Its Time for Bernie Sanders to Apologize to his Supporters, and to President Obama

[Ken Burch]

249. He HAD to run.

We couldn't just treat the whole corporate control of the economy and life issue as though it doesn't matter.

Corporate control is the reason we as a party are thirty degrees to the right of where we were in the Sixties...why any serious effort to deal with poverty or strengthen the labor movement is off the table-why are agenda now is largely items that are mundanely decent but never genuinely transformative.

And it doesn't matter that Bernie was an independent-he had to because the party hierarchy would have forced him to give up all his principles and say nothing on the House or Senate floor other than "the line". He'd have been as neutered, pathetic and useless as Hubert Humphrey was in '68 if he'd done what you wanted him to do. No one anywhere would have believed him on anything anymore.

Hillary could have won if only she'd let a "no TPP" pledge into the platform(and if only Terry McAuliffe hadn't sabotaged our chances by implying she MIGHT support that agreement after all if elected), if she'd backed off on the insane "no-fly zone" proposal for Syria(a proposal that could have got us into a direct shooting war against Russia) and if her national office had listened to the field coordinators in the Upper Midwest told her they needed a lot more canvassers brought in in the last days, and if her campaign had been a positive appeal based mainly on the good things we DID have in the platform and on an argument that electing her would actually have made people's lives better. She was never going to win by focusing mainly on arguing that Trump was a scumbag(he is, a lot of people who SUPPORT him think he is, but that was never decisive in the voters' minds)

Nothing that happened in the fall would have been prevented if only Bernie had stayed out and if only no one at all had opposed Hillary in the primary, and treating Sanders supporters as the enemy is not going to elect a Democratic president in 2020.