What Southern Beale said:
Bernie Sanders’ supporters need to stop and consider for a moment what a losing Sanders campaign will mean for the progressive movement. If Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee and loses to a Republican — any Republican, but dear God imagine if he loses to a crackpot like Trump or Cruz — what will this mean for progressives, the progressive agenda, and the progressive “wish list”?
I can tell you what it will mean. It will mean the death of the progressive movement for an entire generation.
Sanders is campaigning as the “outsider” — I know it’s his “brand,” it’s the thing Sanders’ supporters like about him. But when you’re an outsider and you lose, you’re irrelevant...
... A losing Bernie Sanders general election campaign will send the message that progressive ideas are losing ideas and progressive activists are failures. Nobody will listen to progressives on anything. We will not have a place at the table and we will be shut out of the conversation.
Something to think about. Because if Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee? His supporters better get their asses in gear and make damn sure he wins, or else you’re staring at your own irrelevance for the next 30 years.
And here's my comment to someone who answered my comment at her site about what the general election would be like if Sanders gets the nomination :
Given the history of such candidacies which were proposed watershed moments, Obama’s from what I’d call the center to right of the so-called middle is the only one which has gained office. You have to gain office to make it real instead of a failure.
If there were ten Berne Sanders style socialists in the Senate I’d say it was a realistic prospect, as it is I don’t think even those aligned with the Social Democratic faction of the Democratic house caucus are all on board with the Sanders campaign.
Recent electoral success is a bell weather of change in the near future and I don’t see that for Sanders. He would need such people in the congress to do any of what he proposes to do, if, by some miracle, he was elected he would have to withstand a reaction that would make that to the pathetic programs of Obama’s first two years seem like a mild breeze.
The ice cream millionaire Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's is being quoted as saying he wouldn't support Hillary Clinton's candidacy if his guy isn't the nominee chosen. I confess that as this goes on they are, for me, the face of the Saunders campaign, the ones who seem to embody the die-hard BernieOrBust people, people who would not, really, be the ones to suffer the most from a Trump or Cruz presidency, a Supreme Court dominated by their appointees.
The Democratic base needs to eat its vegetables before it gorges on dessert. I used to think Bernie Sanders understood that, I hope he starts serving them to his all too often puerile base of support. He can start with Ben Cohen.
The failure of McGovern and of the 18 year olds, who first got to vote for POTUS in '72, to turn out and change the political landscape as promised (and they haven't shown up since to do anything so radical) led to Carter, and then Reagan/Buxh for 12 years.
ReplyDeleteBernie's candidacy would be McGovern redux. I'm mostly afraid people would stay home in droves, unwilling to vote for Bernie or (most likely) Trump.
And, of course, as proof that politics is our secular religion (well, for the most fanatical), the Bernie supporters who won't vote for Hillary won't do so because that would sully their sacred vote. It must, above all things, be kept holy, pure, untarnished.
With friends like these.....
I had a lot more respect for Saunders before this thing started the longer it goes on the less I think of him.
DeleteIf, by some miracle he won, there would definitely be a reaction or, more likley, a mere failure to show up at the mid-term election, a replay of 2010. The ability of the play-left to not learn from things like the Bush II catastrophe, the idiocy of 2010 if matched with another catastrophe of 2016 would lead me to, more than ever, conclude that they have to be booted out of any left that has any hope to succeed. We'd have to call it something other than "the left". They would be welcome to stick with that dead brand name if they kill it.
Ben Cohen makes me glad that I'm excluded from being a customer of his brand by lactose intolerance. I never went in for the multi-flavor inner-kiddie marketed kinds of ice cream, anyway.
The first Democratic debate I saw, I was convinced Sanders belonged in the Senate, Hillary in the White House.
DeleteWell, of the choices on offer.
I haven't changed my mind.
"Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's is being quoted as saying he wouldn't support Hillary Clinton's candidacy if his guy isn't the nominee chosen."
ReplyDeleteExcept apparently that quote was doctored. But thanks for playing.
The last thing I saw said that the "quote" that I DIDN'T RESPOND TO, the one saying he'd support Trump if Bernie Sanders didn't win, was the one that was doctored. The one I responded to said that he wouldn't support Hillary Clinton, which is not the same thing, though I can well imagine the distinction going well past your reading level.
DeleteI'm telling you, Simps, you should get one of those old SRA reading kits and go through it. It being you, you start at the earliest color category and bravely, slowly work your way up. You would lie less often if you could understand something longer than one of Duncan's virtual robo-posts.
One of his longer efforts was pointed out to me a few days back, the one where he said he didn't tell "the left" what to do. No, I'm sure he doesn't, that would be too much like work and it might reduce his take of Bezos bucks and ad revenue as even more of his pathetic rump "community" hitched up their pinafores and went off in a huff. I mean, he's got people like Erin and Stoat to do that for him, now that those like Tlaz, Msinformed and you have gotten the Gomez, Ralphie faction banned.