As Bernie’s reasonable fans pivot to Hillary, his fanatics have gone nuts. They can’t hurt her. [View all]

[Iamaartist]

http://www.dailynewsbin.com/opinion/now-that-hillary-has-won-the-remaining-bernie-fanatics-have-gone-nuts-they-never-mattered/24812/


Each day it becomes more clear that Hillary Clinton is certain to become the 2016 Democratic Party nominee. She’s ahead by more than three million votes. Accordingly she only needs a handful of delegates from the final states, which she get proportionally win or lose, in order to clinch it. That’s prompted most supporters of Bernie Sanders, including some of his most prominent backers, to begin embracing the inevitable: that it’s time to support Hillary in the general election even if they still support Bernie’s platform. But as the Nevada convention demonstrated this weekend, the minority of Bernie fanatics have gone completely nuts. And that’s okay, because they were never a part of this process.

Last fall I wrote that Bernie Sanders essentially had two bases of support in his Presidential campaign. Even back then, the trend was clear enough to see. 85% of them were regular democrats and liberals who happened to like what he was selling, and they were always going to slide to Hillary if she won the nomination, because they were never going to sit back and let a republican win. The other 15% were self described libertarians but came off more like anarchists or just paranoid anti-government types who were latching onto Bernie for all the wrong reasons: when he talked about a “political revolution” all they heard was revolution. And now those two groups are fully diverging from each other.

As had always been predictable, various prominent Bernie Sanders surrogates ranging from Bill Maher to Michael Moore to Robert Reich are now making clear that they’ll vote for Hillary Clinton in November if she’s the nominee. For that matter so will most of Bernie’s supporters overall, because they’re not insane enough to allow a republican like Donald Trump to become President. And yet there are still those pesky anti-government loons who are trying to burn down the Democratic Party now that their preferred candidate lost in a multimillion vote blowout fair and square. But they’re about to make a different kind of pivot of their own.


The ugly scene at the Nevada convention, which saw Bernie loons booing respected Senator Barbara Boxer and then later booing Bernie’s own surrogate Nina Turner before ultimately getting on the wrong side of the police, can only serve to chase away Bernie’s reasonable supporters. They may not be ready to give up on him, but they can see that his campaign has become a sinking ship that’s now dominated by crazed bottom-feeders who don’t care about progress. Reasonable people will bail on his campaign all the more quickly, preferring to root for him as a Senator, as an idea, but no longer as a Presidential candidate.

And even the loons will get chased off soon enough. Bernie Sanders keeps saying that whether he becomes the democratic nominee or not, he’ll do everything he can do help defeat Donald Trump when the time comes. That means at some point he’ll end his campaign and at least nominally get behind Hillary Clinton, so he can use it as a platform for trying to bury Trump. And that’s right about the time that the crazed loons will abandon Bernie, perhaps claiming that he “sold out” or that he’s now a part of the “establishment conspiracy” against himself.


Most of the loons won’t end up voting in November at all. And that won’t hurt anything, because these were the types who were never going to vote for a major party candidate to begin with. They were merely bandwagoning on what they secretly hoped might be the end of the world as we know it. Meanwhile the majority of Bernie’s supporters are already coming around to the idea that they’ll be voting for Hillary in the fall.

The Nevada convention will not be a preview of the Democratic National Convention. By that time the party will have sat with a by-then mathematically eliminated Sanders, negotiated a few platform concessions and granted him a primetime speaking slot, in return for him peaceably going along with the nominating process. His loons won’t be allowed into the building. And if any of the actual delegates decide to make the career-ending mistake of acting up, they’ll be quickly introduced to Homeland Security and the Philadelphia Police Department and the Secret Service.

It will all fade away soon.....