The Bernie Sanders frock Phish's drummer wore at on this summer's tour as seen on a fan at the Gorge. Photo taken by me.
Jon Fishman is the drummer for the jamband Phish. Since he’s from Burlington, Vermont, he’s had a lot of exposure to Sanders and has grown to love him as a politician. He recently started a facebook page to talk about the election.
As a diehard Sanders’ supporter, he jumped in deep. While some of his posts were about why he loves the man and his politics, a lot of them — unfortunately — have been of the misleading memes and deep down the echo chamber take downs of Clinton. He’s been living deep in the Bernie or Bust world. Some more practical Phish fans have been pushing back while others have been thinking that Jill Stein might be the right approach. That’s why i was stunned to see this public post from him this morning:
I could have never considered it before knowing for sure whether Bernie would be on the ticket, any ticket, or not. Now that he's out I have to say publicly that when push comes to shove I'm going to put aside my disgust and vote for fucking Hillary Clinton. Here's why:
I've trusted Sanders for 30 years and for 30 years I've watched him exercise sound judgement and be on the right side of history the vast majority of the time. Way more than anyone else I've observed in politics in my life. There are a lot of people I respect saying we should vote for her, but I could care less what even they say. It's the fact that Bernie is endorsing her himself that makes a difference for me. I've trusted him this far. Why would I decide not to trust him now just because he's saying something I hate like hell to hear and have to consider? The fact is, as dirty as her hands are as a politician I truly do not believe Sanders would give her his endorsement if he didn't feel as a country we would be at least in safe hands with her as president. It's clear he believes we would definitely not be in safe hands with Trump, and for me that's a no brainer to agree with.
Hillary and the DNC are probably lying their asses off to Bernie about doing any of the things he's fought to get her to publicly state her support for. Whatever...she's a fucking professional liar, but the fact remains that if she does become president it'll be as the head of a party who's platform clearly has his permanent finger print on it which is not going to just go away.
It goes on for a while but that’s what I have been arguing for a while. You don’t have to love Clinton or even like her. What you do have to do is see that by supporting her, by working to get her elected, that gives you power. You become part of her working coalition at which point she owes favors to the left. Moreover, because there’s so much distrust, people will keep the pressure on her. It won’t be like Obama where we all relaxed after he was elected and the pressure came from the right. The paradox here is that progressive distrust might actually push her further to the left.
This obviously isn't the endorsement I would have written as I've been a Clinton supporter. However from a Bernie or Buster, this is a revelation. I don’t know how influential Jon Fishman is, but when a die hard Bernie supporter, someone who had serious distrust over Clinton and was not at all happy about her winning, if he can come around to begrudgingly supporting her, well there’s no way that’s not a good thing. Let’s do this!
