Berl Falbaum
It was a signature moment for Bernie Sanders when the senator from Vermont took to the podium at the recent Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago.
You could almost hear him thinking: Yes, I know, this is supposed to be about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but I have the podium and I am going to have my say.
And that he did. Barely mentioning Harris and Walz, for almost 13 minutes, he laid out the legislative plan he expected Harris to pursue if elected.
Perhaps he thought he was still in the running for president because, basically, it was his stump speech that he has delivered in two of his presidential campaigns.
For example: He expects Harris to take on “big pharma…the oligarchs…big oil,” etc.
Surely, Harris/Walz probably knew the risk they were taking in giving him a speaking role, but they did it to placate Sanders’ progressives and probably hoped that perhaps — just perhaps — he might temper his self-importance, spitefulness, and arrogance a bit.
He didn’t and no one should be surprised.
Not much — if anything — has been written that, in my view, no one is more responsible for Donald Trump becoming president and for Trumpism to poison our political veins than Sanders. I’ll explain.
Let’s turn the clock back to 2016 when Sanders ran for president. While he had every right to do so and he made important contributions in the discussion of issues, when it became clear that he would lose, he stubbornly refused to bow out, thereby weakening his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Then, after exiting the race, he waited weeks before endorsing her — a weak endorsement, I might add — sending a message to his followers that he was not happy with her candidacy.
He can argue all he wants about his role in the 2016 election. Sanders’ legacy, however, is that he opened the gates for Trump to become president, a man he described in 2019, when he ran for president again, as the “most corrupt president” in modern U.S. history.
Thousands of Sanders supporters openly opposed Clinton, some pledging to vote for Trump.
When Sanders called for Clinton’s election at his rallies, many in the crowd yelled, “No!” Sanders did little to halt the anti-Clinton movement.
Consider the following: In 2016, Clinton lost four battleground states by slim margins: Michigan, by 2 percent, 10,704 votes; Wisconsin by 0.8 percent, 22,748 votes; Florida by 1.2 percent, 112,911 votes; and Pennsylvania by only 0.7 percent, 44,292 votes.
These four states account for 85 electoral votes. Clinton, who lost to Trump 304 electoral votes to 227, did not need all of these four to win the presidency. She would have won with only 43 additional electoral votes, which means that Florida with 29 electoral votes and Pennsylvania with 20 would have given her the victory. All she needed in these two states was 157,203 votes.
Given these numbers, the following statistics from several post-2016 election studies take on additional meaning: 52 percent of white women and 64 percent of non-college educated white women voted for Trump and only 35 percent cast their ballots for Clinton. And, finally overall, 12 percent of Sanders’ minions voted for Trump.
As Peg Tyre wrote in Politico Magazine a week after the 2016 election: “So little of it seemed to matter to so many women in the voting booth: the vulgar language about sexual assault, the serial groping, the fat shaming, all the sharp, crystalline shards of misogyny that were spiked through Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.
“Women didn’t just vote for Trump. They voted against Hillary Clinton. And for many, they weren’t voting against her as a woman. They were voting against her as an establishment figure, and her sex didn’t matter all that much.”
A full embrace by Sanders of Clinton may well have given Clinton a victory.
We would not have Kavanaugh, Barrett and Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, creating a 6-3 conservative majority nor would we have Dobbs. Gun and voting rights laws would not have been weakened, separation between church and state would not be threatened, and so much more.
The Sanders’ progressives staked out a position that if they could not have the presidential candidate they wanted, then they would take their ball and go home. The hell with the consequences.
They were childishly petulant ignoring the fact that Trump or Clinton would be president. There was no other choice. This was not a zero-sum situation. A loss for Clinton would not be a win for them.
They acted, or more accurately did not act, forgetting another truism: You reap what you sow.
They — all of us — have suffered the consequences of their political blindness and petulance.
One more point: It isn’t that there is no precedent for progressive spitefulness. In 2000, Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, cost Vice President Al Gore the presidency. True, a Democrat did not face a depraved and corrupt Republican, but the principle is the same.
George W. Bush beat Gore in Florida by only 537 votes. Nader, with absolutely no chance to win, garnered almost 100,000 votes, which would have gone to Gore along with Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the presidency.
That’s not all. In New Hampshire (four electoral votes), Nader received about 22,000 votes that could have given Gore a victory in that state and the presidency even without Florida. Bush beat Gore in New Hampshire by only about 7,000 votes.
Back to Sanders. He has the ability to stir emotions; to rally the troops, so to speak. He had another opportunity to do so at the convention. He could have repaired some of the political damage he did to our politics and taken a step toward rehabilitation. But he refused to do so. Spitefulness and arrogance once again trumped — no pun intended — reconciliation, compassion and humility.
Self-examination, obviously, is not one of Sanders’ strong suits. He probably has never reflected on his role in creating Trump and Trumpism. But history surely will.
You could almost hear him thinking: Yes, I know, this is supposed to be about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, but I have the podium and I am going to have my say.
And that he did. Barely mentioning Harris and Walz, for almost 13 minutes, he laid out the legislative plan he expected Harris to pursue if elected.
Perhaps he thought he was still in the running for president because, basically, it was his stump speech that he has delivered in two of his presidential campaigns.
For example: He expects Harris to take on “big pharma…the oligarchs…big oil,” etc.
Surely, Harris/Walz probably knew the risk they were taking in giving him a speaking role, but they did it to placate Sanders’ progressives and probably hoped that perhaps — just perhaps — he might temper his self-importance, spitefulness, and arrogance a bit.
He didn’t and no one should be surprised.
Not much — if anything — has been written that, in my view, no one is more responsible for Donald Trump becoming president and for Trumpism to poison our political veins than Sanders. I’ll explain.
Let’s turn the clock back to 2016 when Sanders ran for president. While he had every right to do so and he made important contributions in the discussion of issues, when it became clear that he would lose, he stubbornly refused to bow out, thereby weakening his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Then, after exiting the race, he waited weeks before endorsing her — a weak endorsement, I might add — sending a message to his followers that he was not happy with her candidacy.
He can argue all he wants about his role in the 2016 election. Sanders’ legacy, however, is that he opened the gates for Trump to become president, a man he described in 2019, when he ran for president again, as the “most corrupt president” in modern U.S. history.
Thousands of Sanders supporters openly opposed Clinton, some pledging to vote for Trump.
When Sanders called for Clinton’s election at his rallies, many in the crowd yelled, “No!” Sanders did little to halt the anti-Clinton movement.
Consider the following: In 2016, Clinton lost four battleground states by slim margins: Michigan, by 2 percent, 10,704 votes; Wisconsin by 0.8 percent, 22,748 votes; Florida by 1.2 percent, 112,911 votes; and Pennsylvania by only 0.7 percent, 44,292 votes.
These four states account for 85 electoral votes. Clinton, who lost to Trump 304 electoral votes to 227, did not need all of these four to win the presidency. She would have won with only 43 additional electoral votes, which means that Florida with 29 electoral votes and Pennsylvania with 20 would have given her the victory. All she needed in these two states was 157,203 votes.
Given these numbers, the following statistics from several post-2016 election studies take on additional meaning: 52 percent of white women and 64 percent of non-college educated white women voted for Trump and only 35 percent cast their ballots for Clinton. And, finally overall, 12 percent of Sanders’ minions voted for Trump.
As Peg Tyre wrote in Politico Magazine a week after the 2016 election: “So little of it seemed to matter to so many women in the voting booth: the vulgar language about sexual assault, the serial groping, the fat shaming, all the sharp, crystalline shards of misogyny that were spiked through Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.
“Women didn’t just vote for Trump. They voted against Hillary Clinton. And for many, they weren’t voting against her as a woman. They were voting against her as an establishment figure, and her sex didn’t matter all that much.”
A full embrace by Sanders of Clinton may well have given Clinton a victory.
We would not have Kavanaugh, Barrett and Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, creating a 6-3 conservative majority nor would we have Dobbs. Gun and voting rights laws would not have been weakened, separation between church and state would not be threatened, and so much more.
The Sanders’ progressives staked out a position that if they could not have the presidential candidate they wanted, then they would take their ball and go home. The hell with the consequences.
They were childishly petulant ignoring the fact that Trump or Clinton would be president. There was no other choice. This was not a zero-sum situation. A loss for Clinton would not be a win for them.
They acted, or more accurately did not act, forgetting another truism: You reap what you sow.
They — all of us — have suffered the consequences of their political blindness and petulance.
One more point: It isn’t that there is no precedent for progressive spitefulness. In 2000, Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader, cost Vice President Al Gore the presidency. True, a Democrat did not face a depraved and corrupt Republican, but the principle is the same.
George W. Bush beat Gore in Florida by only 537 votes. Nader, with absolutely no chance to win, garnered almost 100,000 votes, which would have gone to Gore along with Florida’s 25 electoral votes and the presidency.
That’s not all. In New Hampshire (four electoral votes), Nader received about 22,000 votes that could have given Gore a victory in that state and the presidency even without Florida. Bush beat Gore in New Hampshire by only about 7,000 votes.
Back to Sanders. He has the ability to stir emotions; to rally the troops, so to speak. He had another opportunity to do so at the convention. He could have repaired some of the political damage he did to our politics and taken a step toward rehabilitation. But he refused to do so. Spitefulness and arrogance once again trumped — no pun intended — reconciliation, compassion and humility.
Self-examination, obviously, is not one of Sanders’ strong suits. He probably has never reflected on his role in creating Trump and Trumpism. But history surely will.
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