Fact: Sanders has been in the Senate nine years and has sponsored only one bill that pass.

[Ken Burch]

150. My main concern is NOT about Bernie.

If if was, I wouldn't have repeatedly said that he shouldn't run for president again.

My actual main concern is about not wanting the party to alienate active Sanders supporters, to avoid driving them away from politics and dismissing what they care about.

We need them, and we need their ideas, ALONG WITH THE IDEAS OF OTHERS IN THE PARTY, to win.

As a party, we WILL drive them away forever, we WILL convince them that political involvement is bogus(particularly the youngest among them, the people we MOST need to have in our tent of any of them and the ones we are most likely to lose)if the party does what some want and anathemizes not only Bernie as an individual-but any and all ideas with any connection to his campaign.

We can't ever win another election if we do what some here want and say that all Sanders-related ideas are off limits(which would leave us with only moderate conservative policies on economics, btw, since it would mean we would even be renouncing anything connected to Keynseniasm and leave us with a tie to corporate power that no progressive party should ever have), hide any progressive ideas in our platform and refuse to defend progressive or liberal ideas when they are under right-wing attack, make ourselves look as conservative as possible in the fall campaigns, and then double down on loudly demanding that people who were more progressive than we were or than we were trying to look vote for us simply because the other side is horrible-in other words, make every future campaign a "stop the villain" campaign.

That's the approach that was used against Reagan in California in 1966 and 1970. Failed badly both times.

That's the approach that was used against Reagan nationally in 1980 and 1984. Failed badly both times.

That's the approach that was used against Bush the First in 1988. Failed badly.

1992 and 1996, we won on the candidate's personal charisma, an actual fight-back against right-wing attackers(the rapid-response team), and, in 1992, a pledge for universal healthcare.

The approach listed above was what failed(at least in the Electoral College) in 2000.

It failed in 2004.

It failed in 2016.

Nothing against the candidates themselves in saying that, they were great people. It's the strategy I'm talking about.

I want us to stop Trump and stop everything he wants done.

But why stay with what has failed for fifty years?

Whoever we nominate(and it will be someone from a younger generation in 2020), why not try something else, given that what we've been doing, other than the variations in the routine Obama brought in, generally isn't helping us?




I support Hillary's right to speak...there was only one small section of her book about whith I raised respectful concerns. I don't support the people protesting
her book signings or anything like that.

And no, my main