They were like that before 2016. When the time comes for historians to portion out blame for the lost opportunities and outright political disasters since the mid-1990s, the corporate media (and not just Faux News) will deserve a huge share.
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Remember when Howard Dean’s entire political career went down in flames because he made a weird sound at a campaign rally? The networks were basically playing that soundbyte on a loop until he caved.
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Certainly true of the BernieBros. Misogyny is a core tenet of their personality cult. That said, they’re a small and loud-mouthed minority of Sanders supporters. Most others will gladly get behind Warren if she’s the nominee because the policies are so similar (not so much with Uncle Joe or Wall Street Pete).
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Bernie doesn’t like slow toilets according to his rider
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@Wanderfound’s analysis of recent events:
The Warren campaign has made a strategic choice to pivot right; they’re trying to replace Biden as the establishment centrist.
She’s burnt her bridges with the Warren-sympathetic Berniecrats, and also lost quite a few Bernie-sympathetic formerly-Warren voters. But they’re hoping to take over Joe’s base once he flames out.
From a purely tactical PoV, it’s not a bad move. Their campaign was fading, and they had next to no chance of dislodging Bernie as the left candidate. An alliance between Warren’s predominantly white & PMC base and Biden’s elderly conservatives might have the numbers to shut out the left, especially with superdelegate backing.
OTOH, from a “defeating fascism and militarism and averting climate apocalypse” PoV, it’s likely to be catastrophic.
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Ok. What did I miss? Other than the CNN-manufactured controversy, I haven’t seen the kind of schism you’re alluding to, nor any pivot right by Warren.
ETA: And I’m not sure what you mean by “Their campaign was fading.” She’s polling #2 in Iowa, right behind Bernie.
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Every moderate Republican that I have spoken to in the last year or so thinks Warren is the anti-christ.
Pivot? Meh.
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Oh? What makes you think that?
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Monitoring Twitter over the last few days. Particularly the #RefundWarren hashtag.
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I don’t do Twitter. I very much respect your opinion. Could you share the tl;dr?
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They’ve been drifting right for months; see the gradual retreat on M4A for the most obvious example.
But the twin attacks leading up to the debate plus the debate itself flipped it from disguised to overt.
Yup; the GOP thought Obama was a communist, for fuck’s sake. No Democratic candidate is going to make significant inroads into the Trump base.
But the Warren pivot isn’t really about the GOP, it’s about supplanting Biden.
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I must say for an Aussie you seem like a Washington insider.
Just say’n.
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Non-Americans tend to be much more aware of US politics than vice-versa. Because the bombs fly out from the imperial core, not in.
Plus I’ve got to get my political junkie fix somewhere. Australian politics is mostly (1) petty, (2) depressing, and (3) largely driven by American influence anyway.
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Yeah, the watering down of M4A disturbs me, but it has been an element of her plan (the two phase approach) for months. The inherent danger of the two phases is never getting to phase 2. 
I’m still not sure about where the accusation against Sanders came from. CNN is way too gleeful about it. Whether because it falls into their centrist wet dream or whether it’s manufactured, when I look at the actual debate footage, both Sanders and Warren were working to de-escalate. If Warren’s campaign pushed the accusation, she’s doing some great acting.
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The basic situation, as perceived by Berniecrat partisans:
Stage 1: the beat-up over the campaign phone script. This was apparently a document that was briefly posted by an unknown person to a Bernie chat group; it was not official literature. Regardless, the content of the document was spectacularly inoffensive; all it did was very politely state some empirical facts about the demographics of Warren’s supporters.
This criticism was so feeble as to be irrelevant, except for the point that the primary purpose of this story appears to have been to set up a preemptive justification for the following attack (i.e. “they started it first”).
Stage 2: the “women can’t be President” story.
Reminder here that I’m presenting this as perceived by Berniecrat partisans; use your own judgement as to credibility.
This story was pretty much universally viewed by the Berniecrats as manufactured slander. Keep in mind that:
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There is history here; “Bernie is a secret misogynist” was a major theme of the Clinton primary campaign against Bernie (and a significant theme in the Clinton campaign against Obama as well), and a lot of ex-Clinton people are now working on the Warren campaign.
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“Anonymous sources, reporting hearsay about a private conversation they were not a party to, in which one of the participants flatly denies their claims while the other implies that they’re true but refuses to specifically confirm the details” would not normally be treated as a credible source by any serious journalist.
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Bernie has a long and documented history of saying exactly the opposite of what was claimed.
So, the Berniecrats tend to view this as a unilateral violation of the previously existing Warren/Bernie peace treaty. And, as a result, they’ve moved Warren from the category of “friendly competition” to “opponent”.
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What I’m hoping, for both campaigns, is that the de-escalation continues. I hope that calmer heads prevail in the Sanders campaign (which has not always been the case) and that the establishment Dems who signed on with Warren quit their bullshit manipulation.
From listening to what the candidates have said about it, it sounds like a pretty simple misunderstanding. I could definitely see Sanders saying, “A woman going up against Trump would face serious challenges. Here’s what they are.” And I could understand Warren interpreting it as, “A woman can’t beat Trump and here’s why.”
What neither candidate is saying, that CNN keeps pushing as the narrative, is that the accusation is that Sanders said that “A woman can’t be President.” Which is nonsense. No one who has paid any attention to Bernie Sanders, ever, could give credence to that accusation.
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That was my hypothesis too. Nobody recorded the conversation, so “the world may never know,” but if Bernie is a closet misogynist, that is a deep-ass closet.
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Narnia deep.
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Same. It feels both realistic, and true to my perception of both candidates. But that scenario makes this whole situation so sad and pointless. It doesn’t serve anyone except those who want to see both fail.
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If Sanders and/or Warren can’t weather this relatively minor kerfuffle, then they are not prepared for a general election fight with Trump.
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