Senator Bernie Sanders started a revolution of thought that might have made him the only remaining candidate that was sought out for the post. His poll numbers justify that idea thoroughly in that no candidate comes close to competing in a head to head with Bernie. If the real reason that Mr. Sanders remains in the game, despite the hoops and hurdles he must navigate to win, is because he is the only candidate that can soundly secure the presidency, he is doing a noble thing.
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| Can Bernie actually run as a Democrat but preside as a Socialist? Who becomes a part of his bill making coalition? |
Noble because campaigning is grueling on candidate and family. Any real reason to doubt your prospects is a real reason to spare your family the strain and struggle of fighting from behind. That is the reason most candidates bow out expeditiously. At some point when fighting from behind, you are mathematically needing to eat the whole pie- or most of it- while your opponent continues to get their fair share of bites.
Like a puppy in a litter, you simply can't eat fast enough to get all of the food, even if you are the bully of the bunch.
Sanders is not a bully, but he is trying to bully his way into a process that wasn't made for bullying. In the end, he must convince the superdelegates to change their mind about Hillary and to cast their support behind the best chance Dem's have at winning.
Hillary can claim a lot of positives, but her approval rating and head to head polling against Donald are not among them. She is stuck between needing Bernie and his support, and needing him to shut up already at the same time. Without the volume of voters that Bernie can inspire to turnout on her behalf, the republican party might have just enough Obama anger to energize their way back into the white house.
If the real mission is to simply keep Donald Trump away from the presidency, I'm starting to get confused by Bernie and his pathway problems. Not the problems he'll have procuring the lion share of the remaining electorate just to block Hillary's path, but the problem he and his surrogates keep having and declaring with the process and it's rigging's.
I hate to find myself lambasting my brother Bernie once again because we Socialist really do need to stick together. Not that we are a dying breed. On the contrary. Capitalism is simply way too notorious for attracting the slime of the world for any clear eyed young adult to view it without some skepticism. Old folks like myself have been fairly brainwashed into our position on Socialism, so there really isn't a lot you can do to change that. We grew up with parents whose parents fought the last great war in this world, and they left that experience thoroughly convinced that we must draw a line.
Socialism bad. Capitalism good.
Our generations have the images of Mikhail Gorbachev and Nikita Khrushchev on the television screen and magazines. TIME magazine had me fairly convinced that the odd birthmark on Gorbachev's head was surely as sign of something evil. When President Ronald Reagan declared that he must tear down that wall, the world came to some odd sense of comfort that the age old Cold War had finally come to an end.
In reality, our nuclear race between the former soviet union was not a Cold War at all. In reality, the Cold War was always one that we've been fighting with ourselves. The fear of the rise of the proletariat has been embedded into the psyche of old folks like myself and older. Our generations read Karl Marx as a warning of something demonic and dangerous, not as a warning of what happens when Capitalism is not given the kind of balance that it demands.
Bernie Sanders is nothing more than the voice of the proletariat that Marx promised. And surely, just as forewarned, they are fed up with economic imbalance and want to point a finger and find a fix. If you're looking rather closely, Trump has quite a few proletariat's himself, except they are pointing their fingers at different causes while complaining about the EXACT SAME PROBLEM.
Some think Donald Trump can fix it while others believe he'd be more of the same since he's been rubbing elbows with the same candidates that we've grown weary of trusting. Candidates like Hillary Clinton in fact. She is a notorious insider who has just a few points of favorability (42% versus 39% ) over Trump, probably only because she doesn't intentionally offend people on a weekly basis- but that is the only reason.
As a result of these dismal polls on the two remaining front runners, Bernie Sanders now has a really interesting decision that he needs to make for himself and his so-called party, seeing as how he's Democratic Socialist running under the Democrat flag. Sanders must fully legitimize the manner in which his party chooses a candidate and legitimately use it to whoop Hillary's ass in California and give the party a SERIOUS reason to believe that he can secure enough of the kind of voters that represent most of America.
Sanders has won plenty of state caucuses to fully justify remaining in this race. What he hasn't won is more primary voters than Hillary or diverse populations like New York or California, places vital to victory for any Democrat candidate.
As a result of what he's doing absent the tailwind to justify doing it, the process itself has been brought into question- by Bernie himself no less. Process, meaning those superdelegates that are free to do what they want. They (superdelegates) must want Bernie over Hillary for Bernie to be the Democrats nominee. But Sanders does not need them or any party just to secure more votes in a general election than Trump or Hillary. The numbers say that he could do that now, yet not from the inside. Bernie must come to grips withe the fact that either it's okay that superdelegates exist (without them, Trump might have run as the Democrat he truly is), or they need to go away right away and not be courted as a legitimate pathway to the presidency for Sanders.
The real point is this.
What if you actually win Bernie? In essence, you will be declaring that an unfair game just unfairly flipped in your favor as you proceed to happily use it to achieve your presidential aspirations. Will you lambaste it similarly if you actually win? In fact, by courting superdelegates while besmirching the process, you are offending them and asking for their support all in the same campaign speech. The integrity to insist that a system is totally unfair and must be changed, but then say their remains a pathway to make it work for you- so stay with me supporters- is beyond odd, it is disingenuous and destructive to the party you are asking for support from.
Bernie is the first candidate in the history of our political system with a legitimate shot at winning the popular vote over both of the two-party options, forcing the Supreme Court to figure out what the hell happens next when the laws are written to cater to the these two parties against the rise of another.
By all means, Bernie Sanders should press on to the convention and make his claim for the portion of delegates (super or not) that he truly deserves. Trump and Clinton are just as flawed as the numbers say they are and every attempt to tell US that they are actually something different and better than what WE already know of the two is kind of pissing me off.
Yet, I'm much more enraged by my brother Bernie who wants his cake and wants to eat it too. When Marx described the rise of the proletariat, he might not have anticipated the two-party counter efforts from those who've feared their arrival ever since he warned of it. Like it or not, the Two-party system was, and is, made to resist that rise. Either accept it and overtake it nonetheless, or shut the hell up and run as a third party candidate.
Stated more succinctly. Be a damn socialist Bernie or not. You can't run as a democrat and not accept the full implications of that choice. Since I am totally convinced that Sanders has not the courage to actually blow the whole thing apart and run third party, I am a mad Socialist who wishes he'd just shut up and stop helping Trump.
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