Bob Chianese's Initiating Comment on email April 20, 2016
Well,
Hillary did it, by 16 points, and Bernie left the field, but for his
home in Vermont to "recharge." He's apparently planning to fight on
until the convention where he will try to pry loose those
Clinton-committed super delegates. It doesn't matter to him that she has
a couple million more popular votes and many more earned delegates. His
claim that polls show him able to beat Trump better than Clinton is his
battle cry.
The question is whether he will recharge to launch
more attacks on Hillary, which may have cost him more than a few points
in the election today, or begin the process of becoming a help to the
Democratic party to beat Trump (or Ryan/Haley). This is the crucial question that goes
right to the essence of his character--is he forever a dreamy outsider
purist or a wounded and seasoned pragmatist. This must be a tough night for
him, where he needs to look in and discover his core values before the
speaks in the morning and decides how to move ahead.
Bob Chianese
Bernie says he will continue to fight even past June 7, especially for super delegates. This gives me considerable pause. There has to be a point where he supports Hillary and gets his supporters to do so as well. Given their momentum, this should happen soon. BTW His manager said that he was and would be a democrat essentially "forever" - this is good news and hopefully presages the sharing of some of his funds for the support of down-ticket candidates.
ReplyDeletefrom JOHN BROESAMLE: Commentators keep on harping that the GOP faces a hostile takeover, but Sanders represents the same and even more for the Democrats, with whom he has a fleeting affiliation that cannot be expected to outlast the convention. What concerns me then is that he’ll do what everyone is convinced Trump would do, run as an independent (or, should I say, an Independent). Say Hillary wins her nomination and Bernie decides to run against her. That really changes the arithmetic. His insistence on ideological purity and his passionate denial of evident truths make him an honorary millennial but also reveal an unreconstructed New Leftist.
ReplyDeleteFrom RON DAVIS While Hillary won by a large margin in New York it is not that she did it but that Bernie failed to do it. And he failed because of a low voter turnout overall, which was largely due to the inability of independents to vote in the Democratic primary as well as cross over Republicans as well as the surprising apathy among many New York voters who did not vote because they could not decide between the two. It was an important victory for Hillary but I'm not sure that it was a major loss for Bernie in terms of what his supporters hope to achieve, namely, the transformation of the Democratic Party.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens from here on is less dependent on what Bernie does and more dependent on what Hillary and her supporters do. It is unlikely that he and his supporters will easily support a Democratic Party that continues in that shift to the right, which is what they have against Hillary. For Bernie, I suspect, his actions to continue to seek the nomination reflects his conviction that the Party has to come to him even if he is not the nominee. That has been his position all his life. It is not that he sees himself as a spoiler for Hillary but as a movement to transform and convert Hillary and her moderate party leaders. For him to abandon this quest for the soul of the Democratic Party would be an impossibility and a total sell out of his principles. I think that this is also what motivates Elizabeth Warrens neutrality on Hillary.
With this the reality, what happens next depends on Hillary taking a more forceful stand in support of the issues that have energized the Bernie Movement. For her to win next November against Trump, she will have to put together a new Democratic Party coalition of secularists (many of whom are liberal Christians), the millennials (meaning young people under age 35 including young single women), anti-war folk (who are largely opposed to the foreign policies that she has embraced all her life), minorities (whom she already has), and blue collar voters left behind by both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party (many of whom are opposed to Hillary because of her policies on trade and banking reform). To do this she will need Bernie. She must take much more meaningful positions on the minimum wage, trade, foreign policy, a higher federal minimum wage, and yes college tuition (which impacts students in college and millions of lower-middle class families fearful of what college costs mean for their kids in the future). Her strong hold is on blacks from every age group, older women who understand that the progress made for gender rights could be easily lost, and many but not all union workers. How she reaches out to the millennials, to the disaffected blue collar workers, single women, economic populists determined to break up the giant banks and reduce the power of corporations, and those fearful of more interventionist gambles in the Middle East is her challenge. Most importantly, in my opinion, Hillary tenacity and ability to take all kinds of garbage attacks and still come back unfazed is truly remarkable and is her strongest asset. But this asset does not motivate the millions who are suspicious of her willingness to chart a new path for the Democratic Party.
I hope that Bernie backs off on attacking her character because it does not win him votes among Hillary's people, and he will need them to both win the nomination and to shape the Democratic Platform if he loses the nomination. But much here will depend on Hillary and what she now does. But she will lose to Trump without the Bernie supporters later on. It is not up to Bernie to back off but for her to take seriously what Bernie and Elizabeth Warren stand for. She has indeed moved to the left on many issues (fracking and trade) but unless she begins to feel the Burn, I fear for victory in November.