Huffington Post: Bernie Sanders Should Not be Allowed to Hold the Democratic Party Hostage

[Ken Burch]

343. I like a lot of what President Obama did and would vote for him again.

I think some of what you see as anti-Obama feeling is actually resentment that, in the first two years when the party had majorities in both houses, grassroots progressive activists were kept fairly out of the loop by the administration(especially by Obama's reactionary chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel). A lot of activists felt they'd basically been told "it doesn't matter that you folks did most of the work of electing us-we don't care what you have to say and we don't owe you anything, including respect."

If they'd been kept in the game, if they'd been given the chance to make themselves heard on policy and strategy, rather than being given what sounded to them like the "go away kid, y'bother me" treatment, I think their whole attitude towards the administration would have been different and the whole party would have benefitted.

Keith will not be Bernie's puppet. He's not going to propose anything that benefits Sanders supporters and leaves out everyone else. Nor will he be in charge of our party's Middle East policy. And for obvious reasons, he's not going to do anything to drive voters of color away.

And people in the party will judge Keith by his own merits...no one holds him to blame for Bernie's failure to do better than he did with African-American voters(mainly older AA voters-Bernie actually broke even with Hillary among AA voters under 30).

It sounds as though you want to stoke anti-Sanders(and by anti-Left) feelings within the party and to perpetuate the dividing lines within the party(frankly, it sounds like you want to make sure people of color are not only against Bernie as an individual, but opposed to everything he stands for-and it's hard to understand why that's so important to you since Bernie's never going to run for the presidency again and little if anything he supports would be bad for people of color). I hope up will reconsider that stance-especially since it does the party no good.

To move on, we need to give up seeing EITHER main primary candidate as the enemy, and we need to get past the toxic lie that working for economic justice meant putting the fight against institutional and grassroots bigotry on the backburner.