He’s old. I don’t mean age wise, I mean his thinking and politics are stuck in the 70’s. He’s like an old school western European socialist from the 70’s. He opposes nuclear power. I don’t mean he opposes new plants, he wants to accelerate the decommissioning of working plants before they are end of life and basically shut them all down as soon as possible. I think that is the wrong move and kind of stupid, to be honest. And it’s old thinking.
I’d still vote for him if he gets the nomination over Trump, but I’ll do it with a lot more holding of my nose than I did with Hillary and will feel seriously conflicted if he becomes president. Basically, anyone but Trump is my motto, but Bernie would be the least of my choices.
I hope he’s asked that in the debate. It’s an important question, Bernie, and if you will not commit to supporting the nominee of the party upon whose coat tails you ride then you can fuck off.
Because in practice it would backfire on the Democrats to exclude him, plus we’d have to listen to the Bernie Bros stamping their little feet and whining about how unfair it is.
That doesn’t mean his blatant carpetbagging isn’t major dickery. Be a Democrat or fuck off, Bernie.
He seemed to be shouting for quite a bit of tonight’s debate, and, if I may be superficial, looked a bit too sweaty by the end. I think I noticed dandruff on his jacket’s shoulders, too.
He traveled to Nicaragua, Cuba and the USSR while mayor, blasting Reagan and US imperialism and praising those countries for policies or public services he thought were better than in the US. He has since been more critical of the brutal and/or undemocratic nature of those regimes, but insists his primary motivation was averting WWIII. Many in Burlington at the time asked him to focus on improving city services instead of being so interested in foreign policy, but he was easily reelected anyway.
Full disclosure, I despise Sanders. I also know that Twitter can be a bubble.
I have noticed a lot of negative feedback about Sanders on social media, but also a lot of just ignoring him. Every election is different and I think Sanders reminds people too much of Trump now. We already shook things up and stuck a finger in the eye of the establishment by electing Trump.
Again, I know I’m in a bubble but Harris, Warren and Buttigieg seem to be getting most of the discussion on my social media positively with some positives about Castro and Booker. Biden is getting killed and Sanders talk is mostly negative or non existent.
The main reason I don’t support Sanders is that I think we’ve had enough of old white men messing (this was my third choice of adverb) up this country.
I speak as a not quite so old white man myself. I think it’s past time to let the next generation have their chance.
Since I live in California, I am leaning toward Kamala Harris, but it’s early days yet. We’ll see how I feel when the primary comes around.
Don’t get me wrong, I will vote for the Democratic nominee in the general, no matter who. However, I think that nominating Sanders or Biden is the equivalent of handing the election to Trump. I’m on the fence about Warren, but I’d definitely prefer someone younger.
I grew up in VT, am liberal, but dislike Bernie Sanders. Much has already been said about Bernie’s effectiveness, but to add to that, I just don’t buy into his image as a newcomer and outsider with bold new ideas. He is no newcomer - I am in my late 40s and he has been a politician for as long as I have been following current events (probably since the early 1980s) and has served in Congress since I was a teenager. As far as being an outsider is concerned he is an Independent in name only. He was first elected to the House when VT Democrats started merely running token candidates because they realized that having both a viable candidate and Bernie in the same race was splitting the Left vote and handing the race to Republicans. At the national level a prominent Dem such as Chuck Schumer endorses Bernie in every election and the DNC takes that as an unofficial cue to stay out of the race. Finally, his ideas aren’t new. He’s been saying the same damn things for decades, his ideas have just failed to become mainstream because they are so far fetched that they have failed to gain traction among anyone, including other liberals, who are familiar with the actual realities of passing and implementing legislation.
Don’t get me wrong, Bernie is the first candidate I ever voted for and I would continue to vote for him if I still lived here since voting for his Democratic opponent is a waste of your vote and I rarely vote Republican. However, his popularity and messiah like status among Progressives continues to baffle me.
Bernie raised 18 million in second quarter fundraising being crushed by a small town mayor Pete Buttigieg who raised almost 25 million.
This should set off alarm bells in the Sanders campaign. Bernie’s email list and fervent grassroots support was his campaign in 2016. Being crushed by a mayor who was virtually unknown when he announced his campaign is a very bad omen for Sanders. I’m thinking that Sanders persona of being cranky and mad at the world isn’t the right message for this campaign and Mayor Pete’s intellectual and calm approach might be. We already shook things up by electing Trump.
I’ve been hearing that he’s consistent, that his positions on issues stay the same because he has conviction. As for “failed to become mainstream” his views that he’s held for years were the same things I was hearing from the mouths of most of the other Dem candidates in the debates, like Medicare for All, climate change, get out of the Mideast wars, etc.
Fair enough, I guess I was drawing more from my observations beginning with his election to the House in 1990 up until before he achieved cult leader like status during the 2016 primaries. Although I’ll admit that a couple of friends and I would volunteer for his House campaigns a few days before the election while we were attending college in Burlington, VT (where his campaign was headquartered) during the 1990s because he always put out a nice spread for his victory parties.
Alright, following Happy’s suggestion in the Biden thread, I will bump this to serve as the Bernie thread. To succinctly explain why I support Sanders:
Policy: He has been a consistent progressive voice since the darkest days of Reaganism. His stances on single-payer health care, decreased military spending, increased funding for education, fighting climate change, relieving student debt, gay equality, legalizing cannabis, etc have all moved from the fringes to the mainstream of the political debate in that time. He offers ideas that will make real improvements in the lives of working class Americans and give them reasons to continue voting Democratic even in the hypothetical future where the Republican candidate isn’t a toxic dumpster fire.
He’s too damn old. Yes. Yes, he really is, but so are his main Democratic opponents and, perhaps more to the point, so is Trump. So this, although a major weakness, isn’t one which should really hurt him in this particular election.
Experience. Other than Biden, nobody can top him in this category. He has served in both houses of Congress and been a small town mayor, which I wouldn’t overstate the importance of, but it is executive experience.
ElectabilityPolls consistently show that, other than Biden, he is our best potential candidate. He is especially popular in those Midwestern swing States that we would really like to get back. He is also the most popular candidate among Democrats under 50, a group we need to turn out bigly.
Most of the criticism of him on this ground is based on people’s fevered imaginations about how hypothetical GOP attacks might affect him in the general elections. Most of the people who claim to worry about this spent 2016 assuring us that Hillary’s unfavorables were “baked in”