WRex:
Curious if anyone has heard a plausible case for optimism, curious if anyone thinks a strategy of continuing to build popular support and juxtapose that against Clinton's corporate ties could erode Clinton's poll numbers enough to make her actually toxic.
He's accomplished something enormous: he's run an insurgent campaign inside one of the two major parties that actually attracted about half of those in the party's orbit to him (I'm including independents who are left of the Democrats and who don't vote for Republicans, but who reliably or at least often give in to the lesser evilism blackmail, like me).
He's got an email list of many millions, heavy on millenials, hundreds of thousands or millions of whom have reached into their pockets to financially support him. His database is the most coveted prize of the entire cycle. Clinton's DNCers would kill their children for unfettered access to it, because the party's future prospects are intimately tied to the party's ability to appeal to those within it.
Crucially, Sanders has an invitation from the Green party to head their ticket. If he did, he'd bring those millions with him, effectively doing what every third party in the US for decades has been unable to do: build a fundraising and communications base for an entity that truly threatens the duopoly. Even more deliciously, he will have done it by hijacking the party system and defeating the media blackout of smaller parties. They'd raise millions for his run, and he'd almost certainly surpass the threshold for matching funds for next cycle running in the tens of millions.
IT'S ALL RIGHT THERE for him. HE'S DONE THE WORK. If he simply folds that effort back into trying to nominate Hillary Clinton, it's not just a failure, but a monumental, tectonic, generation-crushing failure. He has a clear choice, one he's enormous lucky to face: join with the Greens and make US history, or endorse Clinton, and deposit himself into it's dustbin that second.
So sad he's just a flawed gradualist that lacks real courage.
. Meanwhile, former staffers and volunteers have formed a PAC, Brand New Congress, in order to take over congress by the 2018 midterms.
