Bernie Sanders: A Presidential Campaign Postmortem

by Don Rice Jr.

Yesterday, I started writing a postmortem on the campaign of Bernard Sanders. I was researching all I was putting in the article as I went along, embedding the links to the facts in the article.

(I don’t work well from outlines; I either write as I find the information I’m writing about, or I write what I already know and then find the evidence to back it up.)

I was roughly half-way through the article when a keyboard mishap occurred in which, within a split second, the entire text was highlighted as I was typing the next letter in a word. With a single stroke, all I had written disappeared.

I was pissed, to put it mildly. I had been working on this piece about an hour and a half. I’d written on Windows Notepad, as I usually do for these infrequent articles. Then I post them either on Blogger or Medium. (Lately it’s been exclusively on Medium and share them on Facebook, and occasionally on Twitter. (I’m transitioning out of Blogger.) The problem with Notepad, though, is that once something disappears like that, it’s impossible, as far as I know, to recover.

Disgusted, I shut down Notepad, closed the tabs I had open for the evidentiary links, links, and went offline for a bit. I read a book for a while (Harriet Tubman: The Road To Freedom). I played a bit of Final Fantasy X, HD version, for a bit. Then I got back online and checked my email and Facebook feed.

While doing all that, I thought about what had happened. Not very long, though, as the solution to what happened, to prevent it from happening again without recourse, was to use a different program for these missives. So I decided to use the same program I write my stories and novels in. Open Office, a free program that rivals Microsoft Office in both easy to use functionality (especially for someone like me who has some difficulty keeping up with changes). Another advantage to Open Office is that, being freeware, tou don’t have to pay Microsoft (or anyone else) to use its full functionality.

(It should be noted here that at one time Microsoft office was free. Then the bright lights at that company decided to start charging users for the “privilege” of using the program after a small number of uses. At that point, I decided to look for a comparable program that didn’t have a user’s fee. Open Office was recommended to me by several other writers and bloggers. I looked into it, and liked what I saw.)

All of that went through the back of my mind, most of it unnoticed, as I went through the day. I slept when it got late, around 3 in the morning. When I woke up, I fixed a cup of coffee, added dollop of milk, a dash of nutmeg, and a sprinkle of ginger.

Then I did a quick manual filtering of my email. I got rid of the garbage, mostly the politicians begging for donations that I can’t afford to give. (Living on Social Security Disability isn’t really living, it’s merely existing.) I started glancing at the videos from the commentators on Youtube I’m subscribed to, and deleting the ones on topics that didn’t interest me. That’s usually because it’s a rehash of things that I’ve already heard a number of times.

The first one I came across that did interest me was from a progressive commentator who analyses a variety of of things, from alleged UFO’s, to Star Trek and other science fiction, to politics. Too often he does long videos that quickly lose my interest, so I delete them too. But I quite often watch his shorter ones, especially when the topic is politics. It quite often is.

His name is Jamarl Thomas. He works out of Virginia. Like me, he’s disabled. Also like me, he’s a Sanders supporter. He likes Sanders’ policy platform, as do I, for the progressive stances on things like Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, public college education that’s free at the point of service, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, and something that Sanders rarely talks about (that Hawai’i Representative Tulsi Gabbard built her much of her campaign around, and was almost completely ignored for by both the media and her fellow candidates for President): ending the forever wars that our society is so enthralled with that most in Congress speak against but vote for. I agree with her on that issue especially and specifically.

You can watch that 15 minute video by Mr. Thomas here:

But unlike me, he’s often critical of Sanders, in ways that may seem a bit harsh to some people. At least I’ve often found it so. But when you really listen to what he’s saying, his comments are usually valid ones. I just don’t speak or write about them, because, to be honest, I’m rather uncomfortable dwelling on the faults of people I like. I think that’s true of most of us; we have an unfortunate tendency to reject criticism of our chosen heroes, be they politicians, actors, or practitioners of other disciplines.

In politics, it seems to me that this is more pronounced. We always want to think the best of our political actors, no matter what the evidence might show. I’ve seen it in supporters of variety of candidates and office holders, from the current Democratic front runner, Joe Biden, to Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Hillary Clinton, and others.

And yes, Bernie Sanders. Much to my chagrin, I’ve watched as Sanders fumbled his presentations with things like so and so is his friend. This is especially true of his treatment of Biden. Every time he has a criticism of the former Vice President, he makes sure to preface it with, “Joe is my friend, but…”; then comes the criticism. And it’s usually soft. He doesn’t seem to understand that, in politics especially, the only friends one really has are those who support your positions, if not unequivocally, then with some degree of honest disagreement through which a given position may be made better through discussion and compromise.

Politics is a hardball game. You can’t really win if you are unwilling to play that way. Sanders has been in that game for decades, as has Biden. Even Donald Trump, current holder of the title of President of this nation, a political neophyte, understands that if if he understands nothing else. But Bernie refuses to play that way. And that, in my view, is his biggest failing.

Don’t get me wrong. I love his policy positions, for the most part. There are very few of those, if any, that I disagree with. And I appreciate his desire to keep things civil and peaceful whenever possible; there is too much vitriol in politics these days, more so than at any other time in my memory, which goes back a long way. Decades. Not to even mention the historical record, which sometimes shows things even going so far as the literal dueling, with guns or swords, by political opponents, and in at least one case, the murder of a leader by a group of members of a legislative body who opposed him. One of the Caesars of ancient Rome, as I recall.

Sanders and Biden have very often been on opposing sides of issues. These range from welfare reform that wound up greatly increasing poverty levels and breaking up families in minority communities, to criminal justice reform that saw the imprisoning of huge numbers of non-violent offenders whose crimes had no victims, to the prosecution of war and other conflicts with other countries, usually for no other reason than that our government doesn’t like their government, to the so-called Third Way that has taken hold of the Democratic Party since the administration of Bill Clinton.

That Third Way movement has seen the Party of the People embracing Wall Street and the rest of the corporate world as though they were lovers, largely turning away from the needs and desires of the rank and file. This can easily be seen as an extension of what is called supply-side economics, also called trickle down economics and Reaganomics, after the former President, Ronald Reagan, who espoused and enacted it. It has also had a predictable effect on the Party, especially since the start of the Obama administration, during which voters in large numbers began either dropping out of political involvement or switching their party affiliations.

The Democrats lost over a thousand seats in legislative and other governing bodies as a direct result of that turn of the screw on the body politic. True, there are other factors, like the gerrymandering that is still being done by the Republicans who took over many states when they won elections in previous Democratic strongholds. But even that can be chalked up largely to the Democrats’ change of direction.

The Democratic Party establishment, however, refuses to recognize their own failings. But if one were to ask the Party dropouts, I’m reasonably certain many, if not all, of their responses would be along the same lines I’ve laid out in the last two paragraphs.

Getting back to Sanders and Biden, it’s clear that Bernie’s refusal to strongly confront his sole remaining opponent has had a deleterious effect on his campaign. This effect is so strong that I’ve heard people say that he didn’t really want to win, only to move the Overton window, that indicator of acceptable discussion, more to the left, to return the Democratic Party to its FDR roots as working for the people, not Wall Street, the very wealthy. and the corporations. He has done that, in spades as it were. Medicare For All, free college, and so on, have become near-constant topics of in political discussion.

But Sanders’ campaign has now been suspended. Some, including a few of his top surrogates, say it’s over, that he’s dropped out of the race, even though he stated in his announcement that he is still going to pick up delegates in the states that have yet to vote. And he still hasn’t, and probably won’t, address the several issues that plague his campaign.

His declining to vehemently and regularly point out the huge differences between him and Biden are just the tip of the iceberg. There is also the readily apparent coordination with almost all of the other major candidates who then almost immediately and almost all endorsing Biden, one of whom declined to endorse anyone but spoke extraordinarily well of “Uncle” Joe; the closing once again of voting places; the culling of voter roles, and the irregularities in the vote tallies themselves. That latter item is shown by the divergences between the exit polls and the final votes, which were “adjusted” to make the polling conform with the computer tallies.

But the differences were often greater than the 4% acceptable to the United Nations in their “guidelines” for other countries’ elections. Yet the U.N. has declined to monitor ours, or even to take a cursory glance, even though they were asked to by organizations concerned with the shenanigans related to the outcome. One would be fully justified in asking why.

And there is no way I will believe that a Minnesota district that is mainly colleges and their students, a Sanders stronghold, had a majority of Biden voters. You also can’t expect me to believe that this is the only place that happened.

Add to all of that the fact that the major corporate media, which has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo for their owners, rarely gave Sanders favorable coverage, and regularly fawned over the establishment’s “candidate of the week”, culminating in their sycophantic and continuing praise of Biden, in spite of his many faults, the latest being the alleged sexual assault of a former Biden Senate staffer. That leads to the fact that the #metoo movement, which has been built on always believing women who make such claims, not believing Tara Reade, simply because she is accusing Joe Biden, the current Chosen One of the Democratic Party.

I cannot, in good conscience, support or vote for Mr. Biden, even if he, likely as my dead father returning to life, eventually chooses a progressive as a running mate.

But I will not, under any circumstances, cast a vote for Donald Trump. He has shown himself to be unworthy in many ways, not the least of which is his narcissistic behavior that goes back to long before his time as a third-rate game show host. He has lied and obfuscated every day since he took office, and even while he was campaigning for that office. He has broken his campaign promises to end the wars in the Middle East and tobring our troops home; to pass a health care plan that will be cheaper and better than Obama’s grossly misnamed Affordable Care Act; to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure which would have created a whole slew of good-paying jobs; and of course to unite the country.

And there you have it. My perspective on the current state of the 2020 Presidential election, minus my conclusion.

I strongly suspect that lot of other progressives feel the same way.

© 4–09–2020