The bernie or bust threat is not going to work http://thedailybanter.com/2016/02/nevada-bernie-sanders-or-bust/
There truly is a brand of young political idealist -- and that’s the nice way of referring to it -- which is wielding its vote, or lack thereof, as a weapon to hopefully get Bernie Sanders elected. These are the people who threaten to stay home on election day, so to speak, and who insist that that very boycott will be what costs the Democrats the White House and puts the highest office in the free world in the hands of somebody like Donald Trump. Their arithmetic goes something like this: Democrats say that a Republican win in 2016 is unacceptable, given who the candidates are and what they believe, and that any and all necessary steps must be taken to prevent it; Hillary Clinton can’t win against the Republicans without the support of Bernie Sanders supporters in the general election; Bernie Sanders supporters will not vote for Hillary Clinton if she wins the nomination, no matter what; therefore, abandoning Hillary Clinton and supporting Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee is the only alternative to preventing a GOP victory. See? Give us what we want and no one gets hurt. Simple as that.
Except that this is the same kind of political hostage-taking the Republicans currently in Congress have become pariahs for engaging in. When the GOP has in the recent past threatened to allow the government to go into default because it doesn’t have the votes or the power to get what it wants through the proper channels, wise people have looked for the nearest brick to throw at its representatives. Now, if these Sanders acolytes are to be believed, the ostensible other end of the political spectrum is trying to pull the same crap: threaten to burn the country down because they can’t get what they want any other way. Like all forms of political terrorism, if you give in to this nonsense it’ll just embolden the next fringe group that can’t see its demands met by putting it to a vote. And that’s really the problem here: these ........ apparently can’t understand that in this country it all comes down to a vote and if their guy doesn’t get enough of them, he doesn’t win. Simple as that.
I’ve said from the very beginning that the Republicans are so thoroughly batshit and so unconscionably dangerous right now that a victory for them in November should be out of the question. Because of this, whoever were to win the nomination for the Democrats has to be the person sane people vote for, because he or she is all that stands between America and a new Dark Ages, particularly when you take the Supreme Court into account. If Bernie Sanders were to win, he’d get my vote. If Hillary Clinton were to win, she’d get my vote. That’s how, I believe, decent, evolved people think -- people who aren’t petulant children. I’d like to believe that the “Bernie or Bust” crowd is just making idle threats, but given its well-documented behavior over the past several months -- coupled with the fact that Bernie’s white millennial base likely believes it has the luxury of being able to survive in the GOP’s vision of future America -- it seems far more likely that if Sanders doesn’t win, they’ll stay home and sulk rather than do their civic duty for the good of the country.
What does that mean for the rest of us? It means we’ll simply have to do it without them. We’ll have no other choice.
Again, no one is going to change their vote and support Sanders based on the fact that some Sanders supporters will not support the nominee of the party.
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