2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Dkos: No, Senator Sanders; YOU are out of touch (opinion piece) [View all]R B Garr
(17,377 posts)he kept saying it. That's the point. You can try and pretend otherwise, and Sanders' campaign platform is based on many similar leaps of logic, but con men like Donald Trump listened to Bernie and understood his smears and admittedly used Bernie's attacks to also smear Hillary, so they obviously knew it was a duplicitous goldmine they could exploit to demonize her.
"Demonize" is an interesting word in association with Sanders' campaign. At that Benie townhall on Monday night (admittedly, I only watched a couple exchanges before switching to the college football championship) a young man described Sanders' rhetoric as exactly that -- demonizing. So in the real world, people of all ages who listened to Sanders' during the primaries came to the conclusion that he was demonizing and they found it fishy or offensive which is why he lost the primaries so bad.
Back to the real world, Sanders demonized "incrementalism" and used it as a derogatory accusation against Clinton. Again in the real world, Vermont does not have the $15.00 hour minimum wage he touted, yet he demonized Clinton for her more realistic $12/hr proposal. He demonized her about single payer when his own state rejected single payer because it was too burdensome. He demonized Clinton about incrementalism on education policies, but he hasn't even bothered with tackling free tuition in his own state. He demonized her incrementalism on climate change. He was really against incrementalism. Now he's out there getting his picture taken supporting a true progressive state like New York's incremental free tuition policy.
He should explain his switch to the young people who fell for his rhetoric. He demonized Clinton and he demonized Democrats for incrementalism, yet now he's out there supporting it without any explanation to his gullible followers as to why he is contradicting himself from the primaries. He poisoned the minds of many gullible young people into believing that Democrats were not fighting for them. That is just duplicitous and dishonest and it did a lot of harm to Democrats and left a psycho crook like Donald more wedges to divide Democrats. Sanders is very divisive.