the government works either. We pretend there's an election but in reality it's already happened. The majority of districts are 'safe' so whoever wins the primary in a safe district automatically wins the election. The person who wins the primary is almost always the person the party endorses. In practice the party endorsement is the election. The endorsement process is controlled by party insiders so the net effect is that they pick the government, not the voters.

Now you're living in real fantasyland!

Seriously, I agree with you, but I don't know how to solve that problem either. The DNC is just completely bereft of good ideas and at this point seems about as useless as the Mitt Romney-era Republican party was.

Dean Phillips could have been their easy ticket to a victory, but they decided to make the worst possible choices. This is simply a result of hubris and incompetence.