He's running for Senate in 2018. I just thought he was going to build his Revolution org. But it is interesting if he decided to take another bite at the apple.

So, I don't know.

He is remarkably energetic for a man his age, but I think he wants to work on bringing up a new generation of progressive politicians at all levels of government. I am with him on that; the Republicans were smarter than we were in working for decades to take over local, county and state offices, not just federal ones. We should do that, starting with school boards, to stop this anti-science ideology and historical propaganda that is destroying our schools.

Despite what's been posted here a zillion times about the label "socialist" not having the negative connotation it once did, for millions of voters it still carries an extremely negative connotation - one that the GOP would have hammered relentlessly.

JFK was able to transcend the "negative" aspect of being a Catholic in the same way Obama transcended the "negative" of being black, and Bill transcended the "negative" of being a Baby Boomer from the sticks - they all had incredible personal charisma, which Bernie does not have. Their youth also went a long way in garnering the attention of voters. Again, Bernie does not have youth on his side - and you can't pretend that it doesn't matter to voters, because it does.

Had this election become a match-up between Trump and Bernie, remember that Trump latched on to Bernie's idea of tapping into the "anger" of segments of the population - the difference between them being that Trump promised to bring back jobs that are never coming back, appealed to racists, bigots, anti-GLBTers, etc. - things that Bernie never would have done.

Recognizing the way of the world is not revealing one's prejudice - it it simply being realistic.

Will the US ever elect a "socialist Jew"? Who knows. Perhaps a young, passionate, charismatic socialist Jew will come along and capture the "hearts and minds" of a nation. But Bernie was never THAT guy, and it's time to stop pretending he was.

Under what banner would he run? I'm fairly sure the dems will not allow a repeat of the past primary. So he'd have to run as what he is, an independent, which he didn't want to do last time as he considered it an ineffective move. So all discussion on a further run is just so much pie in the sky. Now he might try to do something since apparently he's found he likes the attention but first time's the charm, second time around not so much.

Too many people think National Socialist not Democratic Socialist

That's really the major reason why Clinton haters of all stripes opposed her.

It's not anti-Semitic to point out that RW assholes, supported by Nazis, just might be anti-Semitic.

This type of post is the O.P.'s concern, which is valid, though you may not see it.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=2663560

Which you have not so far.

Your inherent sub-messages are thinly veiled. I'm moving on.

Very much like the OP.

Thanks for playing!

people still clutch it like it's gospel fucking truth.

If Conventional Wisdom had been right this year, Jeb Bush would have been the GOP nominee. Or Scott Walker.

by trying to deflect their actions with silly excuses?

Maybe you should be more clear as to what it is exactly you're referring to?

a socialist and jewish was not the problem.

This year, in this country, Bernie Sanders was not going to win the primary, let alone the general election.

But tell yourself what you need to get by for the next four years.

I mean, I question how much impact the Jewish thing would have in 2016, but then I've always been sort of oblivious to Anti-Semitism, so much that I'm regularly shocked by how prevalent it is.

As for Sanders being a "Socialist" (Spooky! oooga-booga!) that kind of ties pretty neatly into his ideological orientation on the political spectrum. Personally I think labels aside he was doing a damn fine job connecting with the voters that Hillary showed unexpected weakness with, in the GE- particularly the rust belt.. but getting back to your point, here, if it wasn't Sanders' ideological orientation that was the reason, as you put it, he was "not going to win", then what was the reason?

It just re-postulates the OP.

You are too well-informed and too politically astute to not understand why Bernie wasn't going to win. You may like his ideas. I liked most his ideas a lot (other than the whole gun thing), but if he were ever a serious contender, his background, his writings, and his personal life would have been ripped by the media. Everyone left him alone. The media because they needed a foil to provide drama in the Democratic primary. The republicans because they would have loved to have him be the nominee. Hillary because she needed the votes of his blindly loyal followers.

He was popular with who he was popular with. Even if he had the coverage that the other candidates had, they wouldn't care. Just like the trumpers, they don't care what he does. That didn't even get him the primary, let alone would it have given him close to a majority in the general.

It's probably the height of pointlessness to speculate on what coulda/woulda/shoulda happened, because at the end of the day we are stuck with what did happen, of course. If my grandmother had wheels she'd be a golf cart, that kind of thing.

However, this idea that there was some damning, deal-breaking amount of Sanders oppo material that would have doomed him... okay, maybe, maybe not. In a normal year a video of a Presidential candidate bragging about "pussy grabbing" would have sunk the candidacy for good. Hell, it almost did. But this wasn't a normal year.

In that context, if (again, speculative territory) if Sanders had been out there making his solid economic case to, say, Rust belt voters, was everyone gonna turn around and freak out because of his marital history (um, trump) or his employment record? So he didn't have a real job until 40... neither did Dubya, if I remember correctly. So what? And the so-called "rape essay". Fuck, don't get me started. That thing was beaten to death and it wasn't ever anything close to the hair-on-fire 5 alarm crisis some people here wanted it to be. And it was already out there, people knew about it and would have had plenty of time to digest the context of the poorly written yet era-appropriate piece of social commentary that it was. And again, it would have been sitting in contrast to "pussy grabbing".... circa just a few years ago. One thing that wouldn't have happened is, James Comey wouldn't have commented on it on October 30. I think we can safely assume that.

Castro? Florida? Well, it's worth noting that Hillary didn't win Florida either, now, did she? (Perhaps letting Debbie Wasserman Schultz go to the times and get all reefer madness against a medical marijuana law that FL eventually passed with over 70% of the voters, wasn't such a good strategic move, but I digress) ... None of that stuff would have mattered nearly as much in 2016 as it would have in, say, 1996. Remember, we had an electorate that already knew that the current Russian administration was in the bag for one of the presidential candidates and it didn't cause a mass freakout- so everyone was gonna lose their shit over Sanders' cold war activities from 35 years ago?

but again, this is all speculation. We'll never know, and frankly neither of them are running again, so my thinking is we need to expand our bench, preferably with younger and more geograpically diverse- particularly vis a vis the underrepresented West Coast- leadership. Time to move on.

The point isn't that this wasn't a normal year. Not being a normal year isn't what would keep Sanders from winning. People didn't flock to trump because they wanted to vote for Bernie. Actually, they didn't flock at all. He still got the vote of only about a quarter of the electorate.

If, as you contend, Sanders was just a flawed sexist and bum like trump, and they didn't mind trump being crude, why would they vote for Sanders?

You are sort of all over the place with this. Arguing that Sanders is like trump and like bush is not making your case. Sanders was promising stuff he couldn't deliver and never put forth a solid plan for anything. I started out trying to support Bernie, but grew tired of his endless, empty rhetoric. And your contention that "everybody" knew about his rape essay and living on unemployment (not the same as living off daddy like bush did) is not accurate. If you didn't really go looking, that story was under wraps. The media kept it out of sight because they needed the drama of a contested Democratic primary for their ratings.

You are quite accurate about the comey comments. Do you really think they couldn't have done the same hatchet job on Sanders? Hillary won the damn election. She didn't lose great swaths of the voters. And you know that if the election were reheld just two days after the voting, she would have won in a landslide. My beef is with the "democrats" who ran with the right wing memes about Hillary all the way up to the election. They suppressed the vote. My particular beef with Bernie is his taking his ball and going home after the drug out the primary sniping at Hillary. Then he would sulkily endorse her. After he spent four months too long questioning her judgement.

And I'll agree that this wasn't a normal year. But not because there is a giant wave of proletariat ready to rise up and cast off their capitalist oppressors. Hell, 25% voted for a pretend billionaire. They want to be just like him. The Democratic message (while too conservative for my tastes) resonates with people overwhelmingly. What made this an abnormal year is the media collusion, crooked fbi assholes, idiot third party fools, and absolute lack of any morals for ethics by the opposition. Trying to be more like republicans is not going to win us any election that will produce progress.

Not being a normal year isn't what would keep Sanders from winning.

Well, we don't know what would have happened in the general. Again, it's all speculation. What we do know, statistically speaking, is that Hillary's performance in the crucial rust belt states of WI, MI and PA were directly related to her losing the Electoral College. Going "but she won" doesn't really help her get into the oval office, now, does it? People want to swear up and down that what happened to Hillary was NOT! FAIR! NOT FAIIIIR! fine, I agree. But you win the game based upon the shit that happens, and that's the shit that happened. And it wouldn't have mattered if she just would have carried those 3 states, like she was supposed to.

Like her campaign assumed she would.

And Sanders beat Hillary in two of those states, in the Primaries, did he not?

If, as you contend, Sanders was just a flawed sexist and bum like trump, and they didn't mind trump being crude, why would they vote for Sanders?

There's so much weirdness in this sentence, I just want to stop for a moment and marvel at it. Wow. Just simply amazing. Really, a work of art. Okay, let's go. "Sanders was just a flawed sexist and bum like Trump"- no, I didn't say that. I said that the essay Bernie Sanders is known to have written back in 1974 which was clearly a piece of social commentary, that some half-wits here were trying to spin up as "rape porn", clearly wasn't. What it was -obviously- was era specific critique of then-contemporary societal gender roles, much like the overwrought hyperbolic nonsense Andrea Dworkin enjoyed writing, stuff about the dystopic terminally toxic relationship between the sexes and how no one can relate to anyone because the system, maaaaan. Popular shit back in the days of turquoise roach clips and corduroy leisure suits.

That's not saying he's "just like Trump", it's saying that the two paragraphs in the alterna-weekly from forty years ago weren't going to torpedo his candidacy against captain pussygrabber, much less anyone else.

And none of this was about "being crude". It's 2016. No one -really, I'm being honest, now- gives a flying Philadelphia fuck about being crude anymore. But the rust belt didn't vote for Trump because they wanted someone "crude", they voted for him because he promised- in the face of all logic, mind you- to bring their jobs back. He spoke to their concerns, while Hillary courted celebrity endorsements and - according to numerous sources - her campaign wrote off and took their states for granted.

But your logic here is hard to follow, speaking of being all over the place ... you seem to be basically saying "Bob has gum on his shoe. But you're saying Fred has gum on his shoe, too. Why are you saying Fred and Bob are exactly the same?" I'm not. I'm saying that none of this shit would have been a dealbreaker. And here we get back to conventional wisdom, again, because the same conventional wisdom that says "Sanders would have gotten buried by all this spooky unseen opposition research" also told us that Hillary was fucking scandal-proof because she'd already had all this crap thrown at her for decades. Except that wasn't, really, the case. The reality is, she came into the election with high negatives and a lot of people already having made up their minds about her. And she never really transcended that, with a lot of voters.

That same damn conventional wisdom said the exact same shit about Hillary in 2008, even as it told us we would be INSANE to nominate that "inexperienced African American man with the funny name"

Obviously Comey knew what he was doing, and having "CLINTON EMAIL FBI INVESTIGATION REOPENED LAPTOP WEINER TEEN SEXTING SCANDAL WARRANT" plastered all over the cable news scrawls a week before the election was clearly put out to maximum effect. Would they have been able to throw something similar at Bernie? I don't know. I do know that -Fair or not- Hillary walked into this thing dragging a shit-ton of baggage.

And yeah, "she won the damn election". But she didn't win it by enough, or else she would be taking the oath of office on Jan. 20.

How you seem to begin posts with the throw away "we'll never know" and then proceed to "know" exactly what would have happened and exactly how every voter in the country was feeling.

You don't seem to be serious about addressing anything other than your own need to deflect. That's okay.

Here are facts. Hillary was our only chance this year of taking the white house. Bernie was never credible. You may not know that, but I suspect you really do, and all the verbiage is to try to convince yourself otherwise. Because what the Bernie supporters did to Hillary is the largest reason that trump is president. Oh. I know they didn't really want trump. They thought they could keep being so self-righteously cool and hip because trump didn't stand a chance. That's why Bernie allowed himself to sulk through the Fall instead of behaving like someone who really wanted the things he said. He didn't think it mattered because trump didn't stand a chance.

But you can go on and play like reality doesn't exist with all the errant rantings. Hope they help you.

But if you want to help the Democratic party, you will stop pretending there is a great liberal mass of voters longing for the revolution. History does not support you. Reality does not support you.

Join us when you can.

"Liberal" and "revolution" being two of them, in your post. I think a lot of voters in this country felt they had two crappy choices facing them in the general election, and worked from there. I don't think they necessarily wanted what Trump was selling, either, whatever label that would fall under.

My saying that doesn't mean I claim to "know exactly how every voter in the country was feeling". One thing I can safely say is that in terms of objective data, as I said in my previous post, we have some specific data points on, for instance, the rust belt. See, in that sentence above, I said "I think"- which means I am expressing a subjective opinion. However, we know that Hillary clinton lost PA, MI and WI. We know that she dropped a shit-ton of counties in the midwest that Obama carried (the polling in Iowa should have been a red flag, to all of us, in retrospect) we also KNOW that Sanders outperformed her in several of those key areas during the primaries. See, there's speculation, but some of my speculations here are based on objective data. Doesn't mean it's right, but it has a basis in reality.

I don't even understand why you'd say that- believe me, if I wanted to make jokes they'd be funnier- unless I said something that confused you, upset you or left you unable to formulate a more relevant response. I'm not deflecting anything, nor am I "ranting errantly" in fact I think I'm doing a yeoman's job of following your scattershot logic, here.




...people want to win elections? Spending the next 4 years proclaiming how righteously aggrieved they are, isn't gonna win any. Now, as for "cool and hip"- what the fuck kind of nonsense is that? Bernie Sanders is a 74 year old frumpy bald guy who sounds like Alan Arkin when he talks. He is no one's definition of "cool and hip". No one fucking voted for him, worked for him, or supported him, because they thought it made them "cool and hip". The only people who thought "cool and hip" was gonna win the election were the Manhattan-ensconced Hillary campaign geniuses who thought getting Jay-Z and Katy Perry to endorse her, or sending her on Ellen to do the "nae nae"- was any sort of substitute for having a ground game in Michigan or talking about jobs to unemployed Wisconsinites.

it's never pleasant watching politicians pander to youth. I recall the Macarena dancing at the convention in '96 with similar cringing...

Not with all of the massive baggage he had. The Castro video alone would have sunk him.

I gave money early on to Sanders despite knowing he wouldn't win the primary. But when that Castro video came out, I refused to give a dime to him because he had no business whatsoever running for president knowing that and his New Left, misogynist writings would sink him. He wouldn't have won a single state other than Vermont, especially with Michael Bloomberg in the picture.

He made my shitlist for life with that Vatican trip. He is every bit the brazen liar Trump is.

As opposed to Clinton, who had a squeaky clean record with no political baggage at all?


Good one.

His wasn't.

Look at it this way. Can you name me another candidate of either party in the last half century who has more fully been proved to be honest and above board. The people of America have spent literally millions of dollars looking into every single part of her whole life. Our elected officials and our secret law departments have devoted thousands of man-hours trying to find a single thing that she has done that could be construed as illegal or crooked. The result of the most through investigation of any American citizen ever conducted is that she has not.

If you believe otherwise, you are naive and gullible. You have bought the lies that the right have given you, some of them used by other "democrats".

Look, I am an admitted Bernie supporter who voted for Hillary, but "honesty" was never her strong suit. Competence and work ethic she has in spades, and that's what would've made her a far better POTUS than Trump. I think she was more qualified than Bernie as well, I just didn't care for her coziness with Wall Street and stance (as recent as her Senate days) opposing marriage equality. But she did come around eventually on the latter... the former not so much.

As for her honesty, I defer to the wise words of President Harry S. Truman, who said you can't get rich in politics, unless you're a crook. Bernie spent a life in politics and had a net worth of around $700k at the start of the primaries. Hillary, meanwhile... it's champagne wishes and caviar dreams. I'm not saying she obtained it illegally, but I do question the morality of taking $250k from a college for a speech when young people are drowning in debt from these same colleges. it just flunks the smell test IMHO.

But don't get it from Fox news which is where the whole "lying Hillary" meme was started.

I just erased a whole paragraph about Bernie's lies and politics for money. Attacking Democrats (even those that play Democrat because it seems a path to success) isn't worth it.

Your post is full of right wing propaganda. Next you'll be after her about Bengazi and emails.

That's why he would not have and will not win if he runs again. I have always liked Bernie and am very familiar with him, but I find him to be too far left for my moderate tastes.

I've seen the drooling idiots rage about 'words' they have no clue what they stand for. Sadly it is not just the GOP, we have some too.

think that the National Socialist party was actually a socialist party.

racist billionaire real estate developer with a bad combover." So we really never know what "we" will do, do we?

As seen on DU they do not need to be repeated. Such is the nature of humans to identify and project prejudice. I liked his message and at the end of the day he influenced and supported his Democratic rival. I do wish he would join the Democratic Party but I can live with it if he does not.

Some of my best friends are socialist Jews. It's all those bigoted, uneducated hillbillies in flyover country. I don't know any of them personally, but I know exactly how they think, and how they vote, and how they would vote in any hypothetical situation. They would never, never vote for a Jew, a socialist, anyone from Vermont, anyone whose name rhymes with Flanders, or anyone who wags his finger at them. So we better never, never nominate anyone like that.

the logic is essentially, "firsts exists, therefore all firsts are possible."

yes, there was never a catholic president, then a catholic president got elected, as one example provided.

so, yes, there was a first time this happened, and a first time that happened. and there will surely be more firsts in the future.

but that doesn't mean that just because we can think of something that's never happened before it's then at all likely to happen.

yes, in theory, these things are all possible. but there's nothing in the logic of the o.p. that suggests it's at all likely.


using the same logic, i could say it's revealing prejudice to say "america will never vote for a two-year old" or "america will never vote for a "103-year old in a coma" or "america will never vote for someone convicted of mutiple rapes and mass murders"


that's not to say we shouldn't try for firsts, or that they'll never happen. of course a very select few of them will. but the o.p. doesn't suggest the most important part, which is exactly *which* firsts can reasonably happen.

You can't run for president till age 35.
You should have to STOP running at 65.
At some point enough is enough.

If they voted for Trump then any sort of a candidate could win depending on how well they ran their campaign.

I think we need to focus now on our party and new candidates not the past election really other than lessons learned, which would be the candidate can win despite any label.