What the hell is wrong with this man?? Does he want to just rip apart the party?? I’m sorry, I used to have respect for him, admired his campaign and the issues he brought a spotlight to. At one point I was considering to vote for him (as I’m in California I have yet to cast a primary ballot). Those days are long long gone now. Anyone in one of the state’s or territories yet to vote should do the Democratic Party a favor and vote against this kind of thinking. It’s like he wants to be a gadfly just to be an irritant to the party. Even if the “establishment” adopted everything he wanted I have the distinct feeling he still would be raging against the party.
In this interview he talks about how super delegates in states he’s won should flip to him and honor the “will of the people.” But then for some reason the super delagates in states Hillary has won should still disregard their state’s voters and vote for him instead because he thinks he’s a better candidate in the fall?? Well I’m sorry he should do the same thing he’s preaching to super delegates in the states he’s won and listen to the will of the voters. Even if we allocated the super delegates of each state to the winner of that state Bernie would still loose and if we allocated supers proportionally just as we do with the pledged delegates we’d be left with results that proportion wise match today’s pledged delegate percentages, with Bernie having something like 11% fewer delagates.
And to top it all off he’s ranting about a “rigged” election process, now though it’s not the super delegates he’s complaining about (since he now is relying on them for his proposed “conceivable” pathway to the nomination), it’s closed primaries. I’m sorry but he made a lot more sense when he was raging against this group of “establishment” elites with power to disregard the entire primary process and crown a winner than when complaining about state parties that simply require you to be an actual member of that party to select that party’s nominee (the only quibble i think is legitimate here is New Yorks ridiculous requirements to change registration months and months in advance). The sad truth is if you want to influence and shape a party you should actually take a stand and become a member of that party! In my mind that’s a much more effective model then the vision it appears sanders embraces where you should stay out of the party and complain. A national party is naturally a big tent coalition of people and movements and ideas, I get that Bernie may be unhappy with some of the party’s or its candidates ideas and proposals or their unwillingness in his eyes to go far enough but parties can and do change to reflect the sentiment of its membership (see the Democratic Party and gay marriage relatively recently), but to get that change in the party you have to fully embrace and commit to the party and push it to look more like the party you envision, you have a chance to succeed if you bring about untold numbers of fellow believers into the party fold… This is all not to say I think all primaries should be closed, it’s just that I think far from being “undemocratic” there is definite arguments for a “closed system” (just as there are arguments for an open primary system). The far more undemocratic system and process though, is the entire concept of the “caucus”, which just happens to be a format Bernie performs well in (so we don’t hear him ranting against them at all). Like i mentioned earlier, I at one time truely did admire The Sanders Campaign, mostly because I thought it was a campaign that appeared full of idealistic integrity. That cannot be said about the sanders campaign of today. A better word today would be “sanctimonious.” A campaign that still thinks and preaches itself as some sort of moral superior to all other presidential campaigns, that’s fighting to make the primary more responsive to the People, of building a “revolution” from the “bottom up” with millions of voiceless citizens. But in practice all its preaching about giving a voice to “the people” is thrown out the window in favor of finding “the people” who are, in Bernie’s view, simply voting the right way.