@HenryAWallace

I sure as shit didn't donate what little extra cash I had to Bernie's campaign to be where we are now, "awake" and powerless to effect change within a government that is happy to take our money and fuck us all in the ass while doing it.

#3
Nor what he raised money on.

He just woke a lot of people up, and that's all he ever really intended to do.
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@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

He ran as this moral and principled candidate only to turn a blind eye toward voter fraud. If he had stood on principle and fought and lost, I could handle that. Instead, he duped his supporters. That pisses me off.

#4 I think we have taken transactional politics as far as we should, and it would be a good idea to go back to a politics based on ethics and principle.

The current argument in defense of Bernie seems to be a very Clintonian one. What practical effect would it have had, given that the other side has all the power and the establishment doesn't have to play fair?

It's an argument that can be used against any form of resistance. Why resist at all, really, given that if you do the establishment will do bad things to you, including destroy your reputation?

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

the Democrats are failing so badly that they are no longer able to keep up their end of the kabuki competition between the parties--which makes their donors less likely to invest in them

Perhaps the real goal of the disunity tour wasn't to make the Democrats better - which is a lost cause - but to continue pulling back the curtain. By that measure it was absolutely a success, as the party continues bleeding and money is not coming in. Whether Bernie planned it that way or not, it worked to further erode the base of party support it was supposedly going to shore up. I consider that a win.

I'm not defending Bernie's apparent defection, I totally agree with you about his backing off single payer and DWS. These moves can't be defended logically, and I don't understand or agree with his choice to stick with the party. Especially when they keep using him as a punching bag regardless. But as for results, as long as the Dems are flailing and failing, it's headed in the right direction: into oblivion.

#6 The Unity Tour was only a win for Bernie if his greater popularity than Tom Perez' translated into something meaningful in DC.

Since then, he has abandoned single payer for introducing a public option into the ACA--that's on the policy front--and said he doesn't know Tim Canova, rather than endorsing him in his fight with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

In what sense is Bernie changing the Democratic party? In what sense is the Democratic party changing Bernie?

To quote Donna Edwards' old chief of staff, "When you dance with the devil, the devil don't change."

I guess we could say that Chuck Schumer's "bold new economic agenda" is a result of Bernie Sanders' popularity on the Unity Tour, but I think it's more likely that the Democrats are failing so badly that they are no longer able to keep up their end of the kabuki competition between the parties--which makes their donors less likely to invest in them (two worst fundraising months since 2003). In any case, Schumer's "bold new agenda" will partake, so Schumer says, of advice from both Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin, so that doesn't sound like progress to me. That sounds like bullshit.

@snoopydawg I wasn't there, but wasn't there something about people holding up signs to block the Bernie delegates from view?

It's good to have people who are careful to remember these details, because these stories get flushed down the memory hole by the mainstream press and also, often, by us (you would be surprised how many times Democrats told me that Nader was the reason for Bush's win, apparently completely forgetting that Jeb Bush cheated. In fact, someone (an educated someone) brought up election fraud to me the other night, and I mentioned the 2000 election and they just looked at me blankly. What they wanted to talk about was the Russians and Hillary. In many frightening ways, what was so shocking that it inspired multiple books and movies and protests, at the time, and an attempt in Congress to refuse to certify the election, has now been normalized to the point of invisibility.

I'm making sure the Nevada thing and the Arizona thing don't go down the memory hole. Looks like you're one of the ones who's keeping the convention story from disappearing.

Sometimes I think we should do more than keep this stuff as oral history. It's scary how much people can forget how quickly. Most lefties act like the Howard Dean movement never happened. It's like they have a big hole where their memories of the years 2003-2010 should be. I suspect it's because remembering that requires remembering the end of that story, which was Obama, and the victory that wasn't.

#9
why didn't he do or say anything about how his delegates were treated at the convention? There were whole sections of empty chairs where his delegates should have been. The lights were shut off in many sections of the theater.
I haven't seen one person address what happened at the convention. We all know what happened, but they act like if they don't talk about it, it will just go away.
The other thing that happened at the convention was they didn't let Nina Turner speak.
The convention was going to be run one way and one way only.

@snoopydawg

They had Bernie tell her after she came to speak that night.

Nice touch.

#9
why didn't he do or say anything about how his delegates were treated at the convention? There were whole sections of empty chairs where his delegates should have been. The lights were shut off in many sections of the theater.
I haven't seen one person address what happened at the convention. We all know what happened, but they act like if they don't talk about it, it will just go away.
The other thing that happened at the convention was they didn't let Nina Turner speak.
The convention was going to be run one way and one way only.

@native To that I would say, if Sanders didn't want to do something momentous (and I agree with you that he didn't) he needed to consider long and hard before he ran a presidential campaign that challenged the Democratic party itself, which, whether he wanted to or not, was what he was doing. You cannot run as a New Deal Democrat, even a watered-down one, and not come into conflict with the Clinton machine, which at this point is indistinguishable from the Democratic party. They cannot tolerate competition from a power that subscribes to those older ideas.

I believe he was counting on his own smallness--the fact that only 3% of the population knew him, that he was not photogenic or wildly charismatic, that he is a self-proclaimed socialist (the fact that democratic socialists aren't the same thing as socialists is something so few Americans know that it would not matter), that he is from a small state, that he had no party support or PAC support--to keep his campaign from being perceived as a mortal threat by the Democratic Party/Clinton political machine. However, a decent caution would require that he make plans for all eventualities. At least, that's the kind of leadership I appreciate.

Hell, pretending to have a health problem and dropping out on that account would have been better than what he did.

As for this:

I think it would have been very difficult for him to take sole personal responsibility for such a momentous, and potentially disastrous outcome. It would in effect have killed the Democrats' hopes of winning the 2016 election, and very possibly created an unbridgeable and fatal divide within the Party's electoral base.

Perhaps I am overly philosophical--or more philosophical than Bernie Sanders, anyway--but from my point of view, the Democrats killed their hopes of winning the 2016 election when they chose someone who 1)can't campaign her way out of a paper bag, 2)was already hated by significant numbers of people on the right and the left, 3)had already been rejected by the American people once, and 4)was facing multiple criminal investigations. Oh, and 5)had a history of starting off with high numbers which subsequently did nothing but decrease more and more the more she appeared before the public. Oh, Jesus--and 6)came up with the brilliant strategy of instructing the media to give her general election opponent $5 billion dollars in earned media, which must be the largest in-kind donation I've ever seen made to a political campaign. It is the equivalent of taking a firehose filled with gasoline and spraying a campfire with it at full force for an hour. Then at the end you clutch your pearls and say "Oh, no, there's a forest fire!"

Did I mention that Hillary doesn't understand campaign politics? Apparently neither do her top advisors.

I'm now putting aside both my activist hat and my voter hat and putting on my campaign manager hat. Choosing Hillary as the Democratic candidate--and I mean when the choice was actually made, not at the convention, but years before--was ineptitude so great that it approaches malfeasance. If there were such a thing as political malpractice, this would be it. As would the campaign's primary strategy of attempting to bully the American people into voting for a candidate no one should have chosen to run in the first place.

There were times when I actually considered that Hillary 2016 might be an anti-campaign, that the establishment actually wanted Trump in and that they were actively trying to make people hate her more, because I couldn't imagine that great a level of incompetence among such highly-paid people. That was obviously not the case. But when I expected a Hillary "win" on that morning in November, it was only because I expected she would have the count rigged. Fraud was the only conceivable way that I thought she could win, especially after it became clear that her support among African-Americans was dropping and clearly both she and Obama were afraid that Black people wouldn't turn out to vote. I was shocked that Trump won, not because I was amazed the actual vote count had turned out that way, but because I was amazed that anybody successfully countered the fix that I had assumed was in place.

As for this: and very possibly created an unbridgeable and fatal divide within the Party's electoral base
, well, mission accomplished. Hillary 2016's approach to the other half of the Party's electoral base would be almost enough to ensure that unbridgeable and fatal divide on its own; Bernie's behavior, far from keeping the unbridgeable gap from occurring, put the final piece in place that ensured that it would occur.

Which is more likely to keep people within the party, after the lead candidate blatantly cheated the insurgent candidate and his supporters, and her supporters dealt out nothing but bullying, abuse, and gaslighting to those supporters for months?

Giving at least the pretense of some power to the insurgent, giving his base the idea that gaining power within the Democratic party was a possibility?

or

Kicking the insurgent and his supporters in the face repeatedly, continuing to bully and insult them, giving them no concessions, not even mere window-dressing, and then having the former insurgent stump around the country telling his former base that the lead candidate will accomplish progressive policies, which they know is a lie, and that they must vote for her to stop Trump, which was the same campaign message she ran on that failed to quell his insurgency in the first place? Turning Bernie into an echo of the Clinton campaign after giving him and his supporters nothing merely made it obvious to his supporters that they could expect nothing within the Democratic party and might as well leave.

She would have done far better (and again, I'm not talking as a moral person, a citizen, or an activist, but as a campaign staffer) to make him her Vice-President, which, as John Adams once said, is a position singularly lacking meaning or power, and to throw her support behind one or two of his policy positions, which later could have been helpfully shot down by her allies on the other side of the aisle, after which she could get in front of a camera and say how sorry she was it failed, but Republicans are bad.

#9
to Clinton, the Democratic Party would very likely have split into two irreconcilable camps, resulting in an almost certain victory for Trump in the general. Surely this must have been in the forefront of Sanders' mind when he decided to "dance with the devil". I think it would have been very difficult for him to take sole personal responsibility for such a momentous, and potentially disastrous outcome. It would in effect have killed the Democrats' hopes of winning the 2016 election, and very possibly created an unbridgeable and fatal divide within the Party's electoral base.

Many of us would have applauded such an outcome, but it's not hard for me to understand why Sanders would have shied away from it. It was a case of too much power too soon, I would say. What in the world could he have done with it anyway? He was in no way prepared to deal with such a drastic scenario, because he had never intended to damage the Party. As it turned out, the Party did a fine job of damaging itself, and Sanders has now been assigned the thankless task of trying to patch it up.