That’s what I hope for, that the takeaway from this will be that state and local level dems won’t be afraid to run on unabashed liberal platforms instead of constantly playing the tentative republican-liteTM.
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75% of Americans hear “political revolution” which he has said about a thousand times and they think “I don’t think so - no effing way”.
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So would the conventional wisdom suggest. It will fall flat everywhere else. And this is going to be going for a while. Huzzah to Bill Press for getting Bernie to run, I’ve really appreciated how much he has gotten Hillary to change her positions to co-opt his voters. And there’s probably more to come since she’s having such trouble putting him away.
Because the left is lazy. We range from whiny at the farther left to smug towards the center. We don’t want to have to build the intellectual framework necessary for political success, as conservatives did post-Goldwater. We’d rather be baffled by the self-evident stupidity of the people who don’t agree with us.
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As a Bernie guy myself, I quite welcomed it. This is a crazy political season and I don’t get why the centrists are hyperventilating about some bad publicity for the old man. As if HRC is golden!
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When average Dem voters see him praising Communist revolutions, it becomes very clear that he’s not speaking of “political revolution” as an abstract thesis that we’d discuss in a college course entitled, “Political Revolutions of the 20th Century and their Meanings”. He’s talking about the real deal and if you’re not one of those whose already going down that road, it’s kinda offputting, to say the least.
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That’s a false meme.
He hasn’t pulled her to left. She has long been for universal health coverage, she just believes in building upon what we have instead of single payer. She hasn’t moved one inch away from that. Hell, she is the candidate that is floating the notion of a public option may one route to get there, not Bernie.
He hasn’t pulled her to left on Wall Street. She has long been advocating that if there a bank is causing a systemic risk, it will be broken up. She hasn’t budged one inch towards Bernie’s stance of breaking them up just because.
He hasn’t moved her to the left on college tuition. She has been talking about reducing college debt and introduced her plan for doing so well before Bernie got into the race.
He didn’t move her on paid family leave, or abortion rights. She had those positions staked out a long time ago.
The only issue one can maybe point to is her switch on the Keystone pipeline. But neither candidate is making the environment a central plank of their platforms, so I think attributing that to Bernie is probably a reach. O’Malley,maybe…since he was the only one that really spoke our repeatedly on the environment, but his support was so small that even that is a hard story to sell.
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In fairness, looking at the republican field this year, we DO have a lot to work with for that strategy.
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It’s a wonder we ever lose elections.
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I think it’s pretty radical for a democratic candidate to take over $600K for delivering a secret speech to Goldman Sachs. I guess it really does depend on what’s important to you. Depending on which part of this site you read, either there’s almost no difference between Hillary and Bernie so why not just vote for Hiilary, or Bernie is a hairy eyed bomb thrower and Clinton is the safe choice. I hear he only appeals to white men, and then I read pulled in something like 80% of the under thirty vote. Were they all white men too?
People here are making strawman arguments about what a Bernie supporter is like. Supposedly I hate Hillary Clinton. What I hate is Wall St. remaining unaccountable for it’s crimes. People are suffering in the country and around the world because they have carte blanche to hork trillions out of the system without any downside. What happens is they are hired to oversee the “recovery”. But I guess the idea is that if we play this game right, eventually we’ll get back some of that in social programs or something. For once in this goddamn fucked up country let’s do the right thing. I’m not talking about taking the capitalists out and shooting them, and neither is Sanders. But he’s not taking money from them, and he’s not one himself. It will be an honor to vote for him. If this stuff is not important to you, you’ll certainly vote for Hillary. Geez all this drama about white people. He’s not Donald Trump.
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The Greens actually were trying that approach in the 90s. It fits their “think globally, act locally” storyline very well.
But they got dazzled by Nader, who never delivered on the 5% they desperately needed to help give them footing and financing. And its pretty much been a downhill slide for them ever since.
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Dreamworld!
Your non responsiveness is noted for future reference.
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No, he wants to eat his cake and still have it, too. It’s not hard to have cake then eat it.
For some reason, the silly version of thast old saw has become as common as “centers around” and abuses of “beg the question”.
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Exactly ! ! ! —
( Oh … you can wake up anytime now )
Look, when you get done driving on the parkway, will you just park the car in the driveway??
Jesus, you’re just never going to let me live that down.
I was personally shocked to see this. Where has the media vetting been on this one? Obviously Hillary knew about it from her answer. But she does not want to nuke Bernie as she wants his voters for the general. But this stuff, and his inability to answer the question “how his your socialism different than the socialism of Cuba and Danial Ortega you were praising” is just toxic.
It is in the Left’s interest (and I am a good SF leftist 
) to see our candidate is not a sure fire looser. Being able to tag Bernie - as we saw tonight with some strong evidence - a communist sympathizer is sort of a game changer, don’t you think?
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spin — You may want to rephrase that —
Yeah. It sucks that Cuba has a literacy rate of 99.7%. It also sucks that Cuba sends more doctors — medical and veterinary — to underserved places in the world than, say, the entire western world combined. It’s a tragedy, I tell ya.
What would really suck, however, is if Cuba hadn’t had to suffer a half-century of imperialist subterfuge and aggression. It may’ve made a lot more poor people healthier and smarter and, perhaps, wealthier. But that’s not really what Wall Street’s about.
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