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THE NATION: Bernie Sanders Is Hurting Himself by Playing the Victim
The Vermont senator could turn from movement leader into the messiah of an angry white male cult with his claims of a “rigged” nomination process. t’s been five days since the conflagration at the Nevada State Democratic Convention, and the embers are still burning. Much of it has singed Senator Bernie Sanders. The intimidation of speakers and the misogynist death threats against party chair Roberta Lange have led to a wave of critical pieces by Bernie supporters—some of them now former Bernie supporters. Sanders’s loyal CNN backer Sally Kohn wrote in Time: “I Felt the Bern But the Bros Are Extinguishing the Flames.” Esquire’s Charles Pierce, who voted for Sanders, weighed in Tuesday: “It’s Time for Bernie’s People to Calm Down.” Sanders supporter Harold Meyerson now insists, “The Bros Are Undermining Bernie.”
In the pages of the Sanders fanzine Salon (for which I used to work), at least two Bernie supporters have written that it’s over: For them, the mayhem in Las Vegas has doused the burn. Even on Sanders-friendly Reddit, former Berners were leaving the fold. Much of the media has reacted with shock to the Nevada chaos, and Sanders surrogates have faced tougher grilling on cable news than they have for the entire campaign.
But the Sanders camp is defiant, with the senator himself condemning the threats and reports of violence, but—and you never add “but” to a sentence that’s condemning threatening behavior—insisting party leaders had it coming, because convention rules were less than fair or “transparent.” Sanders has continued to rip the Democratic Party for unfairness, and his supporters are now telling reporters there will be trouble at the convention in Philadelphia over the “rigged” primary process.....Let me stipulate that the “Democratic establishment” isn’t blameless in this mess. I understand the anger and even fear of Nevada Democrats, but the local party’s letter to the DNC charging that there’s “a penchant for violence” in the Sanders campaign was histrionic and only escalated the conflict. I get it: After Clinton supporters were forced to walk a gauntlet of shame in East Los Angeles, screamed at by angry Sandernistas with bullhorns who even bullied children; after protesters crowded Clinton’s car on the way to a fundraiser; and now, after Nevada, there is growing concern about an apparent mob mentality that can cross the line into physical harassment, if not violence. But describing “a penchant for violence” is unfair to the many millions of peaceful, respectful Sanders supporters.
With hindsight, I wish chair Roberta Lange had used her discretion to call for roll-call votes on the contested issues—although it’s common in meetings like that for a chair to use her judgment in evaluating a voice vote, when one side clearly has the edge in numbers, but is out-shouted by the smaller contingent. And once again, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz escalated a conflict that she should have worked to defuse. Repeatedly accused of unfairness by the Sanders campaign—not always with clear evidence—she has time and again replied harshly and defensively to her critics. When the Sanders campaign sued the DNC in December for briefly locking it out of a party voter file—because Sanders staffers, who were quickly fired, tried to steal private Clinton voter data during a security breach—Wasserman Schultz took the lead in defending herself. Even Governor Howard Dean, a former DNC chair who normally defends his successor in public, suggested she should have left the defense to surrogates and waited for the results of the DNC’s own investigation......We’ve also seen some real injustice along the way to the nomination: more than 100,000 voters wrongly purged in Brooklyn; polling places shut down in Phoenix, Arizona. But both were the work of local election officials—and in Phoenix, a Republican—not the national party. Other Sanders complaints are specious: You don’t have to like closed primaries, but they were established long before Sanders came along, and acting like they “disenfranchise” his independent or non-aligned voters is an insult to the mostly African-American and poor people who are truly disenfranchised in this country. Still, several states, including New York, make it ridiculously hard to change your registration and become a Democrat. There’s plenty of room for reform to make the party more inclusive.
All of that said: The Sanders campaign has less than a leg to stand on in its Nevada protests. Politifact “fact-checked” campaign manager Jeff Weaver’s claim that the state party “hijacked the process on the floor” of the convention “ignoring the regular procedure and ramming through what they wanted to do.” After an exhaustive examination of the long day of skirmishes, it found Weaver’s claim to be “false.”
The defections of some supporters, the increased skepticism of even once-friendly cable hosts, and a rebuke by Politifact isn’t fatal to Sanders’s campaign, of course. What will be fatal to Sanders’s future as a mass-movement leader—as opposed to the messiah of an angry, heavily white, and male cult—is his continued insistence that his enemy now is not so much the corporate overlords, or income inequality, or the big banks, but a corrupt Democratic Party, epitomized by Wall Street flunkie Hillary Clinton, that has “rigged” the election to thwart him—as he raged in a tone-deaf speech Tuesday night, as cable news was showing the texted death threats to Roberta Lange in the background (which Sanders did not even mention)..... He thinks he’s the only one who can defeat Donald Trump. But in fact, he’s the only one who can elect him, by tearing the party apart.
More at link: http://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-is-hurting-himself-by-playing-the-victim/
22 replies
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Calling THE NATION'S writers corporate hacks.
"Corporate Hack" !!!!!!!!!
who is, for all intensive purposes, a Clinton surrogate. 
