Why We Need to Be Grateful for Bernie Sanders

From Esquire

Forgive me if I find the scooplet announced last night by the AP and the "election desk" at NBC News just a little skeevy. Two huge states-California and New Jersey-were scheduled to vote on Tuesday, and these two news operations announce that the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is over on Monday night. This was about Being First, and that's all it was about.

What's next? Calling the general election on the first Sunday of November because you've got a poll that tells you who the winner is?

(Lawrence O'Donnell, who grew up in Dorchester and is thus familiar with everything that can be done to an election within the margin of chicanery, made something of the same point last night. Why shouldn't the people in the studio come on the air on election night and reveal what they already know through the results of their exit polling? Assuming you haven't adopted Dr. Rove's Magic Math, this often includes who is going to win. Good question.)

That aside, it's hard to argue with the truth of what the AP and NBC said on Monday night.

There no longer is even a marginally credible fantasy path to the nomination for Bernie Sanders. His entire strategy seems now to be based on convincing members of the dreaded Democratic establishment to do something for him that they weren't even willing to do en masse for Ted Kennedy in 1980, and I think it's safe to say that Kennedy was a more influential career Democratic politician than Bernie Sanders is. And he has to get 300 of them to do it.

Barring a completely cataclysmic event, it's impossible to imagine this happening. (We will leave aside for the moment the golden hopes of what we can call the COINTELPRO wing of the Sanders movement, the members of which are hoping for the FBI to bail them out. Progressive!) Either that, or he's got a Cross of Gold speech in his satchel with which to stampede the convention, and I'm not betting on that, either.

Regardless of how it ends-and that is completely up to the senator and the people supporting him-the Sanders campaign has been a very important exercise in the ongoing struggle to pry the Democratic party away from the survival strategies the party adopted in the wake of being thumped twice by Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton was a president for his time, and Bernie Sanders was a candidate for his. As was the case in the early 1970s, so too was the case after 2008. Then, it was bad war and Watergate. In the present time, it was a series of bad wars and the theft of most of the American economy. Trust in our institutions failed, not because of ferocious partisanship or political polarization, but because the institutions themselves failed to promote the general welfare.

The 2016 presidential election was the perfect time to make that point, over and over again, and that's what the Sanders campaign forced into the national dialogue. As of this moment, Hillary Rodham Clinton is on record as backing tougher Wall Street reform than she might have been otherwise. Expanding Social Security is now the default position of most Democratic politicians, as is repealing Citizens United and putting the teeth back into the Voting Rights Act. And, of course, there is that pesky open seat on the Supreme Court. The only thing on which HRC hasn't changed is her innate hawkishness which, I admit, would give anyone pause.

I do hope Sanders campaigns all the way to the convention. I hope he talks to every superdelegate he can, but I hope he doesn't pitch himself as a reason to reverse the results of the process. He should get every one of them in a room and pitch them his policies, so they can take them back to their state legislatures or their county commissions as something to fight for.

He lost, but his ideas didn't. That should make a great deal of difference.

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