Well, for a start, if he's still a Democrat then he's "Democrats". Other than that the short answer is a lot less than it owed him at the beginning of March.
I would like to see the Bernie Sanders supporters among Democrats have major influence on a. economic policy, b. trade, c. commerce, d environmental issues. And I would hope that would include a veto on any appointees from the disastrous, incompetent in-bed-with-the-kleptocrats Geithner-Summers style of economic advisers.
I suppose that e. would be on nominees to courts. I would like a Hillary Clinton to, most vitally urgent of all, appoint only those to the court who are firm opponents of corporate person hood, the equation of speech with money and the preferential option for the filthy rich and other such people.
f. would be on an attorney general who doesn't hold with the Ivy-Wall Street legal dogma that the filthy rich are too big to jail.
I am hearing the dead-enders talk about "process reform" but, frankly, unless they are willing to get rid of the grotesquely undemocratic caucuses and the anti-Democratic open primaries, I'm not greatly enthusiastic about giving up on the super delegates just yet. Those were invented to fix problems with the nominating process that are not fixed and, as can be seen in the Republican nomination, they might be able to pull the party back from a fit of insanity that can nominate a Donald Trump with a Ted Cruz coming in second. Of course the real dead-ender aren't really interested in "process reform" they are interested in destroying the Democratic Party. I think a lot of them are Greens - I know a lot of them at our caucus were because I heard them talking about it - and a number of them are Republican agit-trolls who are just trying to ratfuck this years election for the Republicans.
But all of those things are things that the liberals in the Democratic Party might have gotten a long time ago if so many on the alleged left hadn't turned out to be so unreliable and unrealistic in previous elections. The United States has never had a far-left president and the prospects of us ever having one are vanishingly improbable. A real left will work with the best deal it can get, not pie in the sky that it will never get.
I think Bernie Sanders should be asked, for once, what he owes the Democrats who have allowed him to declare, at the age of 74, that he is suddenly a Democrat who deserves to have the nomination of a party he never joined before then. Democrats have made him far more famous than he was before, now, nearing the end of his political career and might provide him with the high-point of his influence if he and his alleged supporters don't continue to blow it. He's blowing it even now. I wish the Democratic Party owed him a hell of a lot more right now than it does, and that's his choice.
Process reform? So Bernie can win next time? And if there is no Bernie, do we reform again so the next guy could have won?
ReplyDeleteThe problem is not in the process.
I think process liberals are the doorway to futile let's pretend liberals. I think there must be a rule that when the issues don't work for you, you argue process.
DeleteI do think it's time to ask Bernie Sanders what he owes the Democrats who let him pull his stunt nomination run. He won't answer the question but it's a good question.
Part of the process they want to change is Super Tuesday, because the only real Democrats are the ones who voted for Bernie.
ReplyDeleteSo say they manage to shift the calendar so all the states Bernie won come first. What then? Big Mo? Last guy to proclaim Big Mo was GHWBush, in New Hampshire.
He became Reagan's VP, he had so much momentum.
What they want is to rig the party so Bernie's voters win, and the rest of the party sucks it. Which would be great if you want the Dems to be a minor third-party which is pure but never wins any elected office, even dogcatcher in Cut 'n' Shoot, Texas.
Children throwing a temper tantrum is all they are.
I've read some wishful thinking that Hillary might, possibly flip Texas. I don't know how realistic that is but I am certain that if it happens the Bernie Bots and his supporters in the lefty media will claim that it's due to him.
DeleteAs I said, unless we get rid of the caucuses and fix the calendar, including getting Iowa and New Hampshire out of first place in favor of some states more representative of the Democratic base, no dice on any of the rest of it.
This season, especially the Republicans' dilemma has given me an appreciation for the super delegates that I never had before.
The Greens have fevered dreams of drafting Bernie as this years Nader, who will, like Nader, slay the Democratic dragon and lead them to electoral relevancy, nay supremacy. Those kiddies love to play at politics and revolution and utopia. They'll never grow up, other than a relative few. There is something rather sad about seeing people in their seventies and eighties who still cling to the third party cults, pretending that their mastery of its ersatz wisdom gives them merit of some kind. It's like the loonies of the Left Forum who are still calling for Leninist revolution when Marxism is as dead an ideology as there ever has been. Sometimes it's exactly the same thing.
Flip Super Tuesday so the South votes when CA did, and CA votes when Super Tuesday falls, and you get the same outcome.
DeleteThe problem for Sanders wasn't the calendar, it was the country. This is why Sanders dismissed the South: they dismissed him first. They don't want to change the system, they want to rig it so it produces the outcome they want.
Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?
It's especially ironic in that his loss in his native New York was the tipping point that he couldn't overcome.
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