General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Top 15 Dem Candidates for 2020 According to the WaPo [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The best way to make sure that he doesn't is to embrace the economic ideas from his campaign-just call it "full democracy" and embrace his supporters-IN ADDITION to continuing to embrace the supporters we have now.
The worst way is for people to refuse to let up on "Bernie caused Trump/Bernie had no business running" canards and to treat Sanders supporters like they're the enemy and should just shut up and do what they're told.
It's not possible to simply bar him from the next primaries and then STILL demand that his supporters back whoever we nominate.
We need new ideas, but we need the ideas from that campaign as part of those ideas.
We can't win if we anathemize anyone and anything even remotely connected to what his campaign was about. His proposals weren't unpopular and they weren't wrong. And they can't be blamed for what happened in November, because the campaign we ran after Philly virtually never mentioned those...the televised message was boiled down almost entirely to "it's time to elect a woman", "defend choice" and "Trump is a predatory scumbag"-all of which were and are valid points, but none of which were ever going to put us over the top in and of themselves.
2016 was a disaster, we all agree on that, but it serves no purpose to blame the Sanders movement for it any more than to blame HRC as an individual-which is why I never do that-or to keep arguing that he should have been barred from the primaries when the approach the party had been using on a lot of issues made something like the Sanders movement inevitable.
And if Bernie had actually wanted to destroy this party or had secretly wanted to help Trump, he would have accepted Stein's offer of the Green ballot line for November. He refused to do that.
It would have made no difference if the nomination had been settled in March and the attack ads against Trump had started three months earlier. If none of the attack ads the other GOP candidates ran made any difference against Trump, why would running any of the attack ads we ran after the convention-none of which ever swung a single "moderate suburban Republican woman" voter towards us, why would it have served any purpose at to run even MORE attack ads?