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

[Ken Burch]

444. I respect your anger, but I don't actually hold the views you said I hold in that post.

(if you're referring to Sanders supporters as a group, that's another thing).

Personally, I would never want your votes not to count(and condemn anyone who does want that). I always thought your votes mattered and that race matters as much as class(do you disagree with the idea that we need to deal with race and class at the same time, though? To my mind what happened to the freedom movement after 1967 or so is an illustration of what happens when we try to deal with race in total isolation from class).

And as far as I know, Bernie doesn't think you and other Southern black voters are the Confederacy.

(His strategists made some bad choices on resource allocation, but it's not true that they didn't WANT black votes. Obviously they wanted them. They just did a mediocre job of trying to get those votes and I apologize for that). And Bernie should never have made any part of his campaign an attack on the Obama Administration-instead, he should have framed his campaign on fighting to fully implement the agenda corporate control of politics stopped President Obama from achieving.

From I saw, Bernie did adjust his message to include AA concerns, although clearly more should have been done(and I'm sorry that it wasn't adjusted enough). But it's not fair to say he saw white college kids as the revolution and no one else, and (this is a big thing with me) he NEVER said or even implied that anyone should put the antiracism struggle aside in the name of "economic justice". And the vast majority of Sanders supporters stand with you on the need to fight institutional and grassroots oppression. Now that the campaign is over and we're building a culture of resistance, I hope you'd at least consider dialog with Sanders people rather than confrontation-you'd find a lot more openness on that than you'd expect.

The reasons I supported Bernie to the end were that he seemed to me, with his flaws, the most truth-based and transformative person in the race and I believed and continue to believe his proposals(especially on healthcare and college affordability) would, among other things have benefited voters of color MORE than the country as a whole(I also felt that the longer he stayed in, the more likely it was that Sanders proposals would be included in the platform and that those proposals would make us more electable). That said, I agree that his campaign didn't get the messaging on race right-and attribute that to the fact that Bernie hadn't ever planned to run before 2015, thus hadn't made the national contacts he needed to make in much of any of the party's constituency groups. He was in a bind-he would have preferred Elizabeth Warren as the anti-establishment candidate, but once she dropped out, if Bernie didn't run, there was no one in the race representing Occupy values, grassroots activist politics and the need to challenge corporate domination. This would not have helped us in the fall.

But the choice of a DNC chair isn't about Bernie as a person.

Bernie isn't going to run for president again(he'd be 79 in 2020) anyone running that year as a candidate on the sort of issues he emphasized in 2020 will make a point of addressing everything Bernie didn't emphasize enough, and Keith Ellison as our first African-American Muslim progressive DNC chair will naturally work to make sure the party strongly supports BOTH justice struggles. But it could help us get the votes of the people who supported him in the primaries but stayed home in November. We can get their votes without deemphasizing AA/POC concerns in the slightest, and we can't regain the White House or either house of Congress(OR any of the dozens of state legislatures we need to flip without getting those votes.

In fact, If Keith did win, here's a project I'd propose to help build unity between the justice causes and between the Clinton and Sanders wings(or the Sanders and anti-Sanders wings):

I'd recruit young(and not-so-young) Sanders volunteers to go around the country running voter registration and re-registration campaigns in all states affected by voter suppression laws, and then put them to work on GOTV efforts in the 2018 campaign.