Why AOC & Co.’s endorsements matter

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appear together at a campaign rally in July 2018. AOC has endorsed Bernie as the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nominee. (Washington Post news photo)

Bernie Sanders needed a comeback. He’s been at No. 3 in nationwide and early-state polling* for a little while now, and that heart attack of earlier this month appeared like it just might doom his second presidential campaign.

But perhaps when everything is at stake is when your supporters really step up.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive rock star, and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, also a lightning rod for the neo-Nazis who comprise the Repugnican Party because she challenges the status quo (that is, right-wing white-male supremacy), this week endorsed Bernie, as did Michael Moore. (A full list of Bernie’s endorsers is here.)

Michael Moore’s popularity has been, I think, slipping over the years, so his endorsement, while certainly yet another indicator that Bernie is the real and the most dependable progressive in the race, isn’t the prize that is AOC’s endorsement. I mean, AOC has been in Congress for not even one full year yet and already we’re referring to her by her initials.

Why do AOC’s and Omar’s endorsements of Bernie matter? Again, they demonstrate that Bernie is the true-blue progressive. They demonstrate that just as the young members of “The Squad” represent the future, so does Bernie, even though he’s 78 years young.

And, of course, prominent progressive women of color endorsing Bernie blows away the DINOs’ bullshit “Bernie bros” myth; Bernie is just fine on women’s issues and on the issues of non-whites, even though according to the Billarybots, who unfortunately are still with us, he’s “just another” white man.

It’s obvious to anyone who has two brain cells to rub together that Repugnican Lite Joe Biden would be a milquetoast president at best — if he could even win the November 2020 election, which he probably could not (Hi, Billary!) — and it’s also becoming clearer that Elizabeth Warren is a cheap knock-off of Bernie.

Warren has demonstrated brains — plans upon plans upon plans, including, I’m sure, plans for more plans, and lots of political calculation — but she hasn’t demonstrated much heart. Former Repugnican Warren wouldn’t dare to run against Billary in 2016 because she is a cowardly party hack, and now she challenges Bernie, who, in my estimation, deserves the nomination alone for his central role is relegating Clintonism to the dustbin of history, where it belongs, and who recognizes, entirely unlike Warren, that capitalism must go before it kills all of us.

Why does Bernie appeal to so many of us while Warren doesn’t? Because, again, Warren is a political calculator, eerily like Billary Clinton, except that Warren has been smarter than Billary and has realized that she at least needed to co-opt Bernie’s message from the get-go if she wanted to win. (As I’ve noted, Billary co-opted Bernie’s message, but way too late in the campaign, whereas Warren slyly co-opted it before the campaign began.)

It’s true that progressive rock stars like AOC and Michael Moore may not appeal that much to the entire general November 2020 electorate, but, as Nate Silver recently noted, “Sanders’s objective for now is to win the nomination, not the general election.”

Indeed, you win the party’s presidential nomination by exciting and inspiring the base, something that Joe Biden’s woefully outdated Clintonism and Warren’s cold calculations don’t do.

Unfortunately, it will take at least several days to see how Bernie’s good performance in this past week’s fourth debate and his recent endorsements help him in the polls.

But methinks that it’s inarguable that while it looked like he was in danger of slipping off of the mountain, he’s climbing right up it again.

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*Don’t get me wrong — Bernie’s many competitors who can’t even hit the double digits would love to be in Bernie’s place, with double digits in the polls and with the best fundraising numbers of any other Democratic presidential candidate, but third place in the polls isn’t optimal.

That said, I think it’s entirely likely that Biden will implode soon enough, as he did when he ran for the nomination in 1988 and in 2008, and that this race essentially will be between establishmentarian Warren and actual progressive Bernie.

If it gets ugly, like 2016 got ugly, so be it. The future of the nation and the world is far more important than is any one individual and his or her feelings and those of his or her supporters.

Politico: Bernie Sanders has made 2020 presidential announcement video

Bernie Sanders apparently is about to put out the official signal.

Politico reports today:

Bernie Sanders, inching closer to a second bid for the White House, has recorded a campaign video in which he says he is running for president in 2020, according to two people familiar with the spot.

It’s the latest sign the independent senator, the runner-up in the 2016 contest for the Democratic nomination, is nearing a presidential announcement.

Another hint that Sanders is getting closer to a launch: As Politico reported this week, the Sanders team has been interviewing people for top staff positions. Chuck Rocha, a political consultant who advised Sanders’ 2016 campaign, is expected to join him again if a second bid materializes.

It is unclear when, or even whether, the Sanders video will be released. It’s possible that Sanders could launch a 2020 campaign with an exploratory committee and then formally declare his candidacy later, a route other presidential candidates, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have taken. …

I long have assumed that Bernie would run again. As I noted recently, he’d be crazy not to.

Bernie didn’t go away after his surprisingly narrow loss to Queen Billary in 2016. He has remained in the spotlight, introducing such progressive legislation as Medicare for All, most notably (most of the top-tier candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination signed on to Bernie’s Medicare for All bill), and he released three books after the November 2016 election and has traveled to numerous states since then.

Bernie remains popular — he remains the most popular elected official in the United States — and takes second place only to Joe Biden in reputable nationwide polling of 2020 Democratic Party presidential preference.

If Joe Biden runs, once he starts running his center-right mouth again, the voters will be reminded of why they passed him up on his first two runs for president in 1988 and in 2008, I predict, so Bernie is a strong contender for the nomination.

Not only that, but fivethirtyeight.com’s Nate Silver recently noted that past elections indicate that the more candidates who run in a presidential primary, the more difficult it is for party establishmentarians to ensure that their favorite candidate emerges as the nominee. Silver concludes:

… But the past electoral cycles where the field was nearly as big as this one shouldn’t exactly be comforting to [establishmentarian] Democrats, and it should be particularly worrying for next-in-line candidates such as Biden.

Democratic voters like a lot of their choices and feel optimistic about their chances of beating Trump in 2020. The large field is both a sign that there may not be consensus about the best candidate and a source of unpredictability.

Indeed, 2020 won’t be 2016, in which Bernie and Billary were the only two viable candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Recall that no other high-profile Democrat, including Elizabeth Warren, dared to run against Queen Billary in 2016; Bernie was the only U.S. senator who had the balls to do that.

So while Bernie isn’t polling at No. 1 (yet), again, Joe Biden, with his stale Clintonian pro-corporate centrism, is, in my book, a weak candidate given the Democratic Party base’s ongoing shift to the left. Billary either didn’t see that shift or believed that she safely could ignore it, and instead offered only rehashed Clintonism (always served cold) — and look how that turned out for her.

And (along with what Nate Silver stated) with so many Democratic candidates running, of course Bernie stands to gain from not having to face just one establishmentarian opponent, as he faced only Queen Billary in 2016, but in 2019 and 2020 he faces several establishmentarian opponents who are splintering the establishmentarian vote, including five other sitting U.S. senators.*

And, of course, because Bernie won 22 states and 46 percent of the democratically earned delegates in the 2016 primary battle, he starts off already fairly strong. Indeed, unlike the other, weaker candidates who already have announced, Bernie hasn’t had to jump in yet because he already has a sizable base of support.

Finally, the Democratic National Committee that rigged the game for Billary in 2016 — both Elizabeth Warren and Donna Brazile have said that the DNC indeed rigged the game for Billary — is not the same DNC of today.

Former DNC chair and Billarybot Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was incredibly corrupt, resigned in disgrace, and new chair Tom Perez is much more decent and fair; Team Bernie got some important DNC reforms, most notably the reining in of the anti-democratic “super-delegates” who helped Billary “win” (by making her appear to be inevitable [like with the Borg, resistance reportedly was futile]) before we peons even got to participate in a primary election or caucus; and Clintonism, for the most part, died when Billary tanked in November 2016.

My guess is that once Bernie’s second presidential bid is official, not only will his poll numbers go up and Biden’s and (most) everyone else’s will go down, but his pre-existing army of supporters from 2016 will flood his campaign coffers with individual donations (I sure will!).

We Berners aren’t dead; we are diehards and we’ve just been waiting for Bernie’s bat signal, and once it is illuminating the sky, it’s on.

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*Those five senators are Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren.

Booker, Gillibrand and Klobuchar indisputably are establishmentarian party hacks, and Harris, in my book, is just co-opting Bernie’s positions in order to try to siphon off some of his support.

I have lived in California for more than 20 years now, and Harris never has been a remarkable progressive. She never has taken a position that wasn’t politically safe for her. (She publicly opposes such things as lynching — as though that were a bold, controversial stance, as though a majority of Americans support lynchings and as though lynchings still were commonplace. [Next, she’ll boldly come out against slavery!])

And Elizabeth Warren — I’m falling out of love with her. Not only is she not campaigning well, including the “Pocahontas” stuff, but she was too much of a party hack to oppose Billary in 2016 and she won’t call herself a democratic socialist, but either truly believes that capitalism can be reformed (it cannot be) or is just too fucking cowardly to embrace democratic socialism, as she was too cowardly to face Billary in 2016.

Liz Warren is more of an establishmentarian Democrat than anything else. (Also, of course, she used to be a Repugnican as late as the 1990s. Oh, yeah.)

Bernie already won

Getty Images photo

Bernie Sanders doesn’t pick easy fights, which makes it easy for the legions of do-nothing, know-nothing dead-enders among us to declare that he’s lost even when he’s actually winning.

“Bernie and his army are losing 2018,” proclaims Politico’s David Siders.

“Bernie Sanders is sputtering,” Siders writes. “Two years after his defeat in the 2016 presidential primary, the Vermont senator has amassed a growing string of losses in races in which he has intervened.”

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Bernie has been on the national political scene only since 2015, when he informally announced his candidacy for president on April 30 and formally announced on May 26 of that year.

And yes, Bernie came in second place in 2016, but it was a surprisingly strong second to Queen Billary Clinton — he won 22 states and 46 percent of the pledged delegates (delegates that he had to win in primary elections and caucuses). He pretty much came from nowhere to do that, and he never has been given widespread credit for that.

Bernie Sanders successfully is pushing the needle to the left. That in and of itself is a triumph. For years the Democratic Party has been stuck in the center-right, do-nothing, punk-the-people Clintonian-Obamian bullshit, and that’s finally starting to change. It’s getting harder and harder for corporate whores who call themselves Democrats to continue their scams on the people, and that’s a great thing.

No, the job isn’t done, and yes, the Democratic Party could slip back into its corporate whoredom, but for the time being, progress is being made, even if it’s only in baby steps.

I look to Mexico’s next president, democratic socialist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, for inspiration. He ran for president three times (in 2006, 2012 and this year) before he finally won. Had AMLO, as he is widely called, given up because of the naysayers’ negativity, he never would have become Mexico’s president-elect.

Bernie, like AMLO, is one of those rare types who just does it amidst a chorus of mediocre-at-best pieces of shit proclaiming that it can’t be done.

Like AMLO, Bernie lost his initial races. In the 1970s he ran twice for governor of and twice for U.S. senator for Vermont and he lost all four times. He didn’t finally win an election until he lowered his sights a bit and became mayor of Burlington, Vermont, in 1980.*

Had Bernie given up — and many people would have after having lost four elections in a row — he wouldn’t be in the U.S. Senate right now.

Center-right politics have been stubbornly persistent in the United States of America for decades now, and that dynamic isn’t going to be reversed overnight. But as the more conservative voters finally die, taking their selfish, short-sighted, right-wing bullshit to their graves with them, and our youth — who gravitate toward democratic socialism — more and more take over the reins of power, we are going to see the nation going more and more to the left.

Take a very recent election — yesterday’s special election for a U.S. House of Representatives seat in Ohio. Right now it’s “President” Pussygrabber-endorsed Repugnican Troy Balderson at 50.2 percent of the vote to Democrat Danny O’Connor’s 49.3 percent, a difference of only 1,754 votes out of 201,394 votes cast, with the results of around 8,300 provisional and vote-by-mail ballots still to be officially announced.

Even if Balderson ekes out a win, Pussygrabber won the congressional district by 11 points in November 2016, so in the big picture, the Repugnicans should expect to lose the House of Representatives in November of this year. (Right now, only around 41 percent of those polled say they’ll vote for a Repugnican for the U.S. House in November, while around 48 percent say they’ll vote for a Democrat.)

And because yesterday’s was just a special election, Balderson and O’Connor will run against each other again for a full two-year term in November; even if it turns out that Balderson won yesterday, he will lose the seat in January if O’Connor beats him in November.

Yes, probably most of the vote swing in the Ohio congressional district is due to the revulsion of “President” Pussygrabber, whose nationwide approval ratings remain mired in the low 40s, than to great love for democratic socialism, but the pendulum is swinging back to the left.

It’s not until the end of his piece that Politico’s David Siders more or less eviscerates his own claim that Bernie’s losing, which is a nice and tidy and dramatic — but overall inaccurate — conclusion. Siders quotes two individuals thusly:

“What it is is that most people don’t realize that Bernie Sanders actually won. … What [Sanders] wanted to do [with his 2016 presidential campaign] was mobilize millions of people to get politically involved, and he achieved that in droves. Change is slow. Progress is slow. But it’s inevitable. So, even if we have some devastating losses, we have to stick at it.”

and

“My philosophy — and I think it’s what Bernie was going for — [is that] the Republican Party, years ago when they couldn’t win elections, they did some soul searching and ran people at the local level. Thirty, 40 years later, they control every level of government. … That’s what the Democratic Party needs to do. They need to get some fresh faces, go back to their roots and reorganize.”

Yup. It’s a long, hard slog to the promised land. We can’t give up now. Expect the naysayers, who never are going to contribute anything valuable themselves, to attack and to try to hinder progress.

Ignore them, and keep on doing what they claim can’t be done.

P.S. I must direct you to this piece on NPR, which ran on June 8 and which pretty much is the antithesis of David Siders’ piece for Politico. It is titled, “Bernie Sanders Is Losing Primary Battles, but Winning a War.” I reproduce it most of it here:

Since most of the congressional candidates that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders endorsed this year are losing contested primaries, then Sanders’ political clout must be fading, right?

“That’s a stupid argument,” Sanders told NPR this week. [I love Bernie.]

“You know, he has a much broader look at politics than just elections,” Sanders’ long-time strategist Jeff Weaver said.

That is evident. The 2016 candidate repeatedly questioned the political value of his endorsements, and even expressed some mild indifference to the race-by-race results of the primaries he’s waded into.

Sanders’ broader goal is to get more first-time voters and first-time candidates involved in the political process, and to keep pushing progressive policies like a Medicare-for-all health care plan into the Democratic mainstream.

If that takes more than one election cycle, so be it.

“I hope they [his endorsees] win,” Sanders said. “Maybe they don’t. But if you get 45 percent of the vote now, next time you may well win.” [Emphasis mine.]

In the U.S. House primaries that have happened so far, Sanders has endorsed six candidates in contested races. Only two of his chosen House candidates have won contested primaries, and one was an incumbent: Rep. Nanette Barragán of California.

Even if many of his hand-picked candidates are coming up short, more of the Democrats who are winning are lining up closer to Sanders anyway. A Medicare-for-all, single-payer health care plan continues to gain support among Democratic candidates, and the $15 minimum wage Sanders made a key part of his presidential campaign has been adopted as a cause by party leaders across the country.

But given his broad success at reshaping the party, the question lingers as to why so many of the candidates bearing Sanders’ personal seal of approval are losing.

This week, another Sanders-endorsed House candidate lost a Democratic primary by a wide margin. Pete D’Alessandro ran Sanders’ Iowa campaign in 2016, which resulted in a virtual tie with Hillary Clinton. This year, the Vermont senator campaigned alongside him, cut a TV commercial for him and helped him raise money. But D’Alessandro finished in third.

“I could be 100 percent in terms of my endorsements,” Sanders told NPR. “All you’ve got to do is endorse establishment candidates who have a whole lot of money, who are 40 points ahead in the poll. You know what, you’ll come and say, ‘Bernie, you were 100 percent supportive of these candidates, they all won.'”

“The candidates that we support, by and large with few exceptions, are all candidates who are taking on the establishment, and are often outspent,” he added. [Emphasis mine. Indeed, supporting a candidate who clearly already is the front-runner isn’t all that hard, is it? You pick the obvious probable winner and then claim that your support was a factor in the victory. Bullshit.]

Sanders and Weaver argue that a race-by-race accounting isn’t the best way to track what the 2016 Democratic presidential runner-up is doing this year.

“The issue here is not that I think a Bernie Sanders, or frankly the endorsement of anybody else, is some magical potion to get people elected,” Sanders said. “Frankly, between you and me, I’m not sure how much endorsements – how significant they are. Sometimes they help, sometimes not much.” [Emphasis mine.]

Two of the 17 candidates Sanders has backed this year say that, in their minds, there’s no question the endorsement helped.

“It did a lot of good for our campaign,” said Greg Edwards, who ran in a crowded Pennsylvania House primary last month. “It increased my name ID, helped me get volunteers, helped with fundraising, certainly. And we got a lot of media attention out of it. I think we got four or five press hits.”

Still, Edwards also ended up third in his race.

But Edwards centered his campaign around policies many voters now associate with Sanders. “Universal health care, Medicare-for-all, around universal preschool, around debt-free college. Around increasing the minimum wage from $7.25 to $15,” he said.

“Many of these issues were considered fringe issues, and now they are mainstream issues that we take for granted that there, of course, are legions of Democratic candidates running on those platforms,” said Jeff Weaver. “Three or four years ago you would not have seen candidates running on that platform I would have considered to be outside the mainstream.”

When Sanders introduced his latest single-payer health care bill last year, it was quickly endorsed by several of the Senate Democrats mentioned as possible 2020 presidential candidates. …

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*It’s a common mistake, I think, for someone to run for a big office, such as governor or U.S. senator, instead of running for a lower office and then working his or her way up.