What Bernie Sanders’ newfound money has just bought him, and us (astounding admission!)

[merrily]

Opinions
What Bernie Sanders’ newfound money has just bought him, and us


Coverage. What ever-growing crowds and poll numbers failed to deliver, money has: coverage. Bernie Sanders nearly matched Hillary’s fundraising in the third quarter and all of a sudden the media takes notice that he’s out there.

We are supposed to keep up the pretense that a campaign is about ideas, but we don’t practice it. What we practice is poll-driven coverage, fake-controversy coverage, and worst of all, strategy coverage. Everyone is an armchair general pushing little plastic candidates around a tabletop map of the US. Great fun, no meaning. What really buys you credibility in the world of coverage is the same thing that buys you groceries at the supermarket: money. Money is the reason Jeb! Or Jeb; or Jeb? still is secretly considered the frontrunner. $100,000,000 buys you a lot of considering.

And so now it’s Heeeeere’s Bernie! I’m not sure whether the intent of this story was to play to the expected narrative that Bernie is a wild-eyed radical crank, but the lead paragraphs certainly suggest that. But I suspect the result will be different. It appears readers have been waiting for some bigger Bernie coverage, judging by the number of responses in the comments thread.

But here’s what coverage of Bernie is going to yield. Finally, the range of acceptable political discourse is going to broaden, to the left. It’s about time, you say? I’d say. What have long been considered taboo topics about income redistribution are in fact no more extreme than positions taken by EVERY SINGLE GOP PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE. They are ALL proposing vastly MORE tax cuts to the already obscenely wealthy, and MORE regulation-cuts of the sort that led to our recent economic collapse, all tied up in a ribbon of gigantic deficits. (Deficits are only reported as crazed when proposed by the left). Oh, and lest we forget, a continuation of the extravagantly irresponsible anti-science anti-planet climate position that they are STILL taking, thanks in part to the decades of respectful reporting they’ve received on the subject.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2015/10/04/what-bernie-sanders-newfound-money-has-just-bought-him-and-us/

[Demeter]

1. Calling Lily Tomlin, again

"No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up."

[merrily]

2. One admission after another by journalists and media analysts that they have been shortchanging

Sanders.

The first debate coming up probably also has something to do with their finally saying, "Oh, this guy is a serious candidate, too."

[Demeter]

3. That much was obvious

[marym625]

4. K&R!

Man, this is beyond awesome.

Do you know if the number of contributions and/or the number of those that contributed, has no be made public?

#FeelTheBern
#Bernie2016

[merrily]

5. Can't swear to the number, but the campaign did email: IIRC, 650,000 different contributors

Sadly, I just cleaned out my mailbox, included the deleted ones.

[marym625]

6. I was wondering about the

*other* Will be interesting to compare.

[merrily]

7. Well, at the end of the quarter, they did ask for $1 donations. Seemed like a move to

(a) increase the number of individual donors and

(b) bring down the average amount of each donation.

[marym625]

8. WOW!

The games oligarchs play.

[SoapBox]

9. Ain't that the truth.

Someone said they got an email from Carville, begging for a $1.00 donation for Ms. Inevitable...

[marym625]

10. yuck!

[merrily]

11. I know, right?

[Live and Learn]

12. K&R I don't see it yet but am willing to keep trying.

What the other side doesn't see is that this is our do or die attempt. If we don't win it this time, there is little hope of ever wrestling power back from the corporations.

i am having a hard time seeing why everyone, least of all on DU, doesn't get that fact. At least, the millennials seem to get it.

[merrily]

13. My best guess:

I used to say to our audiences: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Sinclair, Upton, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6; repr. University of California Press, 1994, p. 109.

[Live and Learn]

14. Perhaps, but there are still more of us than there of them,

And I say that as potentially one of them (jobs dependent on the establishment).

But, I see saving the country and the world and giving actual equality a fair chance as more important in the end than my job. I don't say that lightly, I really believe that.

[merrily]

15. You don't have to take salary very literally. It could be any benefit.

Some form of self interest above the greater good is the umbrella concept.

In any event, I don't see authentic failure to understand as the issue.

[Live and Learn]

16. The sad part is that people easily fall in to the blame some category of humanity

for their problems and make that category appear sub-human. I don't know why that works but it seems to have taken hold throughout historical times. Then blame them for all the ills of the world. I keep hoping that we have gotten too smart to let it keep happening but we shall see.