Bernie Sanders running for preznit?

[Dioneo]

I noticed the way the map is filling in - Clinton is carrying states that only go republican anyway.

This is worth repeating. Bernie is winning states that are going to be critical for the Dems if they're going to win in November. He is staking a strong claim to being the more viable candidate in the fall. Not that you'll hear anyone in the media actually acknowledge that...

[NeonLX]

It is my fault for choosing to expose myself to this, but instructive. Like I said, I feel like it used to be more covert, which makes me wonder if it's true that their partial exposure is a limited hangout of sorts.

My fault too for doing the very same thing. I have become so damned cynical that even the encouraging things I'm hearing from Bernie make me suspicious.

I was less anxious back in those days when I was naive.

[Nordic]

Fucking Howard Dean. To think I supported this guy once.

after a woman tweeted:

@GovHowardDean Your SD vote goes 2 Hillary no matter what? Way to represent the people! @BernieSanders will make a great Prez in spite of u

Howard Dean responded:

@D_Born @BernieSanders Super delegates don't "represent people" I'm not elected by anyone. I'll do what I think is right for the country

[Wombaticus Rex]

I heckle Howard every time I see him in Burlington. I mention that in hopes it gives you some consolation.

(His people think I'm an "anarchist protester," too. I was truly born at the right time.)

Via: http://vtdigger.org/2016/03/17/sanders-staff-says/

STAFF SAYS SANDERS WON’T DROP OUT ANY TIME SOON

After a political pummeling in five big primary states, Bernie Sanders’ top advisors projected confidence in a press call Wednesday, claiming that the campaign was far from burning out.

“We are feeling very good,” Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver said. “We are essentially where we expected to be.”

Weaver promised that Sanders would not drop out, asserting that voters in the remaining states deserve to participate in the selection of their party’s nominee. Weaver then criticized what he called a “media drumbeat” that was trying to disenfranchise primary voters.

“Voters should have a chance to articulate which candidate they support,” Weaver said.

Senior Advisor Tad Devine sounded jaunty on the phone, chiming in to say that he could see a “green pasture” on the horizon.

“We see a lot of daylight ahead,” he added.

Using sports terms to illustrate the contours of the remaining campaign, Devine said: “We are at halftime here, and we agree that we are behind.” Devine paused. “But we think we are going to win this game.”

To borrow Devine’s analogy, the second half of the game features some easier shots for Sander, but it requires a lot of Hail Marys, too.

To win the nomination, Sanders would have to greatly outperform in the polls, winning about 58 percent of the remaining delegates. Hillary Clinton now holds a 314-point lead.

When super delegates are added in, Clinton’s lead is even more unsurmountable, 1,606 to 851.

A total of 2,383 delegates are needed to clinch the nomination.

“It’s mathematically possible,” said Eric Davis, a retired professor of political science at Middlebury College. “But politically — and realistically — it’s not very likely.”

Garrison Nelson, professor of political science at the University of Vermont, was more blunt.

“Sanders is starting to run out of gas,” Nelson said. “Meanwhile, the organizational support for Hillary is kicking in.”

“There’s not much to look forward to at this point,” he added.

In an email to supporters, Sanders promised this was “the high water mark for the Clinton campaign.”

“Starting today, the map now shifts dramatically in our favor,” he added.

It’s an argument that’s been made before. Weaver and Devine at a Burlington press conference made similar comments after Super Tuesday, when the campaign won just four out of 11 states.

“We do not think the calendar ahead looks nearly as good as yesterday [for Clinton],” Devine said on March 2. “Not a single day between now and June.”

March 15 was certainly a bad day for Bernie Sanders.

The campaign advisors said Sanders often manages to quickly close polling gaps, and outperform in many matchups.

“We are closing margins in these states in — I think — an unprecedented way,” Devine said

The primary calendar going forward looks better for Sanders, especially in upcoming caucus states, where turnout is often driven by the most passionate, liberal citizens.

Nine more states will caucus over the coming weeks, and Sanders could win all of them. But many are small contests and don’t dole out many delegates. In all, just 331 delegates are up for grabs in the nine caucuses left, but his best margins have come out of caucus contests.

The big two states that could shake things up are California — 546 delegates — and New York — 291 delegates.

The campaign also hopes to make modest delegate gains in western states. Sanders will be visiting Arizona, Utah and Idaho in the coming days.

Sanders could build momentum from a string of caucus wins, and continue raise significant sums of money.

“His donors aren’t going to give up on, so the money isn’t going to dry up for Bernie,” Middlebury’s Davis said.

The campaign advisors bristled at questions about whether Sanders’ policy attacks on Clinton could weaken the former secretary of state before a general election matchup against Donald Trump.

Sanders has increased his criticism of Clinton in the past weeks, especially on her past support for trade deals and her cozy ties with Wall Street.

Weaver promised that “the tone will remain the same.” He reiterated that the campaign “is what it has always been, which is an uphill fight.”

Weaver knows media drumbeats. I expect to see WaPo and Politico running nothing but "ZOMG WHY IS SANDERS EVEN STILL RUNNING" pieces next week.

[seemslikeadream]

the night of the primaries ALL the tv stations were showing a TRUMPLESS American Flag FILLED stage with NOTHING happening waiting for Trump to appear to make his victory speech..... all the while Bernie was speaking ....not one station showed Bernie's speech

[Grizzly]

[JackRiddler]

This is not yet over and it will come down to New York and California.

[IanEye]

April 26th is a pretty important date as well.

[RocketMan]

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016 ... ratic-race

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, responding to reports President Barack Obama called on Democrats to rally around Hillary Clinton as the likely nominee, said on Thursday it was “absurd” to suggest he drop out of the race.

Obama privately told a group of Democratic donors last Friday that Sanders was nearing the point at which his campaign against Clinton would end, and that the party must soon come together to back her, the New York Times reported.

Sanders, a Vermont senator and democratic socialist, while saying he did not want to comment directly on Obama’s reported remarks, pushed back on the idea that his campaign had run its course and he should throw in the towel.

“The bottom line is that when only half of the American people have participated in the political process … I think it is absurd for anybody to suggest that those people not have a right to cast a vote,” Sanders told MSNBC in an interview.

The White House on Thursday said Obama did not indicate which candidate he preferred in his remarks to the donors.

Clinton, a former secretary of state in the Obama administration, has a large lead in the race for the Democratic nomination and she won all five states that were contested on Tuesday.

Donald Trump leads the Republican presidential race but may fall just short of the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. Things could get messy

Sanders said he will do better in upcoming contests in western states, after losing to Clinton in a number of south-eastern states.

“To suggest we don’t fight this out to the end would be, I think, a very bad mistake. People want to become engaged in the political process by having vigorous primary and caucus process. I think we open up the possibility of having a large voter turnout in November. That is exactly what we need,” Sanders said.

“A low voter turnout, somebody like a Trump can win. High voter turnout, the Democratic candidate will win,” he said, referring to Donald Trump, the front-runner in the race to pick the Republican nominee for the November presidential election.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/be ... t_20160214

Bernie Sanders’ Phantom Movement

Posted on Feb 14, 2016

By Chris Hedges

Bernie Sanders, who has attracted numerous young, white, college-educated supporters in his bid for the presidency, says he is creating a movement and promises a political revolution. This rhetoric is an updated version of the “change” promised by the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and by Jesse Jackson’s earlier National Rainbow Coalition. Such Democratic electoral campaigns, at best, raise political consciousness. But they do not become movements or engender revolutions. They exist as long as election campaigns endure and then they vanish. Sanders’ campaign will be no different.

No movement or political revolution will ever be built within the confines of the Democratic Party. And the repeated failure of the American left to grasp the duplicitous game being played by the political elites has effectively neutered it as a political force. History, after all, should count for something.

The Democrats, like the Republicans, have no interest in genuine reform. They are wedded to corporate power. They are about appearance, not substance. They speak in the language of democracy, even liberal reform and populism, but doggedly block campaign finance reform and promote an array of policies, including new trade agreements, that disempower workers. They rig the elections, not only with money but also with so-called superdelegates—more than 700 delegates who are unbound among a total of more than 4,700 at the Democratic convention. Sanders may have received 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, but he came away with fewer of the state’s delegates than Clinton. This is a harbinger of the campaign to come.

If Sanders is denied the nomination—the Clinton machine and the Democratic Party establishment, along with their corporate puppet masters, will use every dirty trick to ensure he loses—his so-called movement and political revolution will evaporate. His mobilized base, as was true with the Obama campaign, will be fossilized into donor and volunteer lists. The curtain will come down with a thunderclap until the next election carnival.

The Democratic Party is a full partner in the corporate state. Yet Sanders, while critical of Hillary Clinton’s exorbitant speaking fees from firms such as Goldman Sachs, refuses to call out the party and—as Robert Scheer pointed out in a column in October—the Clintons for their role as handmaidens of Wall Street. For Sanders, it is a lie of omission, which is still a lie. And it is a lie that makes the Vermont senator complicit in the con game being played on the American electorate by the Democratic Party establishment.

Do Sanders’ supporters believe they can wrest power from the Democratic establishment and transform the party? Do they think the forces where real power lies—the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, corporations, the security and surveillance state—can be toppled by a Sanders campaign? Do they think the Democratic Party will allow itself to be ruled by democratic procedures? Do they not accept that with the destruction of organized labor and anti-war, civil rights and progressive movements—a destruction often orchestrated by security organs such as the FBI—the party has lurched so far to the right that it has remade itself into the old Republican Party?

The elites use money, along with their control of the media, the courts and legislatures, their armies of lobbyists and “think tanks,” to invalidate the vote. We have undergone, as John Ralston Saul has written, a corporate coup d’état. There are no institutions left within civil society that can be accurately described as democratic. We do not live in a capitalist democracy. We live in what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls a system of “inverted totalitarianism.”

In Europe, America’s Democratic Party would be a far-right party. The Republican Party would be extremist. There is no liberal—much less left or progressive—organized political class in the United States. The growth of protofascists will be halted only when a movement on the left embraces an unequivocal militancy to defend the rights of workers and move toward the destruction of corporate power. As long as the left keeps surrendering to a Democratic Party that mouths liberal values while serving corporate interests, it will destroy itself and the values it claims to represent. It will stoke the justifiable rage of the underclass, especially the white underclass, and empower the most racist and retrograde political forces in the country. Fascism thrives not only on despair, betrayal and anger but a bankrupt liberalism.

The political system, as many Sanders supporters are about to discover, is immune to reform. The only effective resistance will be achieved through acts of sustained, mass civil disobedience. The Democrats, like the Republicans, have no intention of halting the assault on our civil liberties, the expansion of imperial wars, the coddling of Wall Street, the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry and the impoverishment of workers. As long as the Democrats and the Republicans remain in power we are doomed.

The Democratic establishment’s response to any internal insurgency is to crush it, co-opt it and rewrite the rules to make a future insurgency impossible. This was true in 1948 with Henry Wallace and in 1972 with George McGovern—two politicians who, unlike Sanders, took on the war industry—and in the 1984 and 1988 insurgencies led by Jackson.

Corey Robin in Salon explained how the Clintons rose to power on this reactionary agenda. The Clintons, and the Democratic establishment, he wrote, repudiated the progressive agenda of the Jackson campaign and used coded language, especially regarding law and order, to appeal to the racism of white voters. The Clintons and the party mandarins ruthlessly disenfranchised those Jackson had mobilized.

Sanders’ supporters can expect a similar reception. That Hillary Clinton can run a campaign that defies her long and sordid political record is one of the miracles of modern mass propaganda and a testament to the effectiveness of our political theater.

Sanders said that if he does not receive the nomination he will support the party nominee; he will not be a “spoiler.” If that happens, Sanders will become an obstacle to change. He will recite the mantra of the “least worst.” He will become part of the Democratic establishment’s campaign to neutralize the left.

Sanders is, in all but title, a Democrat. He is a member of the Democratic caucus. He votes 98 percent of the time with the Democrats. He routinely backs appropriations for imperial wars, the corporate scam of Obamacare, wholesale surveillance and bloated defense budgets. He campaigned for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race and again in 1996—after Clinton had rammed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), vastly expanded the system of mass incarceration and destroyed welfare—and for John Kerry in 2004. He called on Ralph Nader in 2004 to abandon his presidential campaign. The Democrats recognize his value. They have long rewarded Sanders for his role as a sheepherder.

Kshama Sawant and I privately asked Sanders at a New York City event where we appeared with him the night before the 2014 climate march why he would not run for president as an independent. “I don’t want to end up like Ralph Nader,” he told us.

Sanders had a point. The Democratic power structure made a quid pro quo arrangement with Sanders. It does not run a serious candidate against him in Vermont for his U.S. Senate seat. Sanders, as part of this Faustian deal, serves one of the main impediments to building a viable third party in Vermont. If Sanders defies the Democratic Party he will be stripped of his seniority in the Senate. He will lose his committee chairmanships. The party machine will turn him, as it did Nader, into a pariah. It will push him outside the political establishment. Sanders probably saw his answer as a practical response to political reality. But it was also an admission of cowardice. Nader paid a heavy price for his courage and his honesty, but he was not a failure.

Sanders, I suspect, is acutely aware that the left is broken and disorganized. The two parties have created innumerable obstacles to third parties, from locking them out of the debates to challenging voter lists and keeping them off the ballot. The Green Party is internally crippled by endemic factionalism and dysfunction. It is dominated in many states by an older, white demographic that is trapped in the nostalgia of the 1960s and narcissistically self-referential.

I spoke three years ago to the sparsely attended state gathering of the Green Party in New Jersey. I felt as if I was a character in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.” In the novel, Mayta, a naive idealist, endures the indignities of the tiny and irrelevant warring sects of the Peruvian left. He is reduced to meeting in a garage with seven self-described revolutionaries who make up the RWP(T)—the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist)—a splinter group of the marginal Revolutionary Worker’s Party. “Stacked against the walls,” Llosa writes, “were piles of Workers Voice and handbills, manifestos and statements favoring strikes or denouncing them which they had never got around to handing out.”

I am all for a revolution, a word Sanders likes to throw around, but one that is truly socialist and destroys the corporate establishment, including the Democratic Party. I am for a revolution that demands the return of the rule of law, and not just for Wall Street, but those who wage pre-emptive war, order the assassination of U.S. citizens, allow the military to carry out domestic policing and then indefinitely hold citizens without due process, who empower the wholesale surveillance of the citizenry by the government. I am for a revolution that brings under strict civilian control the military, the security and surveillance apparatus including the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security and police and drastically reduces their budgets and power. I am for a revolution that abandons imperial expansion, especially in the Middle East, and makes it impossible to profit from war. I am for a revolution that nationalizes banks, the arms industry, energy companies and utilities, breaks up monopolies, destroys the fossil fuel industry, funds the arts and public broadcasting, provides full employment and free education including university education, forgives all student debt, blocks bank repossessions and foreclosures of homes, guarantees universal and free health care and provides a living wage to those unable to work, especially single parents, the disabled and the elderly. Half the country, after all, now lives in poverty. None of us live in freedom.

This will be a long and desperate struggle. It will require open confrontation. The billionaire class and corporate oligarchs cannot be tamed. They must be overthrown. They will be overthrown in the streets, not in a convention hall. Convention halls are where the left goes to die.

[Perelandra]

Good one.

I actually knew the points made some years ago when I used to sometimes listen to Sanders talk on some "progressive" radio show. However, he still seems preferable to the alternatives, or maybe I'm not cynical enough yet.

[backtoiam]

Hedges just knocked that one over the fence and into the grandstands.

[Luther Blissett]

Very good Mr. Hedges.

Though I am more optimistic that Green momentum could possibly cohere quickly. I'm not married to it. I don't even know what the ideal third party looks like in the United States.

[backtoiam]

Green Party presidential candidate offers ‘collaboration’ with Bernie Sanders



Facing a mathematically improbable path to victory, Democratic Party presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders needs all the support he can get, and the Green Party’s Jill Stein has an offer that would be unprecedented if accepted.

Stein is running for president just like Sanders is, but their “shared goals” could be enough for them to work together, the Green Party candidate tweeted on Wednesday.

Because many are wondering: we have always been open to talking with @BernieSanders about ways to move our shared goals forward.

— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) March 16, 2016

“The Democratic Party is democratic in name only – superdelegates anyone?” Stein tweeted earlier in the day.

Therein lies the rub for many progressives enthusiastically supporting Sanders. The self-described democratic-socialist lost to Clinton in four out of five state primaries on Tuesday, and although Sanders expects to do better in upcoming contests, the delegate count – and more consequentially, the superdelegate count – is piling up in Clinton’s favor.

The delegate count will be finalized at the Democratic Party national convention in July, but at the moment, Clinton has 1,139 to Sanders’ 825. With superdelegates included, it’s 1,606 to 851, and according to the Boston Globe, Sanders must win 65 percent of the rest of the delegates up for grabs in the next 25 primaries or caucuses just to tie Clinton’s count.

Superdelegates are made up of prominent party members and elected officials who are not bound by any primary election results when they vote for the nominee in July. They represent about a third of the 2,383 delegates needed for the nomination.

Super Tuesday & superdelegates are just two of the Democratic Party’s built-in safeguards against democracy. #PrimaryDay

— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) March 17, 2016

This process is just part and parcel of a Democratic Party that Stein finds too conservative, telling Grist magazine the party has a “very clear track record of sabotaging rebels.”

“The party does this fake go-left thing by allowing genuine reformers to be seen and heard, but they never allow them to go all the way,” Stein told the magazine. “You can’t really have a revolutionary campaign inside a counter-revolutionary party.”

What Stein’s idea of a collaboration would include remains elusive, and with Sanders more or less ignoring the olive branch, it currently is serving more as a preemptive offer to collaborate with those who “feel the Bern” should they find themselves dissatisfied with a Clinton nomination.

A Stein/Sanders collaboration has always been on the table. We’ve just never gotten a response to Green Party efforts to open a dialogue.

— Dr. Jill Stein (@DrJillStein) March 16, 2016

Stein won a little more than one-third of 1 percent of the vote as the Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2012. The Green Party’s convention to secure its 2016 nominee is in August.
http://rinf.com/alt-news/newswire/green ... e-sanders/

[backtoiam]

The Bern is blaming the "violence" on Drump supporters. The tangled web...

By Chris Hedges

Bernie Sanders, who has attracted numerous young, white, college-educated supporters in his bid for the presidency, says he is creating a movement and promises a political revolution. This rhetoric is an updated version of the “change” promised by the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and by Jesse Jackson’s earlier National Rainbow Coalition.