The Democratic Party establishment must protect the party from non-Democrats who sweep in to try to use caucuses and open primaries to try to steal the nomination of a party they are not real members of. With this morning's announcement by Bernie Sanders, who I'm not sure has yet rejoined the party he abandoned months after joining it FOR THE FIRST TIME for 2016, it's clear that allowing people like him to do this is bad for the party and bad for the country. Bernie Sanders, 77, has no chance of winning the election, he has little chance of winning the nomination, especially given the other, real, life-long Democrats who have announced already. What he has a chance of doing is acting as a spoiler who will get Trump reelected by splitting the opposition vote, that's a pattern all too familiar with the darlings of the "real left" who are mostly affluent people who are in the business of suckering those who they can to defeating the best who have a chance of winning elections.
The Democratic Party should adopt rules that:
1. No one who has not been a declared member of the Democratic Party for all of the eight years before the election they would run in is eligible for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
2. Delegates to the National Convention chosen by open primaries and caucuses will not be eligible to cast votes for the presidential nomination.
3. The Democratic Party will run primaries by mail-in votes with only Democrats who have been declared members of the party for the year before the nomination contest in states which hold open primaries or caucuses - actually the Democratic Party should conduct its own nominations based on mail-in ballots in line with the way those have been successfully conducted in states in the past.
Democrats have to protect the party from outside interference by the likes of the Green Party and, now, sadly, the Bernie Sanders cult. There is something deeply wrong with a "left" which has a fifty year record of doing this kind of thing. From Al Lowenstein's disastrous "Dump Johnson" effort and Eugene McCarthy's many stunt candidacies, through the sandbagging of Jimmy Carter resulting in Reagan, to Ralph Nader and the history of the Green-Republican spoiler phenomenon, this has been a serious problem for not only the Democratic Party but for American liberalism, the real left, the one which has a possibility of gaining office and making real change in real life.
There are so many people already running for the Dem nomination Sanders realistically has no chance. This is a vanity project for him, which makes him no better than Trump (Trump's gotta be good for something). But I agree with you: he shouldn't even be allowed to run for the nomination.
ReplyDeleteHe reminds me of Herman Cain and Alan Keyes. I suspect there is a profit making motive for his wife and campaign staff as well as his ego. I haven't listened to any of the interviews yet but if someone doesn't ask him soon about his refusal to be a member of the Democratic Party EXCEPT when he is running for president and why any sane political party would allow it to be hijacked it only shows how much such rules as I proposed need to be adopted.
Delete