Bernie's Running His Show

by Deacon Blues

After watching the competing speeches last night, I agreed with the points some were making on BernieTV (MSNBC) about the contrasts between Hillary’s speech (which I found less impressive than the TV pundits did), and Trump’s “they’re making me do this speech like this” address to the assembled white people at his country club. With Hillary’s surprisingly-large margin over Bernie in California, and with the internal backbiting and blame-gaming already starting inside the Sanders’ campaign, I thought last night would have been a great time for Sanders to start a graceful pivot towards party inclusion and a common focus outward against Trump.

Instead, we got a speech from Sanders that pledges a fight all the way into the Philadelphia convention next month, and an ongoing effort to woo superdelegates.

What remains to be seen is whether the sales job and message is primarily anti-Hillary and intentionally aimed at undermining her, which is very possible given what is in the Politico piece, or whether the message is broader-based and focused on how his movement and followers are the true future of the party. It is understandable that Sanders feels he owes it to his followers to stay in the game until they get something out of the effort. But that also assumes that Sanders and his followers join the party. If Sanders isn’t willing to fold his millions of followers and mailing list into a robust progressive wing of the party, and instead wants the party’s nomination but also to remain outside of it, convinced of his self-righteousness, then he is more like Trump than he would ever admit.