His Campaign This Year Has Over Exposed Bernie Sanders' Limits As He Lets His Most Responsible Supporters Down

Bernie Sanders served a really important function as both a member of the House of Representatives and as a Senator, as a gadfly and a, well, frankly, a scold.    No one with both a rational mind and a moral sense thinks that the members of Congress and the Executive aren't in great need of constant prodding to do what's right.  Bernie Sanders played a valuable if not nearly effective enough role doing that but that isn't what's needed now as he is clearly facing the fact that he is not going to be the Democratic nominee for president.  I think it's clear he has no idea how to do what he needs to do now, now it's time for people to scold him in another direction.

Yesterday he was asked what he's going to do about his supporters who declare they will vote for Donald Trump.  His answer was appalling, considering it was the end of May in an election year.

Sanders was asked what his message would be to his supporters who say they’d rather vote for Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, than Hillary Clinton, who is by far the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

“Wrong question,” Sanders replied. “It’s not, ‘What is my message to them?’ It’s not my job to think that I can reach out and say to millions, ‘Do what I want you to do.’ That’s not the way it works. The question that should be asked is, ‘Why?’ … How come you have millions of people who are prepared to vote for him and not Hillary Clinton? Why is that?

Considering the role he's played, especially since the end of March in distorting Hillary Clinton's record - not that far from his when they were in the Senate together, the best period of making a comparison - that's a totally inadequate response from Bernie Sanders, newly self-minted Democrat and career politician.  IT IS HIS JOB TO LEAD HIS SUPPORTERS WHO HE BELIEVED AS OF YESTERDAY HE COULD TELL WHAT TO DO WHEN HE WANTED THEM TO VOTE FOR HIM.

And there is a good reason he should take the bother to do that, the best of reasons.  Because just as you can compare the record of Senator Hillary Clinton to Senator Bernie Sanders'  you can compare the intentions of Candidate Clinton to Candidate Trump and the Democratic Party to the Republican Party AND THE FEW PERCENTAGE POINTS OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SANDERS AND CLINTON TURNS INTO A CHASM BETWEEN CLINTON AND TRUMP, WHICH MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

Sanders gave half of that case he should have made yesterday, pointing out how dangerous Donald Trump is without being able to bring himself to point out that just as Trump is a disaster, Hillary Clinton is not.

“I think Trump is incredibly irresponsible and an incredibly dangerous person,” the Vermont senator and Democratic presidential hopeful told Rolling Stone earlier this month in an interview in Oregon. “A man who is primarily a showman and an opportunist and an egomaniac. A man who has already significantly damaged this country with his attacks on Mexicans and Muslims and women and veterans and African-Americans and so forth. Very dangerous man.”

Bernie Sanders and his campaign, his campaign staff, Weaver, Devine, Biggs, his surrogates Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Michael Moore, Cenk Uygur, etc. are the ones who demonized Hillary Clinton, reinforcing decades old Republican talking points and cabloid smears.  It's no wonder the people in their late teens and early 20s bought the Sanders tactic of doing that because they grew up on it, hearing it coming out of the TV from the time they were on baby bottles.   For Sanders to now say it isn't his role to point out the decisive difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump which makes it an insane idea to vote for Trump because Sanders won't be on the ballot is grotesquely irresponsible and epically childish.    If his ego can't lead him to do what every other grown-up rival for the Democratic nomination has done before, some of them clearly better candidates than the one who got the nomination,  Mo Udall, Tom Harkin, Howard Dean, Shirley Chisholm,  he was never presidential material to start with.  Most Senators aren't.

When the country is in as much trouble as it is, when it is likely that Donald Trump could become president, that's not the time to inflate and play up things you don't like about the only person who stands between us and a Trump presidency.   No politician, including Bernie Sanders is running for canonization as a saint, they are running as a flawed individual who is asking for a job that will include massive and serious moral compromises because that is the nature of worldly government. The fantasy that human governments are ever going to be anything but is why the left has lost constantly in demanding what would have to be a kingdom not of this world.  Considering how many of those are atheists, all they prove is that Jesus and his followers who wrote down what he said had a more realistic grasp of that than they do.

I wouldn't have believed as recently as this March that Bernie Sanders would have fallen so low in my regard as he has in the past two months.  I went to my caucus prepared to stand up for him or Hillary Clinton, as I've mentioned it was hearing many of his supporters talking among themselves which led me to not do that, I didn't want to lend my support to encourage the kind of insanely irresponsible thinking of some of them.   I knew that many, almost certainly most of his supporters weren't that irrational but the ones who are are the Bernie or Busters, the ones who believe a Trump presidency would be better than that of Hillary Clinton are the very definition of why the left can't do a single positive thing in politics these days.