And I think people, including the Dem leadership, will care a whole lot less than they would have prior to Sunday morning. Now the attitude will be “C’mon, Bernie, we got real shit to do.”
I have a few Bernie supporters in my FB feed and while they’re not completely silent, they are definitely distracted, for want of a better word, by Orlando.
Outside of The Hill, which has a very active Twitter and Facebook presence and Political Wire, Sanders has been completely forgotten. And, he doesn’t need the attention of political wonks who already know he’s titling at windmills.
Communications Workers of America withdraws Bernie endorsement, endorses Hillary.
Bernie has been made irrelevant by the recent events.
Clinton wins easily in DC primary. Right now, Sanders is at 21%, if he drops below 15%, he gets no pledged delegates.
It never used to.
Of course, it’s easy to panic and think that now it does. I’d like to think I’m as panic proof as the next person. But when I heard the unfair bullying phrase “crooked Hillary and Pocahontas,” it did make me think that maybe Warren isn’t the best VP pick. As my daughter in law sadly said of that nasty phrase, it has a ring to it. And earlier on, I was rooting for Warren as a VP pick.
I do realize that Trump can come up with similar nastygrams concerning other tickets, such as, with an Al Franken pick, crooked Hillary and the comedian. That doesn’t sound as bad to me, but who knows?
The Pocahontas jibe strikes me as kind of weak. I want Warren as the running mate, in part because I think the optics are bad for Hillary to run with a man.
I keep wondering if the “All Orlando, all the time” thing is some form of aversion therapy, overloading us with it until we’re sick and tired of hearing about it. I know the rest of the world didn’t stop because it happened, but you’d think so from news channels’ coverage.
I kind of thought the opposite. I was surprised when *Meet the Press *and ABC’s This Week did not spend the entire telecast or even a majority of it talking about Orlando.
One of the few candidates Bernie endorsed has lost her primary race for a Nevada House seat. He’s losing any leverage he may have had.
Eh, I’ve said all along that Bernie’s leverage is pretty exaggerated. The Tea Party shows how you get leverage as an intra-party revolution–by seating a sizable number of actual candidates in political offices at both the State and Federal level.
Sanders wasn’t positioned to do that because he got into the race as a protest candidate. It’s been largely forgotten now (not by Obama, though) that Sanders almost primaried Obama in 2012 for the same reasons he got into the 2016 primary. He wants to stake out a bigger place at the table for the progressive left. That’s not a bad goal if that’s your ideology, but his thinking process was “if I can make some noise somehow the progressive left will get more leverage.” The problem is his campaign became primarily about him, and about “not-Hillary.”
The Tea Party has a different origin, some of it grassroots, some of it astroturf, but perhaps (and maybe importantly) because it started in a non-Presidential election year it was focused on winning legislative seats, and running primaries against Republicans who didn’t line up with Tea Party ideals. This had the effect of seating some new tea party legislators at both the State and Federal level, and also causing some Republicans in areas that tended to be deep red to suddenly adopt more Tea Party like views (and even join the caucus), to protect their right flank.
As a lifelong Republican I hate what the Tea Party has done, but it’s frankly hard to deny its efficacy.
A lot of Bernie’s narrative on leverage has never made much sense. He says he wanted to stay in to get as many delegates as possible, so that when he gets to the convention he’ll have more leverage. All the stuff at the convention is majority vote, so it doesn’t matter if he has 1700 or 2000 delegates, it only matters that Hillary has more delegates than he does, if he really wanted to contest the convention he’d lose in straight-line majority votes in every committee and on every issue.
The only leverage he has is to offer his concession and endorsement so he gets out of Hillary’s way, but every day he refuses to concede the value of that offer decreases. I do think Orlando has hurt him as well too, national press has essentially forgotten Bernie existed, and even his statement on the shootings was largely a non-event versus Obama/Trump/Clinton.
While Trump has been the king of Free Media, Bernie has benefited a good bit from all the news articles by reporters desperate to have a horse race in the Dem primary who loved reporting on every slight upset and minor Hillary stumble. Those people largely aren’t interested in Bernie anymore, and that’s going to be responsible for even more erosion of importance.
I think the weakness of Trump also reduces Bernie’s influence. There was a genuine fear by many (myself included) that as well as Trump ran over his GOP opposition he was going to pivot in ways that made him more palatable to the general electorate. He’s slippery enough he easily could. And most of his die hards appear not to care about what he says or does so they’d continue supporting him, and most dye-in-the-wool Republicans hate Hillary so much they were never going to vote for her.
Instead Trump has actually gotten more offensive and less Presidential as the presumptive nominee. His blatant demagoguery on Orlando, an issue I honestly thought he’d do well on, seems to have backfired–in a rare moment where the American people don’t disappoint me, the reaction to Trump trying to inflame nativism and racism in the face of a national tragedy appears to be very negative, even on the right. Recent polling shows Trump weakening against Hillary–and to be frank, she’s just getting started on her broadsides on Trump. I think Trump on the other hand has very little new material on Hillary, you can only call her Crooked Hillary, talk about Vince Foster and email scandals so much, especially when those things have been at peak saturation for ages now.
Anyone see Bernie’s speech tonight? I have to say, I was really impressed. I didn’t think he was going to go for the “burn it all down” approach, but I’m still pleasantly surprised by how good it was. And it sounds like he was listening to a few of us who advocated for Bernie supporters to start working at the grassroots level.
Bernie Sanders, you are quickly descending into Cindy Sheehan territory with your desperate attempts to remain relevant.
Meh, as long as he stops attacking Clinton and focuses on Trump I’m fine with him staying in the race symbolically. He has said that’s what he is going to do now, so lets see.
Considering that she had been a solid favorite before his help that is something. Honestly very surprising.
You guys are being a little harsh! I know: I’m one to talk. But I don’t know how you could see that speech he gave and not be at all mollified.
He also needs to shut up about rigged elections and quit attacking the Democratic Party. Talk behind the scenes, but quit feeding the conspiracy theories and persecution complexes of his most zealous cult members.
I’m a long time Sanders detractor and I think his pivot this week is a good one. While I don’t think he planned it out this way from the beginning (I think he was just making noise in the beginning and not planning at all, to be frank, he was hoping the planning would materialize on its own) his shift to focusing on grassroots progressive causes is actually probably the best way to do something meaningful and productive with the political movement he has started. I think he probably still needs to drop talk of rigged elections and putting so much into “changing the DNC leadership” and “eliminating superdelegates.” The fact is those two things are “process issues”, and superdelegates in particular only affect the party’s Presidential nominee every four years. They just simply aren’t meaningful for building the kind of accomplishments necessary to achieve progressive goals (they have nothing to do with say, getting legislators nominated and elected.)
I don’t necessarily believe at this point places like the Sanders for President subreddit are representative of Sanders fans as a whole, but the talk there is still pretty insane. Most of them are convinced of two things:
I think to try and quiet that down he needs to pivot a lot harder away from “rigged election” talk, because that just foments these conspiracies. Focus on issues that affect people, not process issues.
I also think when it comes time to endorse Hillary (and I don’t particularly care if he waits until the convention to do so), he needs to emphasize how they are in roughly 90% agreement on the issues. He also needs to give his zanier followers a speech about living in the system we have, not pretending we have a different system. We have a first past the post election system, pretending we don’t isn’t productive. You can still advocate for change without making strategic blunders within the confines of our current system, and Sanders needs to really make his people understand that Hillary and Trump are not cut from the same cloth.
:eek:
Wow. I thought I had already been witnessing the Bernhead crazy talk, here and on Facebook. That is way, way beyond.
I’m being shared videos imploring Bernie to go Green.