That’s the media’s fault, not the fault of those of us who support Bernie’s policies because they’re socalist, sincere, and rational.
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So having direct access to the party leadership, being able to limit the number of debates, having all those superdelegates making it LOOK like she had a bigger lead than she had, and so on had no effect.
I find it hard to believe that anybody could have watched the whole process and not seen it skewed pretty heavily in her direction.
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He’s not “whining,” for the most part he’s pointing out where it unfairly favors the corporatist insider (Clinton).
As for why he ran as a democrat, well duh, he did so because he wants to win, so he can help change a very fucked up political process.
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In my precinct the Sanders supporter were pretty evenly split between older, lifelong Democrats (like me) and enthusiastic younger people who were probably mainly leaning-Democratic rather than leaning-Randian.
The influence has already been felt in my state; the new chair of our party is a Sanders progressive. He is replacing an old-guard Clinton supporter (also replacing her as a super-delegate) and is already pushing for massive reform in local campaign financing.
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Well, I was responding to an article saying she had “every possible advantage.” I pointed out a couple of advantages she did not have. Unless I am very much mistaken, which has happened, there is a little bit of daylight between “every possible advantage” and “no advantage whatsoever.” So by attempting to refute “every possible advantage” I am not necessarily pushing a “no advantage whatsoever” line. That’s not what saying.
She didn’t have magical mind-control aliens forcing everyone to vote for her, either.
She did, however, have a completely partisan party administration (debate schedule, IT cutoff, donation laundering), massive incumbent support (precommitted superdelegates and endorsements), collossal amounts of corporate funding (especially when you include the SuperPACs that doubled her money, but were usually unmentioned in media comparisons of spending versus Sanders) and a corporate media blatantly biased against anything which threatens the wealth of its owners.
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So Sanders pretending to be a Democrat in order to win is fine. The party stacking the deck against disingenuous interlopers, that’s horrible.
Arguably it’s the other way around.
The Democratic party is supposed to be for the greater good and the common man and it’s been taken over by career politicians who are more concerned about getting votes and saying the ‘right thing’ then actually DOING the right thing.
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Okay, but like anyway, Sanders isn’t a REAL democrat so, mutter mutter…
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The DSA, like DSOC before it, has always considered itself a movement of the Democratic party, though it has kept itself at arms length as long as the party was dominated by its center-right or (DLC) right-wing factions. Leaders like Michael Harrington repeated this regularly. So, no pretending.
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“Pretending” in the sense of “openly stating that he has not previously been a member of the Democratic party and that he was running as a Democrat because the American political system made a major party affiliation necessary”.
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Ah. So how long has Sanders been a member of the DSA?
Relevant how again? Do we have massive walls in the political system that I’m not aware of? We have a two party system and the Democratic party is the one most closely associated with progressivism and socialism.
It’s OBVIOUSLY not the Republicans. Or is his only option to campaign and run as a third party candidate?
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Precisely my question. I say Sanders is pretending to be a Democrat, someone says “but the SDA has always considered itself part of the party!” I say, Sanders isn’t a member of the SDA, either, so who cares. Please at least make an attempt to follow the string before commenting, k?
Following it just fine, thanks. Waiting to see where you’re going with this, please continue!
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Do we have massive walls in the political system that I’m not aware of? We have a two party system and the Democratic party is the one most closely associated with progressivism and socialism.
It’s OBVIOUSLY not the Republicans. Or is his only option to campaign and run as a third party candidate?
Are there massive walls? No, obviously or Sanders wouldn’t even be able to run for the nomination and a fair number of his voters wouldn’t have been able to vote in a Democratic primary. But there are organizations. And those organizations tend to favor their own. That’s kind of a fundamental fact of political life. You can’t be both the insurgency that’s going to transform the party AND the darling of the existing party power structure. Whining that you can’t be means either you are naive or you think we’re stupid.
Insurgent candidacies are possible. On purpose. They face an uphill battle. On purpose. The party doesn’t owe any outsider his or her own version of fairness. There’s a process, everyone knows what it is. If you don’t like it you needn’t participate.
This notion that every candidate has to shoehorn him or herself into one of the two major parties is a myth. Sanders’ major motivation in running as a Democrat and for staying in the race is essentially vandalistic afaics. I have a notion that a crippled Democratic party which loses in November is probably a lot higher on Sanders list of favorable outcomes than most of his supporters would like to admit.
Wow, SUPER creative interpretation there.
Alternate interpretation: The Democratic party IS crippled, it’s not serving those of us who are very much not Republican and in our system is the ONLY viable option (to pretend otherwise is completely dishonest).
This notion that every candidate has to shoehorn him or herself into one of the two major parties is a myth.
Yup, like that. Completely dishonest. The only option is one of the two big parties, anything else hurts the next best choice for us. We don’t want Sanders splitting the vote and guaranteeing a Trump win.
Sanders, and many of his supporters, want the party to stop being crippled and start serving the non-Republicans among us. It’s lost it’s way and has been infested by near neocons and career politicians who are more interested in power than serving the greater good.
Some people would prefer it STAY crippled because they’re too vested in the Status Quo or really, really want Clinton to win.
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Would you rather Sanders ran as an independent in Nov?
Then we’d see how well your preciously pure Democratic Party would do.
You might not like your party being infected with leftist independents, but you still need their votes.
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I find it weird that all this conversation just assumes that Sanders is hurting Clinton by staying in the race. By staying in the race Sander is keeping young people who traditionally have very low voter turnout engaged in politics. Voter turnout for the university aged is 30% in a good year. The Bernie or Bust people aren’t largely people who would have voted Clinton if Sanders hadn’t been around to draw them away, they are largely people who wouldn’t have voted at all if Sanders hadn’t been there to draw them in.
I’m not finding a lot of good stats - just scattered mentions in articles here and there - but to use an example you can find figures like youth accounting for 18% of Nevada democratic primary turnout rather than the 13% they accounted for in 2008 (when, if you’ll recall, Obama was also mobilizing youth vote). If you look at the turnout numbers, that 5% isn’t just a shift in demographics, it’s extra people voting who wouldn’t have. Sanders took 8 in 10 of those voters. If even 10% of those who wouldn’t have come out to vote get a taste for voting from being energized about sanders, that would be a 0.5% edge in the election for the democrats, which on a national level is the kind of edge that translates to a virtual automatic win.
Sanders is not sabotaging Clinton’s campaign, he is campaigning to win. Obviously if he beat Clinton for the nomination that would “greatly” hurt Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency, but if he doesn’t win (and it looks very unlikely that he will) then he is almost certain helping her.
Clinton, on the other hand, is sabotaging her own chances drastically by viewing Sanders and his campaign as her enemy. Maybe Clinton felt like she had to call Sanders supporters stupid children in order to beat Sanders (though I can’t imagine how it helped her at all) but by doing so she hurt herself in the general. Maybe establishment democrats felt it was somehow important (again, why?) to them to paint Sanders supporters as violent in Nevada when they were not violent, but it alienated people who would have been democratic voters had they not done it.
At this point, Clinton could be talking about how she really learned something by from the Sanders campaign. She could be saying Sanders is an important voice in American politics. She could be praising the passion of his supporters and saying that their ideas are very important to the democratic party. She could be saying that she was so happy to see how many young people were coming out to vote for Sanders, because it’s so important for young people to vote, and that she understood why they supported Sanders and she wouldn’t let them down as president.
This approach would get her votes. Instead, we see petulance and punishment of people who dared to disagree with her. Less from her and more from her supporters, but it still stings, and she could be setting a better tone.
I’m not saying, “Be nice because being nice is nice.” I’m saying she’s running one of the shittiest campaigns I’ve ever seen and throwing votes away for no fucking reason - it’s just spite against a person who dared to disagree. And somehow this is Sanders’ fault. Well, I agree that if Sanders’ hadn’t run then we wouldn’t have seen how Clinton chose to surround herself with stupid, spiteful people run amok who would rather throw youth votes away than string three nice words together. But why did she surround herself with these people? Why is she playing along?
With hindsight we can see Clinton had the nomination in the bag the whole time. All she had to do was act like it and campaign for the general instead of campaigning against her own voters.
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You’d have to ask whoever is responsible for collecting dues. Sanders has been identifying as a Democratic Socialist for some time, for example in his 1997 book.
Sure. For example, Bill Clinton’s candidacy was an insurgency from the right; the DLC was considered a rectionary aberration in the party when it was formed. Sanders is not significantly more off the core Democratic scale than Teddy Kennedy was.
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