"Bernie Sanders talks about...the possibility of a presidential run...."

[True Blue Door]

206. Progressivism has to be reality-based to succeed, and that's always been true.

When it fails to be reality-based, it simply doesn't do anything - just retreats into smug, self-satisfied failure. "Yeah, we didn't achieve anything, but we're still right! Yay us!" The propositions you're making are either testably, objectively incorrect or moot.

It's like saying "If only everyone else would stop being so imperfect and just accept our perfect plan, then everything would go right!" Well, they're not going to. This is reality. You have to work with people as what they are, whatever that is in any given case.

And if it were otherwise, we would already have won with people like Kucinich and Sanders. We would have had a McGovern administration instead of Richard Nixon. But we didn't. Because there are no excuses for failure in politics. If you can help millions of people with a compromise or help zero people by preening at your own perfection, the person who does the former is the progressive and the one who does the latter is nothing at all.

Lyndon Johnson was a rotten bastard, but he created Medicare. Jimmy Carter was and still is a deeply moral person and tried to imbue his administration with humane values, but mostly what we got out of him domestically were two terms of Ronald Reagan and all the horrors that have followed from it.

We elect people to work, not to be symbolic mascots. Kucinich and Sanders are not working legislators - they're entertainers who say things that make liberal activists like us feel warm and fuzzy. But not much ever comes of it for anyone else in this country. All their passion hasn't given us any of the things they advocate, and on the rare occasions something they have advocated came about, they played almost no role in making it happen. The word for them is "superfluous."