Donald
Trump will be a candidate for president, whether he is the GOP nominee or runs
as an independent and Bernie Sanders is unintentionally helping him by
continuing his personalized attacks against Hillary Clinton. In so doing Sanders is helping the Democratic
party blow a great opportunity to put a Democrat in the White House and would
scotch any chance even a part of his agenda could ever be enacted.
Trump’s
newest slogan against Clinton is to call her Corrupt Hillary by echoing
Sanders’ stump speeches. .Proof of whether donations from Wall Street, the
fossil fuel industry or corporate interests resulted in influencing her policy
positions is the missing link since her record as senator was one of supporting
tough measures that were not in those special groups’ interests. Even
Sanders could not name one piece of legislation influenced by such
contributions.
Sanders’
other attack against Hillary is that she is not qualified to be president. Strange. No one in the race in
either party with a resume that reflects both domestic and foreign affairs
experience. Sanders based his attack
mostly on one argument: he has the judgment, not her, because he voted against
the Iraq invasion and she did not. He had a strong case to differ with her on
many issues that she was more of a hawk, but he chose to make this a personal
attack on her character instead. This provides the GOP with a handy sound bite
which diverts attention from their own extremely hawkish views.
Sanders
needs to back off these attacks. They did not work in the New York primary. Polls
at this writing indicate it is not working in Tuesday’s northeast primaries
either. The resulting math is that Sanders is running out of pledged delegates
left to capture, needing at least 59% of all remaining pledged delegates post
New York.
Sanders
has another challenge that is approximately reflected in the current delegate
count. There are just not enough angry Democrats to join his political
revolution. Those in revolt are far more
numerous in the Republican party than in the Democratic party, which is why
Donald Trump has dominated the GOP
process and Sanders has not gained enough of
the Democratic delegates, even
though they are both appealing to angry masses. The NBC News/SurveyMonkey/Esquire
poll released January 3 found that 61 percent of
Republicans find themselves feeling angry about current events or the news more
than they did one year ago. Only 42 percent of Democrats said the same
thing.
Instead of making personal attacks, Sanders
should focus on his greatest success: his aspirational messages, including
fighting nagging income inequality, that have indeed become a significant
movement within the Democratic party and cannot be ignored for years to come. In fact, he has a better chance of seeing his
views getting a nod the Convention platform planks than if he makes his
campaign a divisive personalized fight that turns polarized delegates against
delegates. Clinton, on the other
hand, can still support the essence
of Sanders’ aspirational goals with
greater clarity, but still disagree with the method to achieve them, if she
wants to extend an olive branch to his supporters and maintain her appeal to
the un-angry.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/upshot/realistically-bernie-sanders-cannot-afford-losses.html?_r=0
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