If Bernie doesn't clinch it today, I will shift my focus.
If Bernie Sanders doesn't clinch it today, I will continue donating through the convention, but will shift most of my money downballot progressives & to the Green Party & Jill Stein. Inside/Outside strategies are not about putting all our eggs in one basket. I really do hope Bernie considers breaking as a new party. He has the name recognition & willing donors to do it. Of coarse there is no rush to do this until after the convention, but there is no harm in talking about it either. Hillary needs to know she isn't our only option in life and that we don't consider the end of the line if he isn't in.
I do think the successes on the Plains states & Appalachia indicates the need for major political realignment, not just pushing the party to the left. I am not enthused about the effort to shape the party platform. Democrats are notorious for ignoring their platform.
Comments
How can he clinch anything today?
Coming out of today with a net delegate gain would be awesome, but not necessary. The weight on California grows accordingly of course, but saying 'clinch' is just absurd. Is this the new form of 'I loved Bernie until...' diary?
Right.
The campaign's path to the nomination has always involved California, which doesn't vote until June 7
Nothing of the sort
I just don't see the need to focus exclusively on Bernie Sanders if it just over the party platform. I don't see any indication the Democrat have ever been serious about the platform, so I will focus on electing some serious democrats and other progressives where I can. You can do what you want.
So what numerical goals
define 'clinching it' for you?
You know, just so we can all know whether you focus has shifted, without you needing to write another post about how your focus has shifted.
Didn't have to define anything for you when I first donated
and don't now. I have been posting at kos since 2013 and support Stein as a backup not Hillary, so your attempts to pigeonhole me as a wellpaid astroturf troll, attempting to create bandwagon effect for Hillary will fail.
Stein has no billionares or pacs to pay trolls, and neither do downballot progressives.
I just figured with your ridiculous title
and substance-less diary, you represented the next batch of of anti-Bernie B.S.
Sorry if this was all somehow sincere, and not just inflammatory trolling. It is all academic now, since Bernie clearly Clinched it tonight.
now, now children....communicate!
I think you'll find you agree
I agree that Stein has no PACs to pay trolls with
That is a very reasonable straw man, and may prove convincing for a few people who don't bother to think about it. I don't think I ever suggested that this anti-Bernie title was pro-green trolling, especially when it would be more likely to drive a wedge between the Greens and the Berners.
This MOVEMENT ...
This political movement should not only vote in lock-step for Jill Stein, but try and get Bernie Sanders to embrace the idea that he should team-up with her and the GreenParty and form a co-Presidency that could immediately move his 30% of the total electorate over to the 3rdParty ticket and create the dynamic that would achieve parity with the dying and arrogant Democratic Party and insane GOP.
This is the best way to keep the Revolution moving forward.
I don't really see how Sanders could ever endorse Hillary Clinton and maintain credibility as a movement leader. The DParty Establishment is corrupt through and through and will not produce any meaningful policy change.
I agree completely. He needs
I agree completely. He needs to threaten to take his voters with him to form an entirely new party.
Too soon
to be thinking this way, particularly if you've already been working downticket.
My focus will continue to be real Dems--as opposed to fake Hillary Dems--up and down the slate, from POTUS to state houses. We can do this without "shifting focus" away from Sanders.
I see no reason to beat such a drum, actually. It's not going to hurt anyone if you change yours--just don't expect a bunch of folks to get all excited about it here.
I won't change it into voting for Madam
on November. The easy part for her will be the Dem's nomination.
Without Bernie in the running, I think this might come to be an epic year for electoral fraud between two competing, thoroughly-corrupt parties. Between her scamming and gaming the system, and the more-experienced Repugs trying to outfox the competition with fixes in the central tabulators, I would have some temporary amusement watching our crooked bourgeois democracy collapse on itself come November. While the barbarians at the gates, be it climate change, increased income stratification, environmental disasters, all of that will be ready to pounce on whoever will be the wounded survivor of the gladiator battle that will be the 2016 presidential election.
But I will pray Bernie will pull off the nomination at the last minute. And a small chance for world peace can actually have a glimmer of hope for a short period of time.
And there's Jill Stein and Green Party for me this time.
Let me guess: you've voted already
and you're impatient.
Luckily, we Democrats/Independents/Greens/Peace&Freedom here in the Big CA see it very differently: Hillary is going down on June 7th. But you, you can't wait. Ok wow. Way to take the wind out of our sails.
Californian born and bred
How many years I loathed having the race long over before we got to have our say.
Am a refugee to a Super Tuesday state and it did not go well for us here. Working up my strength to do what can be done at the state convention in June.
'What we are left with is an agency mandated to ensure transparency and disclosure that is actually working to keep the public in the dark' - Ann M. Ravel, former FEC member
I have been donating
To some regional candidates. They have similar views to Bernie. I am going to see Bernie through California because as a Westerner I am aware that the hard right republicans are not the only ones that are beyond ticked off at the federal government.
I want Oregon and California to be heard. Don't think Hillary wants the rest of the country to know that. She could very easily lose California if people don't lose hope and stay home. Oregon is in the bag.
Bill destroyed our lumber industry in a trade deal. He then locked up the federal forests which were planted to cut. They never allowed the necessary thinning so the forests became over crowded. Last year some of them burned in very spectacular and dangerous fires. Putting them out was made very diffacult by lack of fire roads.
The Democrats lost lots of voters because of it. Only Bernie would bring them back.
I haven't voted yet so, to me,
your thinking is premature. I don't vote until June 7th. We still have May to go through. I agree with labryon - you are impatient. Settle down.
"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11
We what need is a two prong approach
1) There is the short game- keep helping Bernie win the nomination and the general election plans
2) The long game is to determine how to continue to move the revolution forward.
If he won
every pledged delegate up for grabs today he wouldn't clinch it.
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” -Voltaire
700 delegates will be decided on June 7 when I vote
I think Bernie will win all primaries on June 7. If he doesn't clinch it then, I'm all in for shifting focus to Jill Stein and good down ballot candidates from any party, but most likely the Democratic party.
Beware the bullshit factories.
Jill Stein versus Bernie clinching it
How many voters other than those here know who Jill Stein is? Enough to win the general? This is a kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking. Bernie may or may not endorse Clinton. I think he'd lose over fifty% of his supporters if he does, yet he's hinted in interviews that he will support her. Then what? A movement of Greens, socialists, progressives, and Millennials won't gain power outside of a crooked party system that gets the media to ignore or smear progressive candidates or board of elections officials to rig voter rolls and votes during primary season. Working inside the party system as Bernie has isn't getting him much traction either. I don't know the best way forward from here either. Getting truly progressive candidates elected within the Dem party will take many years, lots of donations, and invite mainstream blowback. If you study U.S. History, the only times progressives gained power were during times of crisis: Lincoln and the Civil War, Teddy Roosevelt and the corruption and excesses of the Gilded Age, FDR and the Great Depression, Lyndon Johnson and JFK's assassination. Maybe we really do need to start a revolution; and I'm talking pitchforks and taking to the streets. Or, maybe we just need to study the Tea party, who've gained power over the Republican party in just a few short years. My point is: change comes slowly, needs WIDESPREAD support, and needs to get taken seriously by the media. It's too early to run around half-cocked without a well-thought out and well-informed plan.
The tea party gained power by
The tea party gained power by 1)voting for their people in the primaries, & 2)not voting for republicans in the general if their primary candidate lost & finally 3)looking at the long term and not 1 election cycle. There is also the inside/outside track, where you both try and takeover the establishment and undermine its power, and monopoly. A third party only needs 5% of the electorate to become viable for matching funds. I am not running half cocked on anything.
Bernie never would have run if he had listened to the voices of caution, and we would have been stuck with Hillary, whom I was never going to vote for to begin with.
The Tea Party was inserted into power
by Fox News and the Koch bros. Just because they have become rabid and slipped their leash somewhat, does not make them an organic political movement.
Honestly hope
It doesn't come to that. Bernie was the easy way. I am aware the hard way is on the horizon. People are very misinformed about the western militias. The Bundys were not prime examples at all, think Timothy McVeigh. The average militia guy is a combat vet with years in Iraq or Afganistan. There is a percentage of them that simply can not readjust without lots of help and a clear positive path. None of those things have been offered with any timeliness or consistency.
Like the Vietnam vets before them they find a place where they can feel safe and be among like minded folks. The ranks have swollen a great deal the last few years. FDR created the G I bill because he feared battled hardened soldiers would come home home to no jobs and overthrow the government. Our modern day leaders are not nearly as bright.
Took 'conservatives' about 30 years to
take over the Republican Party.
(I've seen accounts that the conservative movement began in earnest in the fifties--and we all know that it was the eighties before conservatives were ascendant in the Republican Party.)
For this reason, I'm of the opinion that we need an inside AND OUTSIDE movement. After all, we're living in strikingly different times, since the 'middle class' was mostly at its zenith in the 1950's and 1960's (maybe the earlier 1970's)--and is clearly on the downslide, today.
From what I've heard and read about the DLC, what we've seen so far this primary season--from FSC's supporters, surrogates, Dem super-delegates, DNC/Dem Party Establishment types, the MSM, talking heads from both parties, etc.--is absolutely 'tame' compared to what corporatist Dems (DLCers) did to the so-called left when they took over the Party in the mid-1980's.
I don't pretend to know the answers, but I am convinced that we don't have 20 to 30 years to 'take back' the Dem Party.
IOW, in another 20 or 30 years, the middle class will have become so diminished (in size), that it would be lacking in sufficient leverage to bring about, or effect, meaningful change.
So, I'm hoping that folks will keep their options open, and look to form broad coalitions with like-minded people--not just with Dem Party partisans.
As to exactly 'how' to achieve this--hey, "I'm all ears!"
BTW, even reporter Susan Page seemed to agree that talk about persuading the Democratic Party Platform Committee to include some of Bernie's policies, is somewhat meaningless.
(Not that I would discount it totally. But it is a hollow victory, to some extent. And we need to push for much, much more.)
As she put it,
Mollie
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Read the diary above yours...
Feeling frustrated? See the big picture and smile...it is called "Brand New Congress" and it is already happening. We were building it the whole time.
See the diary above yours titled:
Corbin Trent and Zack Exely have left the building
We have built and will continue to build a political movement/revolution that will be the envy of the political world. How will we get Bernie's agenda and goals passed...by electing a whole damn new congress! Brilliant. -Nemoshell
The Dem establishment has been ignoring
the Democratic platform for years -- that's why I switched to non-affiliated quite some time ago. If Clinton thought she'd get votes/money she'd agree to most anything, and then find a reason if elected to renege.
She's a very smart person, but a lot of people don't trust her to not play chameleon.
She's smart if you're among the 1% who get richer everytime she
shows up. Not so smart if you've been on the wrong end of her policies (apparently drafted by kissinger) here and around the world.