As if he and his followers would tolerate being dictated to if their positions were reversed.
Bernie is basically becoming the Democratic version of Trump and his “my way or the riots”. Nice party you’ve got here, be a real shame if it got blown up. I can offer “protection”: all you have to do is bow down and pledge utter fealty to me.
I am really starting to hate this motherfucker. Who the HELL does he think he is? Grrrr. :mad:
You buy into some really weird stuff. That post was like reading an article linked on Facebook. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with saying “I’ll support you if you agree to these things.”
And it’s also been the whole point of why he’s been running from the start. His campaign is about pushing Clinton towards the left. And that’s all he’s still doing.
There is nothing remotely similar to this and what Trump is doing. Trump’s position is that he alone is great, and everyone else is a loser. His position is that you can’t trust the establishment. Bernie is trying to work with the establishment to do what he wants.
You know, what politics and campaigning is all about.
I’d be sad if Bernie wasn’t trying to push his ideals in exchange for endorsement. To do otherwise would be to betray all the support he’s gotten precisely because he does stand for political and corporate reform.
He’s the candidate that just won 3 states by huge margins and has the loyalty of much of the young vote which Clinton needs to win. This is called “politics”.
Bernie is also the candidate who will get alot of Republicans to cross lines and vote for him. I’m one of them. I believe the republicans are doing too little anymore for the common person and the DNC is little better. If the DNC puts in Hillary I’ll fight her like hell and vote for whoever the reps have. If Bernie I’ll vote for him.
Wow, you guys think you can lecture me about politics–but you don’t seem to understand it at all. The loser in a primary does not get to dictate what the winner’s platform will be. The voters chose the winner, meaning they chose the winner’s platform, not the loser’s.
It’s not completely unprecedented for a second-place loser to refuse to support the nominee (see for example Nelson Rockefeller, when Goldwater took over the party in 1964, or what is likely to happen with Republicans this year) but it is a rare and extreme thing to do. It requires that there be some kind of egregious break with established party orthodoxy on major issues, and that is just not what is happening here.
The reason it is like Drumpf is that just as Drumpf is not really a Republican, Bernie is not really a Democrat. He is exactly what he has always said he was, an independent socialist who has been using the Democratic Party machinery for his own ambition. And apparently as soon as the party is no longer useful to him, he will wash his hands of it. If that happens, I certainly hope his Senate colleagues will strip him of all committee assignments, and in fact just generally give him the complete cold shoulder, Ted Cruz style. And then if it leads Hillary to lose, he should go down in history in disgraced fashion, similar but more infamous than Ralph Nader, who at least didn’t straddle the fence and pretend to be a kindasorta Democrat until he failed to take the party over, before pivoting into sore loser mode.
P.S. Carpenter is not just a random nobody blogger. The guy has a PhD and has written for CNN: Why right and left won't cheer Obama - CNN.com
He’d be on a fool’s errand if that were his game: even if pulled reluctantly to utter a few left platitudes whilst touting for votes, she’d wobble back to equilibrium once in faster than you could say 'sell-out’ three times. And even faster if some corporate interest waved a wodge of money before her eager eyes, perhaps as a consulting fee for Bill or Chelsea. The Clintons didn’t acquire their well-earned amazing fortune by refusing donations from interested parties.
And in any case, by temporarily adopting or even promising fuzzy left ideals, she would massively alienate her own supporters, who are neither radical or progressive, let alone interested in social justice: if they were, obviously they wouldn’t be supporting her under any circumstance. It would be unjust to suggest they should give support to promises that are against their own right-centre interests.
It is time for her to renounce the race as before, saying that she will not sacrifice the Democratic Party for her own selfish ambition, and that for the win again a better candidate must lead the party forward.
Yes, African-American and Latinos are well known for their “right-centre interests”. :rolleyes: Ladies and gentlemen, here is your Bernhead revolution. (Actually, with that spelling, I guess you might be a Corbyn devotee. He’s another piece of work.)
Bernie’s basically on an ego trip, so the OP’s description of extortion is basically correct.
excuse me? That kind of thinking, that there can’t be a happy medium, is what contributes to today’s polarization.
Bwahahahaha!
You accuse others of not understanding politics, then you make the claim that a candidate with an enormous following is not permitted to set terms for the ways in which he will direct his supporters to switch their support to his opponent.
It is clearly not your opponents in this thread who do not understand politics and you might want to consider paying attention to their “lectures.”
But he’s not leading a revolution, he’s gotten far fewer votes and turnout is down. He’s got a small group of dedicated followers that are extremely loud on social media, but he’s winning primarily in Caucasian caucus states.
I saw him on a couple of the Sunday news shows yesterday and he was being very slippery about whether he’d support Clinton in November.
Screw you, Bernie Sanders. You’re turning into Ralph Nader and I’ll be viscously attacking you on social media.
A smear campaign is a lot more effective with sticky, thick oil!
A lot of people write for CNN nowadays. Mainly articles and essays of 140 characters or fewer.
I stopped reading you at “Drumpf”.
“Direct” them? Are his supporters his employees? Or are they free to make up their own minds to support the remaining candidate who can best help achieve what they want achieved?
Once a candidate has lost, once there is no longer a realistic chance of winning, all he has left is to decide is if his exit will be honorable and constructive, or petty and destructive.
Bwahahahaha!
“Encourage” would be a better word. With that word, Tom’s point is self-evidently correct, and your nonsense about honor and pettiness barely rises to the level of ironic.
Bwahahaha?
Boy, Tom the level of your discourse has dropped embarrassingly.
Assuming a case, perhaps even not until after all states have voted, that Sanders decides that he has no path forward to becoming the nominee, then threatening to withhold his endorsement, essentially threatening to help make a GOP (at this point presumptively Trump) win even marginally more likely, unless the winning Democratic candidate changes her stated positions and priorities to match his, the losing candidate, is, of course, not against any law. It is however reprehensible, disgusting, and stupid.
IF Clinton did give in to such explicit threats she would appear weak and pandering. Her only rational response going into the general at that point would be to publicly refuse and to refuse to allow Sanders any speaking time at the convention.
Indeed such would cause some harm to her campaign but giving in to threats and suddenly taking positions that she argued against (as he states he would demand) would harm the chances of a Democratic victory in November more.
To her credit once she accepted that she lost to Obama she made no public threats for her support and unreservedly and vigorously worked to get him elected. If any compromises on planks and such were made they were done quietly. not with public threats.
Bwahahahaha? From you? Really? Wow.
And then it’s the winner’s job to actually go win the general election, right? It’s absurd to think that if Hillary loses, it’s somehow Sanders’ fault.
Your complete disrespect for Sanders’ supporters is clouding your judgment here, and your characterization of them as blinking automatons who will do anything that Sanders instructs them to do is laughable. Know what will happen if Sanders tells his supporters to vote for Clinton? They’ll label him a sellout and stay home. She doesn’t have those votes regardless of what Sanders says.
So. Much. This. These words need to be inscribed in marble somewhere.
Hear, hear. And we need surrogates who are respected by young people to vigorously campaign to make it clear to them that following Bernie off the cliff is Not Cool. To spread the message that “the Bernie campaign was awesome, I was behind him, and I’m disappointed too…but the consequences of this election are way too important to sit it out now…Hillary won fair and square and let’s not be sore losers”.
Okay, tell me all about the concessions Howard Dean exacted from John Kerry in 2004, or Hillary Clinton from Barack Obama in 2008. I’ll wait.
Of course, there’s no law against Bernie trying to make this play. But Hillary can’t give in without looking ridiculously weak, and then once he’s laid down the gauntlet, the same applies to him if he endorses her anyway. So it’s a mutually destructive game of “chicken” he would be instigating, and a guaranteed recipe for a party rift.
Which–again–is hardly surprising from someone who is not really a Democrat. If he had just stayed a non-Democrat all along, however, his *followers *would still almost all be Democrats. So that is some **bullshit **there, given that his campaign built this big engine using DNC voter lists (as we all remember, they threatened to sue when they were going to be cut off from said lists after getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar, snooping around Hillary’s campaign data). :mad:
ETA: DSeid, my comment came in six minutes after yours, but it was just a coincidence that I seemed to be echoing your thoughts (which I had not actually yet seen) about it being “not against any law” and that Clinton could not give in without looking weak. GMTA!