Right now, Bernie Sanders has to make a choice with extraordinarily serious implications for our country’s future.
He can navigate the end of the campaign with grace. To take this route, he can continue to campaign, to ask for votes, and promote his ideas for the future of the country and the Democratic Party. This path involves ceasing the attacks on Hillary Clinton. He can call out the BernieOrBust crowd and remind them that, as he has said over and over, “Hillary Clinton on her worst day is infinitely better than any Republican on their best day.” When the primaries come to an end, assuming that he is behind in pledged delegates and total delegates (which is a statistical near-certainty), he can wholeheartedly endorse Hillary and look forward to leaving a lasting impression on the party platform in Philadelphia.
If he does this, he will be a folk hero. I never would have guessed you could get such an impressive, sustained advertisement for democratic socialism out to a broad audience. His campaign has reduced the stigma surrounding the “S-word”, and that is a tremendously positive development, even for those of us who chose a different candidate. He wants his ideas to be the future of the Democratic Party, and this path gives him a chance to make that happen.
OR: he could choose to lose poorly. He could launch vitriolic attacks on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. He could fight publicly with elected officials and make excuses for violence. He could feed the conspiracy theories that he has lost this election because it was rigged. And worst of all, he could withhold his support from Hillary Clinton if he loses the primary, or give it extremely grudgingly. He could encourage, explicitly or implicitly, his supporters to write his name in or support a third party candidate in November. But if he chooses this route, there is a very real chance that he will be remembered first and foremost as the man who gave us President Trump.
I may not have supported him in this primary, but I still believe that, after the heat dissipates a bit, Bernie Sanders will rise to the occasion. It is absolutely paramount, both for the sake of the country and for the sake of his own legacy and ideals, that he choose wisely.
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