General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: How the extreme left gave us Nixon, Bush and now Trump [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)BTW, it's bullshit to say that any significant number of Sanders supporters only voted for Bernie because they didn't want to see a woman as president, or because they didn't care about black or brown or gay people.
Hillary carried those demographics Having been campaigning for their support for eight years, she was always going to. The fact that she had their support does not mean Bernie had no business running at all.
I accept that Hillary won, and campaigned for her all fall, but it's finally time to admit that Bernie's campaign was never about sexism or support for white supremacy. The claim that it was always a slur.
Bernie got the votes he got solely because the people who backed him(a lot of whom weren't men, or straight, or white)thought Hillary was too far to the right. There was no other reason. His campaign was not an exercise in white privilege.
If Joe Biden had run and Hillary hadn't, his policies would have been identical to Hillary's, and everybody who voted for Bernie would STILL have voted for Bernie.
The primaries are over. Neither Bernie nor Hillary will ever seek the presidency again. Why are you trying to keep this pointless division between Sanders and Clinton people alive? Both groups are needed if we're to win in 2018 and 2020.
And the issue is not about carrying white voters overall. That's never going to happen and nobody is calling or even secretly wishing for the party to stop speaking out against bigotry. The issue was connecting with working class voters on economic issues, and on getting the people who didn't vote because they thought NO party cared about their situation, i.e., the poor of all races, to believe that we will do something meaningful to help them, and then actually doing that.
It's not about being George Wallace...it's about being Bobby Kennedy.