Hundreds of Bernie supporters of drowned him out today with boos as he tried to make the case for voting for Hillary Clinton in order to defeat Donald J. Trump.
I understand many of you are angry with Bernie (and even with me) for suggesting that not supporting Hillary increases the odds of a Trump victory. Several of you have said you won’t choose “the lesser of two evils.” But as Bernie said today, “This is a real world we live in. Trump is a bully and a demagogue. Trump has made bigotry and hatred the cornerstone of his campaign.”
Let’s first defeat Trump, then let’s continue to build the movement — with an eye on 2020.
But Robert Reich is part of the problem. He used his quasi-economist status to insist that Bernie’s proposals made sense, while nearly everyone else in the field said otherwise. He insisted the processes were rigged, that Bernie was going to win anyway. He set his followers up for this disappointment, as recently as last week.
This crowd’s behavior isn’t new. This is what happened at all the caucuses. It happened in state delegate conventions. It happened when trying to fire campaigners leaking data to the opponent.
They aren’t there to listen, compromise, or build coalitions. They’ve democratically lost and have gotten way more influence on the platform and the convention than their votes warranted. Yet they want more.
They yelled at a black man talking about his dead dad. They yelled at a latina speaking in Spanish, most of them not knowing what she was saying. They booed Michelle Obama.
Bluntly, there is no pleasing them. Bernie has tried repeatedly over the past couple days to tell his crowd thanks for the votes, continue to push change, but ease up on Clinton and vote for her against Trump.
So they boo’d him and started talking about Jill Stein.
These were never Democrats. They got our microphones and airtime but they were never with the party, and they don’t respect its history or its current battles.
They can’t be made happy. We just have to wait for them to fade away.
The reason they’ve failed as a whole is because of this basic “coming at it the wrong way”. You can’t beat the GOP with moral purism. You have to convince the middle you’re reasonable and effective.
The Democrats aren’t a monolithic party. They’re a collection of a hundred caucuses, many of which also mega-team up for important bills in Congress. There’s a mountain of internal compromise before the GOP is even considered.
So in not working with America’s largest progressive coalition, they’re showing how they would also try to beat the GOP. With angry speeches and sit-ins and the insistence all their line items be addressed.
That’s not how you get things accomplished here. You gotta find the common ground, the win win, the compromise. The president won’t just govern the lefties, but the shotgun rack rednecks from my home town, the Christians that go to church 3 times a week, the average joe and jane that just want their paychecks to clear.
That’s been one of the biggest frustrations among Democrats. We should have been pivoting to the general in March. Super Tuesday was a landslide and the eventual outcome became pretty clear. Nate Silver continued his winning streak by calling all but 2 states within a couple percentage points. It was over then.
But instead Hillary’s assaulted from the right and the far left, both using the same playbook and headlines. Lefties post Brietbart and literal Russian state media to attack her.
Now it’s come to light that Russian hackers broke into the DNC networks, and have released everything damning in it they could find. I haven’t seen a single one of the cries of “collusion” or “corruption” prove out when you look at the emails in context. Yah they were mad at Bernie, especially after he called for the sitting chair of the DNC to be primaried. Yah they LOL’d at him sometimes, because they had those same Nate SIlver numbers we all did, and knew he wasn’t sitting as pretty as he claimed.
They should have been more professional in their correspondence. But have you hung around soldiers or doctors or EMTs? There’s some dark humor. Stuff you don’t want families to hear. But you gotta, because the work is so serious, and if you don’t lighten things up now and then and cajole with each other you’ll burn out.
Certainly none of it rises to the level of international espionage by an oppositional world actor to interfere with American elections. The fact the diehard Bernie crowd hand-waves this because they had some scraps of DNC members being catty just boggles me. This is Watergates times Bay of Pigs but they don’t care. There are emerging links between Trump and the Russian kleptocracy. They don’t care. Holocaust survivors are figuratively peeing themselves in public over Trump’s vitriol and popularity. They don’t care.
These aren’t Democrats who appreciate the work that went into suffrage, end of child labor, the civil rights era, minimum wage, reproductive rights… they’re curmudgeons with a “both parties are the same” mantra who won’t entertain any other worldview.
So let them chant. Let them embarrass themselves in the history books – the mostly white male crowd that boo’d every supporter of the soon-to-be first female president. It’s on tape. Their grandkids can go back and see the blind hatred in their eyes and hear their voices gone hoarse from attacking the progressive party. Imagine who they’ll be compared to.
Previously: Robert Reich is the Bill Nye of Economics
[ed note: Don’t bother leaving anti-establishment “both parties are the same” “crooked hillary” comments, I’ll be purging those useless rants.]