Why Bernie? Why now? [View all]

[JDPriestly]

This is an exchange of views, posts numbers 245 and 246, and I think that, although my response is long, some might want to read this because it goes to the core of an issue that may be dividing our Democratic Party.

Another DUer wrote (link to thread at the bottom of this post)

This is lot of trumped up propaganda when the reality is that

he was unelectable because of his fringe politics. That's the reality of it. He never bothered to run for national office because he obviously understood that he was out of the mainstream. Thanks to fighters like the Clinton's and Obama, many of the impediments to his appeal have been broken down for him and he is now able to take advantage of his fringe status. It's really nothing more. If he was so great, he would have run for office in his 40;s but he knew he was not viable.

He's an opportunist, and he has hid out in Vermont but now that he sees an opening, he's going for it. That's fine. That's what primaries are for. But he did not break down any barriers on his own. He is the beneficiary of the efforts of others before him who bore the brunt of intrusive questioning and lack of privacy to endure a national campaign. Now that there's an opening, he's slipping in. Let's not coddle him now, though. He can fight for his spot like everyone else has had to.

*****

I answered:

He quietly stood for what was right for all these years while others stole the spotlight
and spoke half-truths.

Now, he is speaking out. The American people are listening. And what they are hearing is what they feel in their hearts.

History is a story unfolding as we breathe and move. Bernie's time in history is meeting ours.

I can understand the envy of those you describe in your post. People who did not have the courage to tell the truth twenty years ago, who could not then and do not now stand up against all the lies the right wing has persuaded Americans to believe are feeling unappreciated, confused and disappointed. Maybe even bitter.

They missed their moment. They could have told the truth back then. They could have questioned those who were selling the Iraq War before it happened. They could have stood against Wall Street greed and trade that was swallowing American's jobs. They could have funded education and audited the Fed and the military budget.

If they were just preparing a way and sacrificing their integrity to tell their half-truths, to skirt the issues, to sign bills like the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the "reform" of welfare, the sentencing acts, the facilitation of the privatization of prisons, the sale of war materials to local police forces, the War in Iraq, NAFTA, free trade with China, the NSA's invasion of our privacy and on and on, then they made huge mistakes.

What they were preparing was the way for Citizens United, for students saddled with the heavy burden of debt at the time that they should be able to start families, buy homes and furnish households, of banks that cheat and steal and pay the penalties with other people's money, of outsourced and exported jobs, of our markets inundated with cheap goods made by near slave labor while our children cannot find work . . . . I could go on. Detail after detail. Mistake after mistake. And all because of the corruption of campaign financing and the revolving door between government and wealthy corporations.

Lie after lie. Misleading promise after misleading promise. And now those who told the lies and made the misleading promises want us to think that they did it all in order to prepare the way foe someone who was intentionally and coyly hiding himself in Vermont.

That doggie won't bark. It's such an obvious fantasy, so clearly made up after the fact that no one is going to believe it.

Bernie has been in Congress since 1992. He voted his conscience over and over and again and again even when it was unpopular to do so. He was quietly and repeatedly re-elected by the people who know him and knew him the best -- the people of Vermont. He was not in the national headlines because the media and the top dogs in the Democratic Party ignored him.

Their mistake, not his.

Bernie's time has come. Whether he wins or not -- and judging from the enthusiasm of the crowds he draws and the determination of the volunteers he attracts, I think there is as good a chance that he will as there is that anyone else will, he is lifting the veils from a lot of eyes. He is putting the lies where they belong -- in the trash can of history.

Bernie speaks of a political revolution.

When we look at revolutions of the past, and the violent ones are the best known but the non-violent ones are more numerous, the conditions that forced the change we call revolutions existed well before the first tremors of that change were noticed or measured.

In my view, social change, economic change, the spread of new ideas. not crazy people or leaders, bring on the kind of abrupt change we call revolution.

A new invention -- electricity, the cannon, the iron horse, the airplane, television for example -- so changes society that political change must follow.

Computers, the internet, the automation of the workplace, all of that massive change that has occurred in the past 30 years links us, weaves us together in ways that we never thought possible. They have changed the social reality in which we live. And Bernie's ideas respond to and fit with this new reality.

Individuals, leaders, revolutionaries we call them, are credited with spawning the drastic changes that they come to represent. But really that is just the way that we, as we usually do, spin myths around the changes in our lives in in the lives of our ancestors. It is easier to for that part of us that is primitive and ill informed to credit bears or eagles with miraculous powers than to analyze and figure out nature and science.

The internet has changed everything. We can find out opinions, facts, learn history, study science. It's all accessible to us now. We just have to ask a question and we get a variety of answers to choose from. That changed reality calls for a changed social organization and a changed politics. And here is Bernie who represents the very democratic change that works in this new reality.

I don't think that voters will accept the usual excuses that the apologists for the corporate bosses give once Bernie has had his say. The bosses don't know as much more about the world than we can find out as they used to. We are headed toward more democracy, not less.

Today, a Jeb Bush cannot say that he will take care of women when we can press a few buttons on our computers and study his history, the ideas he sponsored, the budgets he signed, the vetoes he cast. Politicians cannot hide their pasts from us any more.

It's Bernie's time.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1251&pid=558746
Replies #345 and 346