About the only good things that come out of the already old Trump-Sanders "debate" in-out-in-out routine is that it could generate a slogan, Bait and switch Trump. The other good thing is it confirms the cynicism of the Sanders campaign, exposing the shocking news that Bernie Sanders is as egotistical and ready to go as low as he needs to in politics.
As I posted yesterday, it's an outrage that Sanders would even consider using the issue of women's health in a clear move to work with the massively sexist Donald Trump to attack the first woman to have won a major parties' presidential nomination. It certainly goes way, way beyond the semi-infamous finger wagging at her and cutting into her talking during the debates between them.
It is never pleasant to find out someone you held up as a sort of hero turns out to have feet of clay. But I haven't seen a politician yet who doesn't at least have that as a potential, perhaps excepting a few like John Lewis, the late Robert Drinan and one of my all time political heroes, the late Shirley Chisholm. You will note that all of them were in the House, not the Senate.
I don't know of Sanders plans on running for Senate again in two years or if he even intends to fill out his current term. I do know that his career as a hero of leftist politics is damaged, probably beyond repair. It is with me and I was a big fan of Bernie Sanders right up through February. This latest stunt, as its clear he has lost the nomination, cooperating with Donald Trump to the extent he was clearly willing to in order to attack the clear and unambiguous winner of the Democratic nomination broke the last illusion about him I might have maintained.
I will be entirely surprised if he does more than go through the merest and most perfunctory of endorsements of Hillary Clinton. After the past two days, I'll be surprised if he even does that much. I don't expect he will work for her election or make any real effort to convince his supporters to vote for her. In the cynical game he's playing he would weigh the loss of cred he has with the worst most immature and ignorant of his supporters as too high a price to pay to save the country from Trump. If he doesn't do everything in his power to support Hillary Clinton, the only person who stands between the world and a President Donald Trump, it's clear he never deserved the best of his supporters.
I don't think he will overlook the bitterness of the campaign and work for his rival's election as Hillary Clinton did in 2008 because if there's one thing this campaign has led me to believe, he doesn't have what it takes to do that. He might surprise us and if he does I will publish that I'm wrong in my suspicions, but I'm not waiting up to see it.
Bernie took Trump's bait and switch only to get switched and humiliated. It might be another thing to take some comfort in, he and his team won't be going up against him for the presidency in November. That Jeff Weaver and Tad Devine didn't see that coming should certainly cut into their business.
Democrats should never give Tad Devine another dollars worth of business. He has earned a boycott.
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Sanders also continues to strike his absurd pose on the party platform, indeed going after Barney Frank and Dan Molloy, demanding they be kicked off the rules committee and the platform committee is where he 's spending his influence these days, settling scores over a document that is entirely meaningless. I would hope that at least some of those who were put on it at his request would know better, Keith Ellison certainly should.
If a friggin' party platform is so important to Bernie Sanders you wonder why he didn't join a party before last November so he could run on one. I am stunned at how petty the pose he decided to strike on that platform is. If he had acted up to his PR image instead of the way he did since the beginning of April, Sanders would be in a far stronger position to talk terms with Hillary Clinton ON SUBSTANTIAL ISSUES. Every time he does something like this it only shows some rather amazing lack of political savvy for someone who's been a politician for four decades.
I think there are a lot of thing to learn from the rapid self-transformation of Bernie Sanders from heroic icon of the left to the angry, cranky, petty and, frankly embarrassingly spiteful figure he's become. This last Trump debate thing is painfully pathetic. I never would have wished this for the Sanders I so recently respected.
We should do whatever needs to be done to shake up the order of primaries. There is no reason for Iowa and New Hampshire to maintain their role in determining who gets the most influence at the beginning. New Hampshire has an especially mixed record. It's ridiculous that the biggest state, a state which has a population far more diverse and so far more representative of the country than the virtually lily-white North of Boston states, comes dead last in the process and has the least influence on the decision. It's absurd that one of the whitest states should have such a decisive influence on choosing the nominee for a party which wins only with the votes of members of minorities and women. Or even who won't get weeded out of the process at the beginning. If Sanders hadn't come from a neighboring state, I doubt he'd have won New Hampshire. I would say the same for my own state, Maine, especially as we retain the voter-suppressing caucus system. States should be pressured to dump caucuses, that's something that should be done as soon as possible with whatever it takes to get it done.
The left has things to learn from this, as well. Tragically, I doubt it will. The idiots who publish and write for and appear on the lefty media will see to that. I include the "new media" Cenk Uygur might serve for the poster example of that. Though I'm always ready to be pleasantly surprised, again, I'm not waiting up for it to happen.
Bernie Sanders, if he had never made this run, might end his days as a valuable Senator of the left, a gadfly afflicting the comfortable. I think his decision to run for president, to take the main national stage has exposed his flaws/ His weaknesses, his shortcomings which might have never been noticed in the Senate but have the potential to move a tragic narrative to a terrible and destructive denouement this fall. Whoever it was who decided it would be a good thing for him to make the run for the nomination set him up. I suspect that person is Bernie Sanders. He doesn't seem to be big on self-reflection and questioning his own motives. They might have saved this election for the left.
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