Prediction, if by some miracle Bernie Sanders is the nominee and he becomes president, within nine months of him being sworn in many of his most ardent supporters will be screaming "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you" like Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, as he fails to fulfill their fantasies or what have become their fantasies in the months between their imagined outcomes on election night and the reality that he faces as a governing instead of a theoretical president. On the play-left, where so much of his most ardent support is found, they will turn on a dime, or a tweet, a blog-post generally not being sufficiently short enough to attract their fullest attention. His past supporters will divide between those who love to hate him, and the online attention that gets them, and the true believers, as is the case in the past, ardent supporters of another messianic figure, Barack Obama.
If he is elected many foreign entities and governments will immediately and forcefully push to find out what his response will be, taking full advantage of his specialization in domestic issues and his untried thinking on foreign affairs. Other forces, especially the oligarchy and financial elite will do the same here, not to mention various factions and the thugs who are in the Congress and the Judicial branch of the government. Some of that will come from Democrats, who will feel little connection to him. But it is certain to come from Republicans who will be looking to destroy him as they tried to destroy Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, in the same and newer ways as they find and create opportunities to do that. They will not be bound by reality, look at how much they made of phony issues such as Barack Obama's entirely conventional and unremarkable real birth certificate. The free press and electronic media will be carrying whatever lies they come up with with the same enthusiasm with which they carried every lie told about Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
A president Bernie Sanders would soon find that he has even fewer people to have his back than Barack Obama did. Whatever you can say about the self-imposed guarantees of failure that Barack Obama is responsible for - and some of those are what motivated Bernie Sanders to run - he faced enormous obstacles imposed by the media and the Republican-fascists who the media have mostly favored for the past fifty years. I doubt that an independent socialist like Sanders will find his nominees, perhaps not even the safest, most centrist ones, will have an easy time at confirmation. And that's just the start of it.
And that is not taking into account what a nominee Bernie Sanders will face if he is serious about trying to become president, a spectacularly wild bet which, until recently, I didn't think he was unrealistic enough to seriously consider making. Considering the odds against him winning, in the face of a media which can, overwhelmingly, be counted on to try to destroy him, it is an inane bet to make. If he gets out of it with a lost nomination and, by a lesser miracle, Hillary Clinton wins, she will be the one who faces all of the above as she has for the past thirty years and longer. He gets to go back to the Senate and he might, might have shown her that she has to do better than Barack Obama's right of the middle, corporate enabling policies, if she wants to have a chance at gaining or retaining congress and having a second term. Though that is a bet, as well.
If he gets the nomination and loses to the present Republican Party, all is lost and it will be on him and his supporters who have lost it. No "she ran a lousy campaign" will explain that away, as Southern Beale said it will discredit the left, entirely, any chance of any influence on any aspect of policy will be deader and buried deeper than it is now. And, I will say this as a past admirer of Senator Sanders, he will have earned the ignominy that will come to him. I used to have some, conditional respect for Ralph Nader, though I never considered him as anyone remotely as deserving of respect as I did Senator Sanders. If Sanders turn into another Eugene McCarthy or Ralph Nader a malignant ghost, railing against the Democratic party that failed to sufficiently appreciate him, that would be sad, though we might be too angry with him to notice it. I don't think that will happen but if he blows this election to Trump or Cruz or whoever the Republican put up, he's earned the contempt that will come to him.
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