This is solely my own opinion, of course, as is everything I write. If you disagree with it, feel free to say so. But I think it must be said, and I am upset enough to express it.
On Tuesday night, there was a Congressional primary in Texas for the seat held by Henry Cuellar, who has held that seat for years. He was opposed by Jessica Cisneros. Cuellar is not a supporter of abortion rights, at least not fully, except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the health of the mother. Otherwise, he pretty much votes with the Democrats on everything. James Clyburn campaigned for him, and Speaker Pelosi, Hoyer, and Jeffries supported him in this race.. It was reported that Cisneros received outside spending in the amount of $2,207,885. Cuellar received outside spending in the amount of $1,523,237.
Cuellar won the primary, which was very close.
Sanders, who had supported Cisneros, made this comment, for all to see, “Billionaire PACs and the Democratic leadership are celebrating the defeat of a strong young progressive, Jessica Cisneros, and the re-election of a reactionary Democrat. Now you know why there is no grassroots energy in the Party, and Dems are in trouble for November.”
Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the Spring of 2016, where Sanders, after being soundly defeated in almost all of the primaries, and being essentially mathematically eliminated after Super Tuesday in March, kept on campaigning against Hillary Clinton, his rhetoric becoming angrier and more disparaging.
Sanders kept this up all the way until June. Finally, he reluctantly endorsed her. He made a few campaign speeches for her, which I was foolish enough to watch. They consisted of him saying, “As you know, I have disagreements with Senator Clinton, but Donald Trump cannot be elected,” then moving into his standard stump speech for the next 80 minutes.
I don’t know what he intended by this, but to a significant portion of his followers, the message was that “Bernie was so wonderful, and Hillary only won because the DNC cheated; so we are not going to support her, and we are not going to vote for her, and then there is a good chance that Bernie can be the nominee in 2020.”
I know that many Sanders supporters voted for Hillary, but a notable number did not; did not vote, voted for Stein or Johnson, and maybe some voted for Trump. “Highlight the differences,” as the arrogantly indifferent Susan Sarandon said. In the three key battleground states of MI, WI, and PA, the votes for Russian asset Stein were more than the margin by which Trump won.
Sanders of course never apologized for any of this, nor did his supporters. Sanders believes that he is always right about everything. And when he does not get his way, he blames the system, other Democrats, rich people. In other words, he makes everything into fodder for his campaign speeches, which along with the books he ostensibly sells, has garnered three houses for himself and his wife Jane.
Sanders-supported candidates virtually never win. But he keeps on campaigning for them, in primaries, because they rarely get as far as the general election. He has the right to do that, though he is not helping the Democratic Party at all.
What he just did was far worse than supporting his version of a Progressive candidate, losing, and accepting that. No, Sanders blamed “the Democratic leadership,” and said that they were celebrating the defeat of the Progressive. Even worse, he essentially told his national supporters that if they didn’t feel like voting in November, or in 2024, or ever, they were justified in that, because the Democratic leadership was against them.
And surely some of them will do just that, as they did in 2016. In my own personal opinion. Sanders is a jerk, a person who thinks he is always right, always wants his way; and if he doesn’t get it, will be glad to bring the Democratic Party to ruins to prove to him and them that he is right.
One of the biggest problems the Democrats have had, except for a few Presidential elections, is turnout. It was a major factor in 2010, 2014, and 2016. We desperately need a massive turnout this November, but if Sanders has his way, we will not get it. He tells his followers that the national Democratic Party is not on their side, that big money is against them (even though his candidate Cisneros brought it more outside money than Cuellar), and that his preferred candidate not winning is the reason that they will not turn out in four months, and the Republicans will take over Congress.
That horrible outcome is probably something that Sanders hopes for, in the way that Ralph Nader did, and the Far Left has been doing for decades, hoping that if the Democratic Party is destroyed, they can lead a new movement, a new Party, which will triumph, in a glorious ascendance. We will drink wine beneath the willow trees!
But there will be no ascendance, there will be a fascist state, with the rights of all Democrats, all liberals, all Progressives, taken away. Abortion is one crucial right, and we would still have it, had Hillary won, had Sanders not kept attacking her, so that his supporters threw dollar bills at her, and booed her at the convention until they got moved to the rafters.
That was infinitely more important than whether one Democrat in the House supports the right to abortion less than everyone else in the caucus. Abortion is going to be lost because of the Supreme Court, where Trump appointed three absolutely evil Far Right Justices, and because of state legislatures. Maybe Sanders, and Joy Reid, and some others who bitterly complained about the Democratic support for Cuellar, should have cared much more about the thing which really mattered in protecting a woman’s right to abortion.
Sanders doesn’t see it, or he doesn’t care. He is completely doctrinaire, self-righteous, arrogant, and selfish in his politics. I wish he would go away, permanently. I don’t want him to die, or to be ill, I want him to go away, get out of politics, stop ruining this for everyone else. We’ve got more than enough trouble and uphill climbing, without him making it all worse, in his typical way. He is the worst thing to happen to the Democratic Party in decades, whether or not his online and media supporters ever figure this out.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
“Cisneros brought it more outside money than Cuellar”
Yeah, but her average donation was $34. I gave her rather more than that.
But not as much as I gave Warnock and Fetterman.
Sanders isn’t completely wrong about who the party tends to support. It plays it too safe in many instances. I’m not a lefty lefty but we’ve taken in way too many conservative refugees since the Trump era began that we’re in danger of spinning our wheels. Here in PA, the party backed my congressman, Conor Lamb, whose a little bit of a cross between a Boy Scout and a high school student body president. He kisses up to the old dudes ar the VFW and completely ignores his eastern suburbs where the voters are bluer than blue and diverse. Lamb went on a scorched earth campaign against Fetterman and lost badly. He isn’t feeling the zeitgeist.
What I think is happening here is Democrats have been told to sit and wait and keep their powder dry for a very long time. But it’s not in our nature to not push forward and try new things and try to get ahead of changes we see coming that might affect the working class and we keep getting stuck with the cautious, clean cut guys who cannot relate.
Sanders doesn’t speak for me. He’s good in some areas and not others and his fucking ego probably cost Hillary the election more than putin, trump or Comey. But we definitely do need to get more in touch with our liberal roots and four freedoms. That may make more conservative Democrats uncomfortable. But think what it has been like for moderate or liberal Democrats who look way lefter than they actually are but are actually lefter than the rightward creep of the party after Obama. People like Cuellar don’t represent us and it’s time to pass the torch to others with newer, younger, fresher ideas even if they are supported by Bernie sanders. That’s why it’s kind of a tragedy that Cisneros lost. I get it that Nancy is trying to hold on to her majority and cuellar was the safer bet. But the fact that Cisneros came this close to beating him indicates a impatience by the younger progressives in her party to just get on with it. You never know who they’re going to pull along with them and voting for an old, cautious, plodding, slightly patriarchical male Democrat just isn’t cutting it anymore. .
EXACTLY, plus he is another example of someone who should retire. The Democratic leadership (not that Sanders is part of it) really needs some younger blood. It’s passed time for Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn, and Biden also, to ride off into the sunset. Chuck Schumer should be in his last term and Feinstein shouldn’t have run last time.
He’s lucky it wasn’t a day later, IMO, his A rating from the NRA would have turned enough voters to give Cisneros the win.
William: Sanders would never be my first choice, but the DNC has got to realize that they need to bring in some younger, more left leaning people IMO, they tend to put their finger on the scale only for the Right Leaning Democrats, Obama being the ultimate example.
” IMO, they tend to put their finger on the scale only for the Right Leaning Democrats.”
In direct violation of the DNC charter, I might add. The Party’s own rules require it to be neutral in nomination contests, something that’s routinely ignored when someone even slightly to the Left of Richard Nixon runs for office.
Well, they supported Hillary, who in my mind was always a classic liberal in most matters, including Medicare For All. They supported Kerry, who by most standards is a liberal Democrat. They even supported Dukakis a very good man, but probably too liberal for the masses. And again, I see no evidence that the voters want someone to the left of Hillary or Bill or even Gore, I simply do not think that the voters are where the Sanders folks think they are, where many of us thought they were pre-McGovern debacle, and some then lapsed back into thinking that they were.
That doesn’t say that we shouldn’t have more liberals in the House, but I think that too many Democratic activists, completely frustrated by the awfulness of Republicans, prefer to spend their energy trying to defeat Democrats whom they don’t think are liberal enough on all issues. It’s sort of a fun game in more ideal political times, but it seems self-destructive now. Imagine whom the so-called “Neo-liberal” Hillary would have put on the Court, rather than Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. But many on the Left hated her because she voted for AUMF, and she is a Clinton, so they supported a candidate who never passed a bill in his life, has no grasp of foreign policy, cannot compromise on anything, and would have lost by 8% or more, in my view, once the voters heard things like him defending Castro and criticizing President Kennedy for not praising him.