Dear Bernie Sanders: Enough already

[lapucelle]

OPINION

Dear Bernie Sanders: Enough already
By Michael A. Cohen Globe Columnist,Updated April 3, 2020, 1:45 p.m.

I can’t decide what makes me more sick and tired: Bernie Sanders or being sick and tired of Bernie Sanders.

Four years ago, Sanders’ refusal to accept the reality that he was not going to be the Democratic nominee for president dragged the 2016 primary race with Hillary Clinton all the way to the party convention in July — undoubtedly damaging her candidacy.

Four years later it’s like watching the same bad movie again. In 2020, Sanders has even less chance of overtaking Joe Biden. He’s performed worse than he did in 2016. Since the South Carolina primary, Biden has trounced him nearly everywhere they have faced off, and usually by double digits. Every theory Sanders had about the race — that he could mobilize white working-class voters to support him and that he would bring new voters to the polls — has been proven wrong.

The view of the party rank and file has been unambiguous: they want Joe. Indeed, a good part of the reason for Biden’s Lazarus-like rise, after poor showings in the early primary states, was widespread fear, among Democrats, of Sanders being the party standard bearer. Sorry Bernie, it wasn’t the establishment blocking your path — it was you.

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While Sanders likes to claim that he’s no longer attacking Biden, that’s only partially true. In the last debate he didn’t hesitate to claim that Biden once tried to cut Social Security. Even now his national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray — who declared that she voted for Jill Stein in 2016 — is suggesting that Biden is “allowing bigotry and misinformation” into the Democratic Party because a campaign surrogate tweeted an article critical of Sanders.

This has become a tired and predictable game with Sanders: He claims to take the high road while his unbowed cheerleaders remain in attack mode. On social media the Vermont senator’s surrogates and more militant supporters continue to lacerate Biden for his verbal miscues and darkly suggest he is in cognitive decline. It was the same four years ago. When he announced his candidacy in 2015 he pledged that it would be “driven by issues and serious debate . . . not reckless personal attacks or character assassination.” A year later he was calling Clinton a tool of “big moneyed interests.”

Sanders could demand that these attacks stop. Dropping out of the race would certainly reduce intra-party tensions. But he hasn’t and he won’t. It’s apparent now, as it was apparent four years ago, that he doesn’t care about the consequences of continuing a race he cannot win.

For a candidate who proudly wears his ideological consistency on his sleeve, the one true constant in his presidential campaigns has been a desperate ambition to be president. Even a pandemic — and the potential of weakening Biden by continuing his campaign — doesn’t give him pause.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/03/opinion/dear-bernie-sanders-enough-already/

[marble falls]

1. Nothing there too hard to understand.

[The Magistrate]

8. No, Sir, There Is Not

Sanders is quite typical.

The 'further left' traditionally take as their chief immediate enemy parties and political figures of the center left, rather than parties and figures of the right. This is because a strong center-left party balks any possibility of revolution. It will have the allegiance of most working people, because it will bring them real benefits in their lives, and by doing so, will shut off influence of the 'further left' by making it clear measures well short of the desperate expedients the 'further left' prescribes for improving the lot of working people are not necessary.

Because center-left parties do uphold the present order of society, the 'further left' sees them as obstacles to its desires quite as much as any reactionary party on the right. Thus you have the 'not a dime's worth of difference' line that views our two major parties as interchangeable. Since the 'further left' cannot comprehend how working people could possibly form an honest attachment to rightist parties, their view comes to be that center-left parties are their chief obstacle to mass support from working people, and they imagine that if center-left parties are broken, they will inherit the mass support of working people, and thus become predominant. Then it will be the time to deal with the reactionary right, but until it is the 'further left' which has undisputed leadership of working people, the reactionary right cannot be dealt with properly.

Properly, here, indicating a policy guided by the slogan quite popular in the radical salad days the sixties and seventies: 'What's the solution? Revolution!' Few nowadays on the 'further left' dream of an actual, barricades and snipers and car-bombs sort of armed revolution, but they do envision a complete overthrow of existing economic and social arrangements. One of the things most people of this orientation fail to understand about working people, and people on the lower rungs of the economic scale generally, is that people who have not much but do have a little are extremely reluctant to put the little they have at risk, and they know that in turmoil and tumult that little will be at risk. There are strains of the 'further left' which do have some understanding of this, and their view is that working people must be made to lose that little they have now, and lose it to the unmitigated predation of the reactionary right. Only then, when they have nothing to lose, will working people be ready for revolution under the banner of the 'further left'. This provides such people still another reason to oppose and demolish center left parties, as these do mitigate the suffering the right would impose on working people, and so are the chief force in balking revolution. These elements view an initial triumph of the reactionary right as an essential step in their own program to achieve revolution, and so are actually quite pleased by the reactionary right achieving political success at the expense of center-left parties.





"From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway."





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

[The Magistrate]

10. Pleasure To Have You On Board, Sir

The 'progressive' left is going to have to change strategy if it wants increased influence in the Democratic Party. At present, it seems to believe that proving the 'progressive' left cannot be relied on as part of a larger coalition will lead to courting and concessions by Party leadership. But all it actually achieves is to drive the Party more towards the center, in an attempt to make up from more middle of the road types the votes the 'progressive' left threatens to withhold unless placated, and often does withhold even if attempts to placate it are made. When all is said and done, the number of votes to be had on the left-most portions of the political bell-curve is far smaller than the numbers to be found near its center. It can be argued that these voters may be fair-weather friends not committed to the Party, and so of less long-term value to the Party then people more to the left, but with the 'progressive' left doing all in its power to establish as fact that people on the left cannot be relied on any more than middle of the road types, simple arithmetic makes the decision as to where efforts may pay off best. Especially since many more middle of the road types, often people who might well be receptive to left policies, especially once enacted in law and operating to their benefit, are actively repelled by the scolds and flamboyant poseurs who make themselves the public face of the 'progressive' left.






"From Bernie’s perspective, dropping out of a race once you have no chance of winning is peculiar behavior that can only be explained by the work of a hidden hand. For most politicians, though, it is actually standard operating procedure. Only Sanders seems to think the normal thing to do once voters have made clear they don’t want to nominate you is to continue campaigning anyway."





"When things are not called by their right names, what is said cannot make sense. When what is said does not make sense, what is planned cannot succeed. When plans do not succeed, people become uneasy. When people are uneasy, punishments do not fit crimes. When punishments do not fit crimes, people cannot know where to put hand or foot."

[SWBTATTReg]

2. Enough is enough. Bernie Sanders obviously has a hidden motive / agenda, and he's not ...

sharing it obviously. How upfront and nice of him. Nothing like being forefront w/ his desires and wishes, as to why really he's staying in. Is he regretting the loss of his power? Is he regretting the former ability to sway policy in more a manner suiting his desires/platform? Who knows. Let us acknowledge that all have run a good and faithful campaign, and move on, to jointly seal the fate of the incompetent twits that are in the WH today. No more time can be wasted, as the Nation is suffering terribly at the hands of this incompetent buffoon.

I think it's time to all join together and get the thoroughly incompetent and corrupt POS and so called president out of office, before he does more damage. The republicans in the House and Senate by the way, by their silence, obviously are approving the idiot's actions. Thus, they are part of the problem too. They need to lose their majority status in the Senate, and lose more seats in the House. Let the responsible adults in the room step up, and do the job that needs to be done.

[Blue Owl]

3. C'mon Bernie just do the right thing

n/t

[Thekaspervote]

4. Yes! This country has given you so so much! It's time to repay!! Drop out Bernie

[Sloumeau]

5. Definition of "insanity": Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. :) nt

[LizBeth]

6. On FB last night an ad for Sanders saying he is skyrocketing in the polls. Money please. So pissed.

[Aquaria]

11. Typical narcissist

Seeing what he wants to see that flatters his ego. He's probably going by national polling, notoriously unreliable at this point, while exaggerating any increase in his numbers even with those dicey poll results.

National polls mean fuck all to state polls which show him behind and fading away in GA, NJ, NY, OH, PA, WI. Biden's lead in all of them is double digit. +37.2 in GA, +19.6 in NJ, +19.4 in NY, +29.5 in OH, +26.5 in PA, +15.6 in WI.

I doubt he's stupid enough to think he can beat those odds.

Which means he's not in this thing to win, but to tear down the Democratic party for rejecting him a second time.

[LizBeth]

14. It was his ad for his money. I saw survey and demised it was that survey he was talking about.

That is just a guess because when I went in to do the survey it was asking for email, for donation and would not let me go further. I wasn't giving him my email.

[Aquaria]

12. Let us know when you find the perfect candidate

Because that candidate has never has existed.

And Biden is far better than BS ever would have been. Biden at least knows how to play well with others, and isn't lazy.