The fact that you can’t see an opportunity to enact progressive legislation doesn’t mean that such an opportunity doesn’t exist. And as for moving the party in the right direction, you’re not going to accomplish that by waging a campaign of butt hurt. As someone else pointed out yesterday, any “progressive” who votes against Hillary out of protest is a petulant child who deserves to be governed by Donald Trump and an extremist republican agenda. However, the rest of us don’t deserve that.
Exactly.
Not to attack the poster you responded to personally, but frankly, this idea that is popular among many radical progressives that it’s more important to move the party in the ‘right’ direction is incomprehensibly illogical. Here we have an opportunity to have real power. Here Sanders progressives have an opportunity to have real influence. And yet here they are seriously considering whether it’s better to wait and risk reversing not just 8 years but possibly decades of progressive legislation, in order to have ideological alignment within the democratic party. That is beyond foolish. And I’m sorry, but it really does reflect poorly on Sanders and his movement. I really can’t see a President Sanders accomplishing anything significant for this reason.
What’s alarming is that not only does Sanders not know everything that he thinks he does, he seemingly doesn’t want to know. Take the example of criticizing Hillary Clinton for her serving on the boards of Wal-Mart and the idea that it’s somehow bad to have any kind of association with a Fortune 500 company. I suppose that in Sanders’ eyes, it’s better to know nothing. Ignorance of how corporate America and how businesses actually function is strength. Well, sorry, ignorance is not strength. Ignorance has a price. Ask the employees and students of Burlington College.
I still don’t see how doing something you know will help Trump win helps progressive causes more than having a Democrat in the White House. It’s all based on speculation, guesswork, and hope. Nobody with this point of view has been able to articulate a coherent reasoning NOT based on the aforementioned speculation, guesswork, and hope. Why should I believe your predictions of how the Democratic Party or voter populace “will” react? Just because you’re right doesn’t mean you’ll win, and I don’t see how you win by sitting back and doing nothing, or actively working against the party that at least partially agrees with you.
And as someone who recently attended the wedding of an old friend to his longtime boyfriend, I’m a little offended that their ability to do so somehow doesn’t matter.
I still want to see the stupid giant ball of string. 
(I’m easily amused.)
At which point he would largely lose credibility. The Anyone But Clinton vote–pro-labor, anti-free-trade, anti-war, Occupy-sympathetic, ideologically progressive and sick to death of being taken for granted and sold out every time–really isn’t about him; rather he is a vehicle for it.
Well, that’s what a revolution is, no?
If only, Ms. Foran. If only.
Mosier, you grip those polls like they’re a life preserver on the Titanic. What you clearly don’t get is that Bernie has a lot of shit in his past, too, and the Pubbies and Trump haven’t even touched him. There’s a reason for that; they want him criticizing Hillary. Bernie’s advantage would evaporate if they did turn on him.
And, bottom line, it matters not one whit. You can argue until you’re blue in the face, +300 delegates and +3 million votes trumps it big time. Bernie’s not turning the supers. Deal with it.
We don’t have a complete version of Medicare. Oh, I know there’s a program only for the quite elderly called Medicare, but that’s not what LBJ’s original proposal was.
Is the fact that even now we’re told to buy our own insurance and thank the Democratic Party for the privilege, instead of actually having a real Medicare system–is that partly because of Hillarycare? Probably…not so much. Hillarycare was a dead letter: a sick joke, despised by all quarters.
But it is the way it is because of Democrats who decided to be conservative on certain issues, and to talk about progress when they needed votes, all the while halting actual progress.
And what’s hilarious is that in the end, because they drank the Free Trade Kool-Aid, they ended up being not conservative enough for the working-class base of FDR’s coalition. The lifelong yellow-dog Democrats Hillary is counting on to win, where are they? They’ve been voting for the GOP since 1994. Gingrich gave them a contract. Clinton-style Dems only promise that they will deal with Republicans, but offer no “deal” to the common man.
By November, it won’t matter. The Democrats very likely have run out of wins on the backs of suckers. Finally, they can join the Whigs on the ashheap. I feel sorry for Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon Johnson; they tried to make a credible populist/progressive party out of the legacies of Jackson and the other racist jackasses. But the present crop of nincompoops? The Clintons can burn; the likes of Grijalva can peel off into a Progressive Party, or go down with the “Clindenburg.”
Sounds like a strictly Republican fantasy to me. The Dems aren’t disappearing, I’m not so sorry to tell you.
So, we need to woo you so you won’t run to a Dick Nixon as in 1972? That’s your position?
The Democratic base that voted for Nixon? They are basically the GOP base now. Or Trump’s base, more likely. (And yes, that probably means this election is already lost to the party of Jackson. Just be glad that Bernie and Hillary ended up fighting over who got to lose to Trump instead of who got to lose to Cruz.)
The Democrats since 2003 have had one big giant faction they have had to woo or lose everything. That was the anti-war vote. And the Democrats sold out the anti-war vote, and they will lose henceforth until they fade from the scene. (The Democrats will fade from the scene, I mean. The anti-war voters will largely survive the present party.)
Your “mainstream Democrats” are a permanent minority on their own. But hey, you got to keep innocent men in Gitmo and murder that Muslim preacher. Was it worth it?
This is literally the first time I have heard this, but OK, sure, there are presumably several such persons.
Do we have stats on how those numbers compare to people who preferred Bernie but were convinced that only Mrs Clinton was electable, and so voted for her? Or to those who are Bernie or Bust?
Even given that we have so little chance against a party with the wisdom and intelligence to nominate Donald Trump, would you mind if we at least go through the motions of some sort of resistance?
Mosier,
Thank you for the response. First, let me just try to make sure I’m understanding your position.
You believe that Clinton having garnered a sizable amount of declared superdelegate support before the primary voting began caused support to coalesce behind her that was not already there, and that such clearly handicapped Sanders from gaining traction, as say evidenced by his performance in New Hampshire. And you (seriously) believe that Clinton is winning because the DNC cheated on her behalf.
You believe that hypothetical general election head to heads in which still more thought of as “none of the above” and never seriously Swiftboated Sanders does better than Clinton means that a majority of American voters agree not only with your agenda but with what should be prioritized.
Okay. If so, you are entitled to your beliefs. I will respond to the following though:
IMHO the group you call progressives are a much smaller group than you think they are and excludes many who share many (although of course not all) of the same long term goals. The group you call progressives are, like the PUMAs before them, a loud extreme group that ultimately does not matter to the election. And like the Tea Party that are trying to emulate are more harm than good.
My belief is that this election could go anywhere from ending up with a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate with a House that is closely divided, to a President Trump with a GOP congress approving a host of Clarence Thomases and Scalia wannabees to the SCOTUS who will be there for many decades, not only undoing all the good that Obama has done, but setting this country and world back many many decades.
I believe that the cost of having the support of those you call progressives highly significantly increases the latter outcome over the former. Pandering to extremists who more often than not can’t be arsed to vote even in Presidential years, let alone in mid-term years? (“Give us all we want or we won’t vote. Again.”) That is a path to certain defeat. Those you call progressives are not asking for a seat at the table; they are stating that will not sit at the table unless they can decide the complete menu for the table.
Okay then. Don’t sit down with the rest of us. We’ll order without you. We’ll keep a chair open for now.
The only other response I must make is to correct an error of fact.
Just not true. Same link provided as in other threads.
Click on Table H5. It will show you median household income in 2014 real dollars. WJ Clinton inherited an economy that had a median real household income of $50421 and what he left his predecessor with was median real household income up to $57843. GW Bush took that and left office with collapsing economy that was bringing the world down with it, leaving Obama to deal with median real household income at $54924 in his first year, managing to halt the drop to bottoming out within 3 years at $52605, and climbing back to $53637 two years later (most recent data). What will he leave as the first year his predecessor has to deal with? Not sure but as unemployment has been dropping and 2015 was ending with emerging upward wage pressures likely a bit better. So the to be clear: WJ Clinton took real median household income up dramatically; Bush left it heading into a ditch; Obama turned it back around. And this in the context of a globally competitive world with a worldwide issue of automation increasingly displacing workers at many levels.
No, real income has not stagnated or declined. It has not fully recovered from the meltdown in progress that GW Bush left behind to what WJ Clinton left us with, but Obama has done well with the economy, and is likely responsible for pulling the world back from the brink of a global depression.
Now you want to complain that some have done better than others during these years, I’ll not argue. We have a bigger problem with increasing income, and to my mind more importantly wealth, inequality than much of the rest of the world, and much of the rest of the world is not doing too well there either. Way too much is being concentrated within the control of a very very few (really the top 0.01%).
FWIW I think you’d find broad agreement among most at the table that that huge gap is a problem in its own right that needs to be addressed even if we do not all agree on the exact way to address it. I think the solutions are more complex than simple but agree with Elizabeth Warren: “Personnel is policy.” FWIW, Clinton early on has promised that she would look to Elizabeth Warren for advice on appointments. Yes, tax reform must also be part of the solution. Now maybe you like Sanders approach better, and the deficit it would create, if he could get it through, does not bother you. A fair thing to think that even if I disagree. But it is not fair to say that the rest of us are not concerned about the issue because we disagree about how to fix it.
Bolted to the floor, I hope.
This sounds like what Lenin was selling when he penned State and Revolution in 1917. I guess since it sort of worked for Lenin, Sanders might gain a little traction with it.
Do you have a link for this story?
Here’s an example we discussed here on the board. It doesn’t look exactly like the one I received (in which the “from” line included Bernie’s name, and there was no indication it was sent from the DNC until you hovered over the links and read the destination URLs) so there’s at least two versions the DNC sent out.
Seconded. IIRC, the GOP isn’t interested in stopping Sanders; they would love to run Trump against him. Hillary scares the bejesus out of them.
And I still wonder whether some of the more extreme Bernie fans who’ve made the news are really supporters of Donald Trump.
Thank you. Yes that’s a little sleazy. In their defense, on the actual donation page you’re sent to it does say “It’s time to commit to electing a Democratic president in 2016” not “elect Bernie”. The other email they mention with both candidates sounds more honest.
Nonsuch, I think Mosier meant DNC not RNC.
That would make sense. And I agree it’s a sleazy tactic. From what the linked page says, it seems the DNC did other emails showing both candidates, which is fair and above board. Hopefully this sort of thing was more of an outlier.