The one thing I do keep wondering about is what happened to Bernie Sanders. Before this campaign, he was a gadfly, he was a critic of the system, and he was a man of strong principles. He still is, but he's also obviously very, very bitter. I wonder if all this was worth it for him? By all objective measures he did way better than anyone expected and had far more influence than anyone thought he would, and he should feel good about that. Instead, he seems more angry and resentful with every passing day.
Drum is downright conciliatory as to what might have made him turn as he did, especially after his performance in the Daily News interview, that last one ismy point, not Drum's.
That's what's happened this time, and I suppose there's nothing unusual about it. I don't even blame anyone in particular. Maybe Hillary's team played too rough. Maybe Bernie's team is too thin-skinned. I just don't know. But it's sort of painful to see a good person like Bernie turned into such a sullen and resentful man. And doubly painful to see him take his followers down that path too.
If Hillary Clinton's team played too rough and it was too much for Sanders and his supporters, what do they think Trump and the Republicans would have done to him if he got the nomination? As far as I can see, they've pulled just about every possible punch they could have taken at him. I would imagine they did their opposition research and know everything that the Republicans would have thrown at him but which they didn't. I'm sure this little blast from Bernie's past would have been among those things raised by the Republicans in the fall.
I don't think Sanders' forty-four year old Freudian moment would play all that well in a presidential campaign of 2016 when your opponent is a blatant misogynist. Believe me, it wouldn't count that it was '72 and Bernie Sanders was relatively young, not when the Republicans and their cabloid and hate-radio megaphones got done with it. Look at what they did to Howard Dean's amplified howl. I'm sure the Republicans have a whole host of such writings, statements, declarations and associations from Sanders' past available. They wouldn't have to look too hard, I found this in a pro-Bernie piece which is being recycled at Mother Jones for who can fathom what purpose right now*. I'm sure he having written stuff like that might have worked for him in 1970s Vermont in a way it would not have worked most places. Even in Northern New England we know Vermont changed drastically in that decade in ways that the other two North of Boston states haven't.
Bernie Sander isn't stupid. He knew all those years and decades he was never going to be president, something he doesn't seem realistic about this spring. I'll be he never really believed he was going to be a Senator for lots of it and he didn't have to watch himself. And I'm just as certain that Hillary Clinton, even not expecting to be a presidential contender, as a woman, knew that everything she said and did could and would be used against her. I think Bernie Sanders might be having a little taste of what it would be like in a way that his experience in Vermont politics didn't prepare him for. And if he can't take the soft-pitch that Hillary Clinton has been sending his way, he'll never stand up against what she's stood up to for the past three decades.
Drum concluded with this:
Usually these things fade with a bit of time. Politics is politics, after all. But for Bernie, it's always been more than politics. I wonder if he's ever going to get over this?
If Bernie Sanders doesn't want to go down in history as the man who enabled Donald Trump to win the presidency, if he wants his movement to have something other than that to its (dis)credit, it's through Hillary Clinton being elected with as strong a hand in congress as it is possible for her to have. But he's going to have to show that he's a mature enough politician and leader to get enough of his followers to support her. I wonder if his refusal to do that is because he doesn't really believe he's got the ability to do that, that his leadership is so symbolic and so weak that he doesn't have leadership of his own movement. I think it's time to call his bluff on that point. If he doesn't lead his own supporters in that direction, right now, his movement is already finished.
I wonder if Sanders doesn't already believe he doesn't have the power to lead his supporters away from disaster.
* They're recycling more than one months pro-Sanders piece at Mother Jones right now. This one about Jeff Weaver and the rest of the Sanders team leaders was on its masthead this morning.
Gotta say, I didn't get past the first two paragraphs of that image you inserted. I don' know what he was writing about, and I didn't want to know.
ReplyDeleteYeesh.
Howard Dean told NPR yesterday Sanders is a poor loser. He excused it in light of the prize Sanders almost won (he really didn't come close to winning it, Dean was being overly kind), but it reflects very poorly on a 74 year old man that he's behaving like a child threatening to take his ball and go home because he isn't winning the game. Sanders' supporters keep talking about the movement he's started, but Sanders is clearly only interested in boosting Sanders. He's not an organizer, he's not a collaborator, he's not someone who works well with others.
And his movement, like the third party Ross Perot started, will disappear without any impact at all. He won't reform the Democratic party; he won't even alter it slightly. For better or worse, he's done.
All I can think is that the idiots in the la-la land play-left of San Francisco figured that piece of tripe was kew-el and showed how kew-el Sanders was. Anyone with a working mind would know it was election year poison. I'm really off of the lefty magazines, they are serial enablers of fascism.
DeleteMaybe Sanders was always like this and it just didn't show up as he was a House member and a Senator from a small, out of the way state who had no leadership role, at all. I have the past pieces I wrote to show that I was one of his fans but he's lost me. I admit I am on my way to despising him as much as I do Ralph Nader and Eugene McCarthy, and for most of the same reasons.
NYT has confirmed the conspiracy theories are coming from the top down, not the bottom up.
ReplyDeleteThis is not going to end well.