As everybody knows, Michigan was said to be headed for a huge Hillary victory by a big margin…
Yesterday.
Yesterday, in Nate Silver’s view, a 99% slam-dunk for her.
Yesterday, it was viewed as one of the last nails in the campaign coffin for Bernie.
Today it’s quite something else.
One of those things is the amount of small-donor money that will be flowing into the Sanders’ campaign.
Another is the momentum it will give us Berniacs going forward.
Let me repeat what I wrote five weeks ago:
Sanders has already breathed new life into the progressive agenda, called forth a can-do spirit for our struggle against the domination of the 1%, and presented a vision of a future America not ruled by naysayers and numbskulls.
As Sanders has said all along, this campaign is not just about him or just about gaining the presidency. Win or lose the nomination, the campaign is about building a movement, or rather building an alliance of the different movements we’ve seen slowly arising over the past 15 years.
Sanders has done more to inspire us in that direction than even most of his strongest backers thought he could achieve a year ago. [...]
Bringing his cross-generational vision to fruition—however long it takes—is our task, whether we just turned 18 or are pushing 75. We won’t get there whining about how the odds are stacked against us. They definitely are. But that shouldn’t stop us any more than our predecessors were stopped when the odds were stacked against them. As Frederick Douglass once famously said, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress."
In the streets and in the voting booths, it is by focused and relentless struggle that we can bring about the changes our nation desperately needs in spite of the obstacles—the sexists, the racists, the homophobes, the warmongers, the plutocrats, and their marionettes in Congress. We should adopt the message of the Galaxy Quest folks: Never give up. Never surrender.
Sticking to it requires that we take seriously what Sanders has repeated throughout the first seven months of his campaign.
We have a long way to go. But Bernie Sanders and his campaign staff and volunteers in Michigan took us a smidge closer to our goals than we were yesterday. Huzzah! to him and them.
