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Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Sanders Disqualifactoids

I've been amazed at how pundit comments about how Bernie Sanders' strength is in "whiter states" are now treated as neutral commonplace observations when in fact they are disqualifying for a would-be leader of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton is performing very strongly among African Americans (overwhelming majorities), Latinos (less overwhelming majorities), women (two to one). The Democratic Party serves and celebrates the diversity of the REAL Real America represented by the twice-winning and ever-growing Obama Coalition. You cannot succeed in becoming the Democratic nominee, nor succeed in becoming the eventual President in the REAL Real America while failing to appeal to the Obama Coalition. As a white queer activist teacher I am a proud member of the Obama Coalition too. If you aren't an asshole, so are you. I do think that Sanders has improved his outreach to the Obama Coalition a little over time, but it is far too little, far too late. Let's just say the vote counts and delegate counts suggest Democrats won't be feeling Buyers Remorse over a Sanders victory any time soon. After all, if these contests for the nomination and leadership of the Democratic Party were confined to actually self-identified Democrats, Sanders would have won one state: Vermont. I am sure that once Sanders is done with his utterly cynical and disingenuous run as a "Democrat" (a label he has eschewed and even denigrated all his life and which he openly admits he recently accepted only "reluctantly" to make recourse to the money, media coverage, legitimacy, informational and organizational resources the Party made available to his self-described "Revolution") and returns to his Senatorial perch as an "Independent" we can expect him to resume his mostly ineffectual sniping at colleagues trying to solve shared problems with compromises and make modest reforms in the direction of progress from the security of his tiny, homogeneous, white, comfortably liberal postage stamp of a State.

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