Why Bernie Sanders Is Still Standing
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_bernie_sanders_is_still_standing_201
60530/
Posted on May 30, 2016
By Bill Blum
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., arrives at
a campaign rally at Ventura College in Ventura, Calif., May 26. (Damian
Dovarganes / AP)
According to the conventional wisdom, the quixotic presidential run of
Bernie Sanders should be over. In fact, by conventional standards, his
campaign should barely have gotten off the ground.
As a self-described "democratic socialist" in a country where the "S" word
has been anathema for most of the past century, Sanders should have been a
ready mark for Hillary Clinton, easily Red-baited, branded as an
out-of-touch, elderly extremist and consigned to the fringes of political
relevance.
But while he still trails Clinton in the delegate count, he remains in the
hunt for the Democratic nomination. According to the latest Public Policy
Institute of California poll he has pulled to a dead heat with Clinton in
the run-up to the Golden State's critical primary election on June 7.
In the meantime, Sanders continues to draw enormous-or, as he might say in
his thick Brooklynese, "yuuge"-crowds to his rallies. The one I attended
last week, for example, attracted some 6,750 supporters, who packed a high
school football field in Santa Monica, Calif.
So, how and why has he managed to defy the odds?
One big reason, undoubtedly, is that Clinton is a weak candidate, damaged by
her insider status, history of scandal (the email controversy is only the
latest in a long line) and the public's grave doubts about her honesty.
Her unfavorability ratings-along with those of Donald Trump, her
front-running GOP counterpart-sit at historic highs.
But Clinton's deficits are only part of the overall picture.
Another reason Sanders remains in the fight is that the Red-baiting tactics
directed against him largely have failed. Those tactics-which have been
deployed in both overt, traditional forms and in coded, latter-day garb-have
been continuous and unrelenting. They have come from Democrats and
Republicans as well as from the mainstream media.
The vintage variety began in earnest with Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire
McCaskill's breathless tirade against him during a June 25 interview on
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show. "I think the media is giving Bernie a pass right
now," the longtime Clinton backer told co-host Mika Brzezinski. "I very
rarely read in any coverage of Bernie that he's a socialist."
Declaring that Clinton was destined to win the nomination-at the time, she
was ahead of Sanders in national polls by as much as 60 points)-McCaskill
struck a theme that would soon be echoed by others: that Sanders was "too
liberal" to be elected. McCaskill urged the media to get on board, and they
soon fell in line.
As if on cue, CNN's Anderson Cooper grilled Sanders about his socialist
beliefs during the Oct. 13 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas.
"How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?"
Cooper asked, adding: "The Republican attack ad in the general election-it
writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned
in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you were not a
capitalist."
Sanders responded with a class analysis rarely heard on primetime television
but that has, nonetheless, become the now-familiar cornerstone of his
campaign. "We're going to win," he said, "because we're going to explain
what democratic socialism is. And what democratic socialism is about is that
it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country
own . almost as much as the bottom 90 percent. That it is wrong, today, in a
rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top 1
percent."
By January, as Sanders' message gained even more traction, Clintons'
supporters and surrogates had become openly alarmed at the likelihood of a
real challenge from the Vermont senator.
New York Times political correspondent Jonathan Martin brought many of their
anxious voices together in an article published on Jan. 19. "Here in the
heartland, we like our politicians in the mainstream, and he is not-he's a
socialist," Missouri Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon said. "[A]s far as having him
at the top of the ticket, it would be a meltdown all the way down the
ballot."
A Sanders candidacy "wouldn't be helpful outside Vermont, Massachusetts,
Berkeley, Palo Alto and Ann Arbor," Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said.
Martin also quoted McCaskill as saying: "The Republicans . can't wait to run
an ad with a hammer and sickle."
True to McCaskill's warnings, Republican operatives, while staying primarily
focused on Clinton, have begun Bernie-bashing, too, and they've been at it
for quite a while. The "Sandinista" and "Soviet" slurs invoked by Anderson
Cooper against Sanders actually originated with Breitbart News, which
publicized them as a set of talking points in a twisted May 2015 review of
his 1997 political memoir, "Outsider in the House."
As Sanders' White House bid accelerated, the "socialist" epithet and the
jeers about his unelectability were picked up and repeated by prominent
conservatives, including Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and GOP strategists
like Ryan Williams, who worked as Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign spokesman.
"There's no mystery to what the attack on [Sanders as the nominee] would
be," Williams explained to Bloomberg reporter Sahil Kapur in April. "Bernie
Sanders is literally a card-carrying socialist."
Along with the old-style red smears, there has also been a new,
post-modernist line of denigration, delivered mostly-and shamelessly-by
Democratic officials and affiliated pundits, who have repackaged the classic
affronts into more nuanced, contemporary forms.
Thus, we've been instructed by party mainstays such as Sen. Barbara Boxer of
California and by Clinton herself that Sanders isn't a "real Democrat."
Instead, we've been urged to believe by Washington Post columnist Dana
Milbank that he is this election season's Ralph Nader, whose Green Party
candidacy allegedly tilted the 2000 presidential election in favor of George
W. Bush, bringing us the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Taking a slightly different tack, fellow Post columnist Eugene Robinson has
accused Sanders of conducting a "scorched-earth campaign" within the
Democratic Party by remaining in a race he can't win. Sanders' obstinacy,
Robinson charges, "will succeed in only one thing: electing Donald Trump."
Whether old-school or newfangled, the aim of the takedowns remains the same:
to insulate the political status quo from any credible threat of fundamental
change, even of the entirely peaceful, small "d" democratic and
reform-minded genre offered by Sanders. And still, Sanders' poll numbers,
particularly as reflected in hypothetical match-ups against Trump, have
continued to climb while Clinton's have shrunk.
Seeking to comprehend why the Red-baiting, in all of its iterations, old and
new, has fallen short, I reached out to Yeshiva University history professor
Ellen Schrecker, considered by many the nation's foremost authority on the
subject.
Now 78 years old, Schrecker lives in New York City and is the author of
numerous essays and books, including her highly praised interpretive
monograph, "The Age of McCarthyism" (1994), and more recently, "The Lost
Soul of Higher Education" (2010). A longstanding socialist, she voted for
Sanders in her state's primary.
The key to understanding why the current attacks have failed, she told me in
a phone interview, lies with young people, Sanders' primary base of support.
"I think Red-baiting is losing its bite, particularly among the young,
because they don't know what communism was, and, as a result, baiting has
lost its Cold War sting," she said.
"The fragmentation of American politics [in the Internet Age] is also a
factor," she continued. "In the '50s, we had three TV networks and a few
major newspapers. It was easier to marginalize left-wing figures. Now, we
have a proliferation of outlets. There are so many other things today people
can be made to fear besides being a socialist: terrorism, transgenderism,
guns or the lack of them."
Recent public-opinion research bears out Schrecker's views. A Pew poll from
June 2015 found that 69 percent of voters under 30 were willing to vote for
a socialist presidential candidate. A YouGov survey, conducted this January,
found the same demographic had a higher opinion of socialism than
capitalism, by a ratio of 43 to 32 percent.
"Bernie Sanders has made it safe to be a socialist in American politics,"
Schrecker added. "That could very well be his most important long-term
achievement. He has offered a way of thinking about politics that we haven't
considered in 50 to 60 years. And he's done so in sync with what people feel
at a gut level. The Occupy Movement brought the issue of income inequality
to the forefront, and it has stayed there. Sanders has given the issue a
public face."
The vital task now, Schrecker said, is to build an enduring movement for
progressive change, especially considering the prospect of a Trump
presidency, which she termed both "terrifying" and "crazy."
The people I joined last week to hear Sanders speak seemed to know this only
too well as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the football field at Santa
Monica High School after waiting in lines stretching three city blocks.
They were, as they have been at other Sanders events, predominantly but not
exclusively young. They were equally divided between women and men, and
included large numbers of Latinos, Asians and African-Americans, whom
Sanders has sometimes failed to reach. Judging from the conversations I had
with a few of these supporters-and the chatter I discerned among others-they
were smart, well-informed and hardly the stuff of naive stereotypes, much
less the commie dupes of yesteryear.
As Sanders railed against sexism and economic, racial and environmental
injustice and made his trademark pitch for "political revolution," it
occurred to me over the cheering of the crowd that something genuinely
transformative was indeed happening, and that a new movement of the left was
being born, if it had not already arrived.
In the final analysis, it is that movement that has sustained Sanders'
candidacy, more than the other way around. Even in the face of entrenched
opposition, it will survive, with fits and starts, setbacks and successes,
even if Sanders himself eventually fades from the political scene.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
Why Bernie Sanders Is Still Standing
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_bernie_sanders_is_still_standing_201
60530/
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Posted on May 30, 2016
By Bill Blum
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., arrives at a
campaign rally at Ventura College in Ventura, Calif., May 26. (Damian
Dovarganes / AP)
According to the conventional wisdom, the quixotic presidential run of
Bernie Sanders should be over. In fact, by conventional standards, his
campaign should barely have gotten off the ground.
As a self-described "democratic socialist" in a country where the "S" word
has been anathema for most of the past century, Sanders should have been a
ready mark for Hillary Clinton, easily Red-baited, branded as an
out-of-touch, elderly extremist and consigned to the fringes of political
relevance.
But while he still trails Clinton in the delegate count, he remains in the
hunt for the Democratic nomination. According to the latest Public Policy
Institute of California poll he has pulled to a dead heat with Clinton in
the run-up to the Golden State's critical primary election on June 7.
In the meantime, Sanders continues to draw enormous-or, as he might say in
his thick Brooklynese, "yuuge"-crowds to his rallies. The one I attended
last week, for example, attracted some 6,750 supporters, who packed a high
school football field in Santa Monica, Calif.
So, how and why has he managed to defy the odds?
One big reason, undoubtedly, is that Clinton is a weak candidate, damaged by
her insider status, history of scandal (the email controversy is only the
latest in a long line) and the public's grave doubts about her honesty.
Her unfavorability ratings-along with those of Donald Trump, her
front-running GOP counterpart-sit at historic highs.
But Clinton's deficits are only part of the overall picture.
Another reason Sanders remains in the fight is that the Red-baiting tactics
directed against him largely have failed. Those tactics-which have been
deployed in both overt, traditional forms and in coded, latter-day garb-have
been continuous and unrelenting. They have come from Democrats and
Republicans as well as from the mainstream media.
The vintage variety began in earnest with Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire
McCaskill's breathless tirade against him during a June 25 interview on
MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show. "I think the media is giving Bernie a pass right
now," the longtime Clinton backer told co-host Mika Brzezinski. "I very
rarely read in any coverage of Bernie that he's a socialist."
Declaring that Clinton was destined to win the nomination-at the time, she
was ahead of Sanders in national polls by as much as 60 points)-McCaskill
struck a theme that would soon be echoed by others: that Sanders was "too
liberal" to be elected. McCaskill urged the media to get on board, and they
soon fell in line.
As if on cue, CNN's Anderson Cooper grilled Sanders about his socialist
beliefs during the Oct. 13 Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas.
"How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?"
Cooper asked, adding: "The Republican attack ad in the general election-it
writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned
in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you were not a
capitalist."
Sanders responded with a class analysis rarely heard on primetime television
but that has, nonetheless, become the now-familiar cornerstone of his
campaign. "We're going to win," he said, "because we're going to explain
what democratic socialism is. And what democratic socialism is about is that
it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country
own . almost as much as the bottom 90 percent. That it is wrong, today, in a
rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top 1
percent."
By January, as Sanders' message gained even more traction, Clintons'
supporters and surrogates had become openly alarmed at the likelihood of a
real challenge from the Vermont senator.
New York Times political correspondent Jonathan Martin brought many of their
anxious voices together in an article published on Jan. 19. "Here in the
heartland, we like our politicians in the mainstream, and he is not-he's a
socialist," Missouri Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon said. "[A]s far as having him
at the top of the ticket, it would be a meltdown all the way down the
ballot."
A Sanders candidacy "wouldn't be helpful outside Vermont, Massachusetts,
Berkeley, Palo Alto and Ann Arbor," Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said.
Martin also quoted McCaskill as saying: "The Republicans . can't wait to run
an ad with a hammer and sickle."
True to McCaskill's warnings, Republican operatives, while staying primarily
focused on Clinton, have begun Bernie-bashing, too, and they've been at it
for quite a while. The "Sandinista" and "Soviet" slurs invoked by Anderson
Cooper against Sanders actually originated with Breitbart News, which
publicized them as a set of talking points in a twisted May 2015 review of
his 1997 political memoir, "Outsider in the House."
As Sanders' White House bid accelerated, the "socialist" epithet and the
jeers about his unelectability were picked up and repeated by prominent
conservatives, including Lindsey Graham, John Kasich and GOP strategists
like Ryan Williams, who worked as Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign spokesman.
"There's no mystery to what the attack on [Sanders as the nominee] would
be," Williams explained to Bloomberg reporter Sahil Kapur in April. "Bernie
Sanders is literally a card-carrying socialist."
Along with the old-style red smears, there has also been a new,
post-modernist line of denigration, delivered mostly-and shamelessly-by
Democratic officials and affiliated pundits, who have repackaged the classic
affronts into more nuanced, contemporary forms.
Thus, we've been instructed by party mainstays such as Sen. Barbara Boxer of
California and by Clinton herself that Sanders isn't a "real Democrat."
Instead, we've been urged to believe by Washington Post columnist Dana
Milbank that he is this election season's Ralph Nader, whose Green Party
candidacy allegedly tilted the 2000 presidential election in favor of George
W. Bush, bringing us the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
Taking a slightly different tack, fellow Post columnist Eugene Robinson has
accused Sanders of conducting a "scorched-earth campaign" within the
Democratic Party by remaining in a race he can't win. Sanders' obstinacy,
Robinson charges, "will succeed in only one thing: electing Donald Trump."
Whether old-school or newfangled, the aim of the takedowns remains the same:
to insulate the political status quo from any credible threat of fundamental
change, even of the entirely peaceful, small "d" democratic and
reform-minded genre offered by Sanders. And still, Sanders' poll numbers,
particularly as reflected in hypothetical match-ups against Trump, have
continued to climb while Clinton's have shrunk.
Seeking to comprehend why the Red-baiting, in all of its iterations, old and
new, has fallen short, I reached out to Yeshiva University history professor
Ellen Schrecker, considered by many the nation's foremost authority on the
subject.
Now 78 years old, Schrecker lives in New York City and is the author of
numerous essays and books, including her highly praised interpretive
monograph, "The Age of McCarthyism" (1994), and more recently, "The Lost
Soul of Higher Education" (2010). A longstanding socialist, she voted for
Sanders in her state's primary.
The key to understanding why the current attacks have failed, she told me in
a phone interview, lies with young people, Sanders' primary base of support.
"I think Red-baiting is losing its bite, particularly among the young,
because they don't know what communism was, and, as a result, baiting has
lost its Cold War sting," she said.
"The fragmentation of American politics [in the Internet Age] is also a
factor," she continued. "In the '50s, we had three TV networks and a few
major newspapers. It was easier to marginalize left-wing figures. Now, we
have a proliferation of outlets. There are so many other things today people
can be made to fear besides being a socialist: terrorism, transgenderism,
guns or the lack of them."
Recent public-opinion research bears out Schrecker's views. A Pew poll from
June 2015 found that 69 percent of voters under 30 were willing to vote for
a socialist presidential candidate. A YouGov survey, conducted this January,
found the same demographic had a higher opinion of socialism than
capitalism, by a ratio of 43 to 32 percent.
"Bernie Sanders has made it safe to be a socialist in American politics,"
Schrecker added. "That could very well be his most important long-term
achievement. He has offered a way of thinking about politics that we haven't
considered in 50 to 60 years. And he's done so in sync with what people feel
at a gut level. The Occupy Movement brought the issue of income inequality
to the forefront, and it has stayed there. Sanders has given the issue a
public face."
The vital task now, Schrecker said, is to build an enduring movement for
progressive change, especially considering the prospect of a Trump
presidency, which she termed both "terrifying" and "crazy."
The people I joined last week to hear Sanders speak seemed to know this only
too well as they stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the football field at Santa
Monica High School after waiting in lines stretching three city blocks.
They were, as they have been at other Sanders events, predominantly but not
exclusively young. They were equally divided between women and men, and
included large numbers of Latinos, Asians and African-Americans, whom
Sanders has sometimes failed to reach. Judging from the conversations I had
with a few of these supporters-and the chatter I discerned among others-they
were smart, well-informed and hardly the stuff of naive stereotypes, much
less the commie dupes of yesteryear.
As Sanders railed against sexism and economic, racial and environmental
injustice and made his trademark pitch for "political revolution," it
occurred to me over the cheering of the crowd that something genuinely
transformative was indeed happening, and that a new movement of the left was
being born, if it had not already arrived.
In the final analysis, it is that movement that has sustained Sanders'
candidacy, more than the other way around. Even in the face of entrenched
opposition, it will survive, with fits and starts, setbacks and successes,
even if Sanders himself eventually fades from the political scene.
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