Bernie, still on his self-promotion tour, found it necessary to once again attack Dems/ the DNC this Friday: Clinton lost “because the DNC is out of touch”.
www.npr.org/...
According to Bernie, if the DNC had just listened to him and focused on the working class, they would have won the election.
Really?
Let’s see what kind of proof Bernie has to offer.
Bernie ran a white populist campaign aimed at the white working class.
It wasn’t a new strategy for Bernie. In 2014 Bernie said in an interview that Democrats had lost white voters,
www.npr.org/...
Well, here's what you got. What you got is an African-American president, and the African-American community is very, very proud that this country has overcome racism and voted for him for president. And that's kind of natural. You've got a situation where the Republican Party has been strongly anti-immigration, and you've got a Hispanic community which is looking to the Democrats for help.
But that's not important. You should not be basing your politics based on your color.
In 2015, in interviews, he made it clear the voters he wanted to attract were the white middle class.
This, in a nutshell, is why Bernie lost the primaries.
In an excellent article in Fusion, by Terrell Jermaine Starr, the reasons why Bernie lost the primaries are described:
How Bernie Sanders lost the black vote.
Based upon interviews with people that worked for the Sanders’ campaign it is shown that Bernie from the very start chose to ignore POC voters.
Despite desperate pleas from his black outreach team staffers, it was considered a waste to focus on POC voters by people high up in the campaign, because it was thought Bernie couldn’t win them anyway.
It takes outreach. But several former members of Sanders’ black outreach team told me the campaign didn’t believe pulling black voters from Clinton was a real possibility; the white vote, the staffers said, was the campaign’s priority.
Those former staffers described a campaign that failed to give its black outreach teams the resources they needed, that never figured out how to connect to black audiences, and that marginalized black media.
Instead, Sanders was clobbered by Hillary Clinton among black voters in state after state after state, including some where Sanders either won white voters or lost them narrowly. The gap made it all but impossible for him to win the nomination.
Some black members of Sanders’ staff whom I met covering the campaign told me they felt that “the white boys,” as they put it, including Weaver, did not appreciate how much Sanders needed the black vote to win the nomination.
In the process, the campaign missed a chance to capitalize on a revolutionary message that otherwise might have appealed to black voters frustrated with the current political order.
It may have been white privilege, or simple cultural ignorance of black people and our plights. The Vermont senator, who built a movement on lofty promises like universal health care and free college, dismissed reparations for black people as “very divisive.”
He appeared not to realize that you can’t simply deliver the same speech on economic inequality to a room full of black people in Atlanta that you would to a room full of white people in Iowa.
In the end, it was this complete failure of the Sanders campaign to appeal to POC voters that lost Bernie the nomination. Clinton won the black vote with numbers somewhere between 85% (in the south) to 75% (In states like NY).
If you’re running for a Democratic nomination and you cannot ultimately win substantial numbers of blacks, browns and older, traditional Democrats over 50 years old—by and large who were Clinton voters, black, white or Latino—it’s very tough to win a nomination.
I would urge people to read the full article:
fusion.net/…
Did Bernie ever admit his failure? Did he understand he and his campaign were to blame for his own lack of black outreach? Nope. Not a single word was ever spent on this failure.
Instead, Bernie doubled down on his message that the Democrats and their lack of outreach to the white working class were to blame.
Then, after the convention, Bernie started his second major project. He created an organization called ‘Our Revolution’. He would use his grassroots movement to turn congress blue in November 2016.
And, since Bernie feels he’s the right guy to criticize the DNC now, it must have been a major success, right?
Nope, his organization was also a major failure.
Most the candidates Bernie endorsed lost their primaries. Canova lost from DWS, Teachout, the big rising star of ‘Our Revolution’ didn’t make it, neither did Feingold or the many, many other Bernie endorsed candidates. In fact, if you go over the list of candidates endorsed by Bernie, most lost their elections in 2016.
The ballot initiatives Bernie fought for the most: CA’s proposition 61 and Amendment 69 in Colorado, were also defeated.
Especially the faith of Amendment 69, for which Bernie campaigned extensively is interesting:
Amendment 69, the ballot measure known as ColoradoCare that would have created a universal health care system in Colorado, was soundly defeated Tuesday night. At 8:30 p.m., with nearly 1.8 million votes counted across the state, the amendment was trailing 79.6 percent to 20.4 percent, according to preliminary state figures.
…...
But even in left-leaning Denver, the amendment was losing 2-to-1.
www.denverpost.com/...
In fact, in many states, Bernie endorsed candidates were outperformed by Clinton.
The only conclusion can be that everything that Bernie did this past year was a failure. His presidential campaign failed, his grassroots organization failed.
Bernie is hardly the person to lecture anyone on how to win elections.
But somehow, while everyone felt sick and beaten after the election, Bernie looked reborn. He started his self-promotion/ book tour and has since then none stop pushed the same message: if only..
If only the Dems would have listened to/ elected me. And: the Dems need to focus on the white working class.
Not a word about minorities, about the fact that Clinton won the popular vote with 3 million. Not a word about Comey/ Russian hacking, nada.
Nothing that doesn’t fit into Bernie’s narrative is worth mentioning.
He basically wants us to make a choice to go against the natural voters base of the DNC and focus on the wwc instead. I guess because that proved to be so successful for Bernie, right?
And instead of holding him responsible for Clinton’s loss or at least demand answers from him, on why he spent so much time to smear the DNC/ Clinton, the DNC is trying to appease Bernie and cooperate with him. They offered him a Senate minority leadership position, some of them endorsed Ellison as his candidate for the chair position of the DNC, and yet Bernie continues to attack the DNC in every possible way he can.
Bernie doesn’t care that Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million votes and that it is political suicide to turn your back on those voters. There is no compromise or third way in Bernie’s life/ book.
The notion that the DNC did well among POC voters, but ALSO needs to spend more time/ resources on the working class (black, brown, Latino, white) simply doesn’t exist in Bernie’s head.
The fact that Clinton’s message was much more popular than his, simply doesn’t ever appear to Bernie, nor the fact he lost the primaries because his message didn’t appeal to a majority of voters.
There is no need in any way, shape or form to listen to Bernie, after his complete failures this year.
Yes, the DNC needs to ALSO focus on white working class voters, but to do that as exclusive as Bernie suggests/ demonstrated this year is nothing short but political suicide.
The party needs to continue to fight for civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights (all the rights/ issues Bernie hardly ever spoke about, or even called the establishment) while ALSO try to improve it’s standing among working class voters of all races.
And the party would be very wise not to listen too much to the fanatic ramblings of the failed primary candidate that is unable to give up his place in the spotlight.
I'll end with an excellent article by Oliver Chinyere in Medium, yesterday:
Bernie Sanders is the Biggest Loser:
With all this context. It’s time to at long last revisit the NPR interview because I won’t allow Bernie to coast and play Monday morning QB about what went wrong for Democrats when he himself ran a failed strategy which saw him lose the primary.”
I really just hope Sanders spends less time criticizing and dividing Democrats and gets back to what’s important: Stopping Donald Trump from making life miserable for millions of Americans. It really is the most good he can do.
medium.com/…
Disclaimer: for those that suggest we need to stop refighting the primary wars: I agreed….
If you check my diaries, I didnt write a single negative diary about Bernie after the convention. I actually believed in the “Stronger Together” message.
But enough is enough. I deeply believe Bernie did immense damage to the DNC/ Clinton and that instead of fighting Trump he will continue to do this damage, unless we fight/ push back.