This Is What a Republican Attack on Bernie Sanders Would Look Like
In a Washington press conference on Sunday, Sanders, who has no discernible path to a delegate majority, outlined a plan to force a contested convention, where he apparently believes some superdelegates will flip to his side on the basis of electability. “The evidence is extremely clear that I would be the stronger candidate to defeat Trump or any other Republican,” he said. Sanders reiterated this on Monday at a rally in Evansville, Indiana, saying, “We appeal to virtually all the Democrats, but we do a lot better with independents than Secretary Clinton. And I hope the Democrats at the national convention understand that while independents may not be able to vote in certain Democratic primaries, they do vote in the general election.”
I have no idea if Sanders is serious about this superdelegate plan. It might just be a rationale for him to keep fighting until the end of the primaries, garnering delegates that he could leverage to push Clinton and the party leftward at the convention. But if he is serious, then what he is proposing is a presumption based on a falsehood.
The presumption is that there is anything progressive about a plan that asks powerful figures to cast aside an electoral majority built on the choices of women and people of color. The falsehood is that Sanders’ superior electability is, as he asserted on Sunday, “extremely clear.”
It is true, as Sanders pointed out, that polls show him doing better than Clinton against Republicans in November. But it is also true that Clinton has not hit Sanders with a single negative ad. Not one.
1. Sanders has never been asked to account for his relationship with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, for which he served as a presidential elector in 1980. At the time, the party’s platform called for abolishing the U.S. military budget and proclaimed “solidarity” with revolutionary Iran. (This was in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis.)
2. There’s been little cable news chatter about Sanders’ 1985 trip to Nicaragua, where he reportedly joined a Sandinista rally with a crowd chanting, “Here, there, everywhere/ The Yankee will die.” It would be nice if this were due to a national consensus on the criminal nature of America’s support for the Contras. More likely, the media’s attention has simply been elsewhere.
3. The Clinton campaign has also ignored Sanders’ youthful sex writings. Republicans are unlikely to be so decorous.
4. As the nominee, Sanders would have to address his former opposition to public schools and praise for parents who believe that it is “better for their children not to go to school at all than for them to attend a normal type of establishment.”
5. He’d have to explain whether he still feels that sexual repression causes cancer.
6. He’d have to explain if he still opposes the concept of private charity, and whether he still supports the public takeover of the television industry.
7. One also assumes Republicans would, in keeping with Karl Rove’s playbook, try to hit Sanders where he’s strongest—on issues of financial integrity. They’d probably do it by going after Jane Sanders, who has been accused of trying to defraud the Catholic Church on a land deal she undertook as president of Burlington College. (After being forced out of that job, she received a $200,000 golden parachute.) If you think this can’t blow up, remember that Hillary Clinton never personally profited off of Whitewater, the land deal that became a pretext for endless investigations of her and her husband.
The Sanderistas appear to believe they were treated unfairly, even viciously, in this primary. In fact, they’ve been handled incredibly gingerly. That might end up being to Sanders’ detriment: If we’d spent the past few months chewing over his glaring electoral weaknesses and he was still leading Clinton in head-to-head matchups against the GOP, he might have a case for a contested convention. It would be a cynical, anti-democratic case that contradicts the people-powered rationale of his candidacy, but it wouldn’t be as nonsensical as the argument he’s making now.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/bernie_sanders_electability_argument_is_still_a_myth.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top
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Response to tonyt53 (Reply #1)
BTW, it's looking like their candidate is also John McCain's.
What a surprise.
After you refute that Marxism stuff, you can take on Bernie's sexual musings. There is so much to be said about that.
--imm
That's because it's broadcast on DU 24/7 
Go on, ask me how
--imm
there is SO MUCH dirt/corruption/slime clinging to Hilary Clinton (whom Bernie has been FAR too easy on, imnsho), that it would take days to catalogue. She has so MANY skeletons, they aren't contained in a closet... it's a veritable catacomb.
hmmmm
