"...and a car in every garage."
A pledge I cannot distinguish from Trump's promise to build a "yooge" wall on the U.S./Mexican border that Mexico will pay for; except I'm more sympathetic to Sanders' promise than to Trump's.
But the former is no more possible than the latter. Although I'm sure I'll encounter some Sanders supporter in comments somewhere who can explain to me on Sanders' behalf that: “I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”
It would take a long series of administrations and congresses and many replacements on the Supreme Court to do what Bernie Sanders advocates, though a president could push in that direction. If it could succeed in 2017 is extremely unlikely and the media would destroy any president who tried it.
ReplyDeleteIf Sanders has any influence on a President Hillary Clinton, moving her to the left of where the Obama presidency figured it could govern from, it might turn out to have been worth the effort, though I'm afraid that's not how it could turn out. It is rather startling how many people have forgotten 2000 and 2004 so quickly, not all of the insane Bernie or Total Destruction nuts are too young to have remembered the last decade. Lots of them are in roughly our age cohort, the same idiots who voted for Nader even as he showed what a total ego-maniacal jerk he was. The same thing was evident in the supporters of Eugene McCarthy as he turned into a man who cared more about the principle that HIS name should appear on ballots than in keeping some of the worst presidents in our history from winning.
I came to see all of that as the play-left, people who generally didn't have much at stake, generally white, affluent, white-collar people who could comfortably lounge in their self-esteem as the world burned. I never associated Bernie Sanders with that before this year, I hope he distances himself from them instead of remaining their idol.
Yeah, I would love to have Bernie Sanders for president, I'd also love to have had George McGovern, Mo Udall and Shirley Chisholm as president. It isn't likely to happen.
In New Hampshire the Republicans are putting pressure on the "super delegates" to support Sanders, in case anyone didn't understand their plans for his followers.
You want a revolution, you promote the cause of the poor, pretty much in line with the argument of the Hebrew prophets (who were the real radicals. Which is why nobody pays attention to what they said.).
ReplyDeleteYes, that's a politically dead approach. LBJ and RFK (just to name them because I have the photos) could be seen with the poor in Appalachia or rural America, or even in the inner cities, because the middle class was well off enough they could spare a thought for the poor. But that's too radical today, where we must offer the middle class free college and manufacturing jobs to the working class, just to get their attention.
But radical? Revolutionary? As I say, you want revolutionary, tell the king that wealth and power and fine palaces are not justice, that justice only comes from caring first for the widow and the orphan. Radical; at the root. Start there, rather than at the branches, and something wonderful will happen.