You can forget about Bernie running for President in 2020

[Ken Burch]

220. He stopped when it was decided. HRC didn't go over the top until almost the end.

He had to stay in at least until New York to give the people who wanted to vote for him a chance to do so and to increase the chance of getting the ideas his supporters backed added to the platform.

I don't approve of everything people associated with the guy said or did-hated the 'bros as much as you did and called him out, called out Willy T to(btw, I'm pretty sure that guy was a right-wing troll just here to make trouble), btw, but in fairness, it was a two-way street on that.

Every thread that falsely accused his supporters of voting against women, people of color and even LGBTQ people just because they voted for the candidate they preferred was wrong, as was every thread that implied his supporters didn't are about institutional social oppression when, as people of the left, fighting that would simply have been part of their DNA, was wrong.

And anytime Bernie's Jewishness was used as an argument against him-especially when it was framed, as it was several times, as "the country will never elect a socialist Jew", was indefensible.

As to the convention-in my view, the chants would never have happened if only;

A) The Platform Committee hadn't gone back on HRC's "no TPP" position of the primaries and put the meaningless non-phrase "no bad trade deals" in the platform;

B) Failing that, if HRC had just said, in her acceptance speech "I respect President Obama's opinion about the TPP, but it's not my opionion, I will withdraw the TPP from consideration if elected";

C) Failing that, if they'd at least, at LEAST not let Terry McAuliffe go on tv the day after the Platform Committee vote and say that the TPP might be put through after all if HRC had been elected;

D) Failing that, the party hadn't refused to let the Sanders people do what they originally wished to do and just stand there silently holding signs saying "NO TPP". The signs were confiscated with no justification. What possible case was there to provoke people who'd been needlessly angered? If they were going to be let down, why not just let them have a harmless silent protest?

In my view, had even ONE of those things been done, the chants on the convention floor would not have happened. Why, instead of dong even one of those things, did the party essentially decided to tell Sanders people to, as a banned former poster put it years ago "pound sand and peddle it walking"? What defense could there be for the issue to be handled in as heavy-handed a manner as it was? Knowing, as HRC's campaign did, that that issues was much more important than any other for Bernie's delegates(most of whom had never been to a national convention before and were simply unaware of the possible consequences for their acts), can you offer any theories as to why her people, in the way they ran the convention, would choose it as the question on which they would make a show of saying "Go To HELL!" to Bernie's supporters and to the majority of the country who joined them in opposing that pact?
All HRC had to do was simply say "what I said about this in the primaries is what I'm pledged to now".

That said, if I'd been a delegate, I wouldn't have joined the chants and would have tried to talk them out of chanting-but can you see how the way everything had been handled would have made that nearly impossible?

And again, I condemn everything that was bad behavior in the primaries on the part of the supporters of the candidate I supported.

Most who voted for him voted for her in November. Most worked for her. I'm convinced if that one issue had been handled differently that week, it would have essentially been all.

What I'm fighting against now is the insistence on some(far from all, but some)people who supported HRC from the start on NOT moving on from their feelings about the spring-on NOT letting that be a thing of the past, but instead on continuing what looks like a scorched-earth campaign not only against Bernie(who can take care of himself and who does need to apologize for some things) but against his supporters and often, by extension, against any idea associated with his supporters.

I mean, you can't even say the words "economic justice" or "corporate power" or "class" on this site without somebody jumping down your throat about it and taking it as code for campaigning for Bern.