Sanders has a Communism problem that Republicans were drooling to exploit in the general election. This was a big blindspot that Sanders supporters still choose to ignore.
An online merchant has accused the Bernie Sanders campaign of “trademark bullying” after a Bernie 2016, Inc. attorney sent him a cease and desist letter regarding T-shirts, mugs, and sweatshirts depicting the candidate with historic communist leaders.
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Hawkins also demanded the company “destroy and/or take offline” any existing products that use the image.
Why did the Sanders freak out and want this taken down and/or destroyed? How much could a t-shirt damage him? By establishing a narrative: Sanders as Anti-American communist.
During the primary fights there was one particular episode that to me revealed a fatal vulnerability of Sanders campaign for president when surrogates from the Clinton campaign made several mentions of how Sanders socialist label would be the ultimate liability in a general election campaign. I remember clearly there were fierce charges of “red-baiting” against the Clinton campaign which caused Clinton and her surrogates to back off any further mentions of this vulnerability, probably out of fear of alienating his base whose support they would eventually need. Folks here need to be reminded of this fact because in a general election Sanders wouldn’t have as easily fended off these attacks as “smearing”, “McCartheyite”, and in fact, as David Brock mentions below, red-baiting would be the primary tactic of any Republican opposition.
“Democratic voters need to know before they vote what’s in the Republican arsenal on Sen. Sanders,” Mr. Brock said. “It’s clear that when Republicans…get done with Sanders, we’ll have President Trump or President Cruz.”
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“I was a Republican operative myself for a dozen years and I know exactly what they’ll do and how they’ll do it,” Mr. Brock said.
Sanders supporters waved these fears off and still get angry at the insinuation, pointing to how President Obama was labeled a “socialist” and somehow he got through it (nevermind that his approval tanked during his first two years in office from 67% to 46% in part because of the socialism attacks), but lets remember these attacks on Obama didn’t have the virtue of being true. They didn’t have Obama saying quotes like these.
He cited an article published in a Vermont newspaper in January 1984 that quoted then-Mayor Sanders saying he was unique “in not believing in the capitalist system.”
Mr. Brock also pointed to a House floor speech Mr. Sanders gave in 1995. Speaking about the fairness of the U.S. guaranteeing loans for Wall Street investors versus small businesses in Vermont, he said: “I personally happen not to be a great believer in the free enterprise system for many reasons.”
We all know Sanders has been an outspoken critic of capitalism so I think it’s safe to say there’s a mountain of this out there in his interviews and speeches. Why would that be a problem? Because of this:
And this:
Not particularly disastrous in itself, but combined with his past interest and positive statements about communism it could be easily shaped into a fatal, campaign-killing narrative.
Sanders -- a man who joined the Young People's Socialist League in college, honeymooned in the Soviet Union and spoke at a Sandinista government anniversary celebration in the 1980s -- is probably quite a bit more sophisticated than most Americans in the way that he came to express his mixed review of Cuba.
I can almost hear Trump now saying “Comrade Bernie honeymooned in the Soviet Union??? Who does that?”. Well, the kind of person who spent time on a socialist kibbutz in Israel. Sanders clearly knew this was potentially damaging information and was extremely guarded about this time at the kibbutz going so far as to refuse to divulge it’s name. It wasn’t until the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, dug through it’s archives early this year to find an old interview from 1990 that the name was finally revealed as Sha'ar Ha'amakim: a hard-left kibbutz that was part of the Marxist-Zionist Hashomer Hatzair movement.
It’s members commonly sung The Internationale and not long before Sanders arrival there with his first wife in 1963 a picture of Stalin was once hung in the communal dining room. The front page of the Hashomer Hatzair newspaper had announced the death of Stalin the front page of the movement’s newspaper as “The Progressive World Mourns the Death of Stalin” just 5 years earlier. Conservative columnists immediately pounced, outlining their future line of attack.
The surging Democratic presidential candidate’s stint at Kibbutz Sha’ar Ha’amakim in northern Israel proves to conservatives that he isn’t just a “socialist” but a hard-core Marxist or even a “Stalinist,” far outside the American mainstream.
“Bernie Sanders’s 1963 stay at a Stalinist kibbutz,” was the title of Thomas Lifson’s piece on the site American Thinker, posted soon after the kibbutz was identified after months of mystery. Over at Frontpage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield’s article ran under the headline: “Bernie Sanders Spent Months at Marxist-Stalinist Kibbutz.”
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[...] in Lifson’s view, Sanders’ “sojourn in an Israeli communist kibbutz is fully consistent with Sanders’s honeymoon visit to the Soviet Union… his visit to Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolutionary leader Daniel Ortega as the first U.S. elected official … and his 1980s visit to Cuba where he met with the mayor of Havana….So far as I know, Bernie Sanders has never repudiated his Stalinist inclinations.”
It’s no wonder Bernie wasn’t considered as a possible vice-president choice. What else had Clinton’s opposition research turn up that wasn’t used in the primary? It’s well known that he has a long history of association with left-wing and socialist activism. What was said at the meetings he attended and who did he associate with? Does he have his own Reverend Wright or Bill Ayers-type figure in his life that might be exploited into 30 second ads? Recall that Van Jones was forced to resign simply because he signed the wrong petition. What petitions did Bernie sign?
But even without further revelations there’s enough material widely available to launch an ongoing negative campaign. As Mayor of Burlington he established sister city relationships in the Soviet Union and Nicaragua and travelled to both those countries, as well as Cuba. Why would a mayor of a small American city (pop. 37,000) go to communist countries it has no economic ties with during the Cold War? He’s on video praising the Castro regime and the Nicaraguan Contras. He has said that breadlines were actually a good thing and emphasized the positives of Soviet housing and health care. His arguments for the nationalization of the television and oil industries, public utilities, and, of course, medicine would leave him wide open to attacks over the inefficiencies of communist economies in comparison to ours.
In the picture above we see him wearing a t-shirt as Mayor of Burlington that reads “People’s Republic of Burlington” while throwing out a pitch for the baseball team he brought to Burlington, the unfortunately named (or deliberately chosen?) “Vermont Reds”. It didn’t seem like he took any of this seriously as potentially damaging to his political career until he ran for national office. It’s almost as if he’s saying “Come at me, bro!” and in a presidential race they most definitely would have.
In the hands of GOP strategists and Koch brothers funded SuperPACS this would be a devastating campaign. They would cast Trump in the image of Reagan. Ads with former political prisoners and refugees of repressive communist regimes would be rolled out one by one Swift Boat-style. I have some experience with political attacks of this type and finding stuff like this in research would be gold. It’s a narrative that Trump would’ve rode to victory by contrasting himself as the champion mom and apple pie capitalism against Sanders America-hating communism. And once the narrative of Sanders as Communist anti-American got going the talk of him taking a large swath of uneducated whites from Trump would fall apart and even his ability to keep together the working class (Reagan) Democrats that Obama brought back into the blue column would be doubtful.
Maybe to younger generation communism is an unknown, or the cult of personality Sanders has cultivated overcomes their skepticism, but to us cold war babies over 40 have been conditioned to believe that communism is the antithesis of American values by both the Democratic and Republican Parties. This would have laid waste to his ability to capture demographic age groups Sanders didn’t already have on his side and caused people to eye with suspicion his platform built on government programs and tax hikes. His principal strength, the image that he is a champion of the working class, would be neutralized by relentless accusations that he considers capitalism a failure and Stalinist-style communism a success.
This is the kind of thing is that would’ve focused conservatives laser-like against Bernie Sanders, left white middle America turned off, and put weak-kneed liberals on the defense as they were forced to repeatedly renounce communism. In my opinion, the opportunity for a disastrous upset for Sanders was so much more clear than it was for Clinton and her few moderately damaging emails. And the attack script linking Sanders to communism almost writes itself, because he deliberately worked hard during his early years to build it.
The presidential election left many former Sanders supporters saying “Bernie woulda won” within an hour of Hillary’s concession. I really don’t think that’s the case. In fact, I believe Hillary took it very easy on him for strategic reasons. Had he been the Democratic nominee or had Hillary tapped him for vice president he would have had to explain his past affiliations with the radical left in a way that only was marginally touched upon during the primary campaign.