Bernie Sanders Reportedly to Seek Democratic Nomination Again

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire and his food writing website Yonder and Home. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew's Heard Tell SubStack for free here:

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11 Responses

  1. Kolohe says:

    The risk with Bernie winning the nom is to give some actual credibility for someone like Nanny Bloomberg or Mr. Starbucks to make an independent bid, and siphon off just enough votes so Trump wins with 40% of the vote.

    But he does have a path to the nomination if the rest of the field remains too fractured between Harris and the rest of 3 to 4 top tier candidates (and especially if the also rans still get more than 5% altogether)

    (40% number h/t/ Yglesias)Report

  2. DensityDuck says:

    “many are asking if another cycle of party establishment vs Sanders supporters would be a fatal distraction to a Democratic Party nominee.”

    welp

    i know a sure-fire cure for that

    it’s called “don’t screw him over this time”

    although that’ll be tough when there’s another America’s First Female President(tm) working for the nom

    progressives gonna progressReport

    • Brandon Berg in reply to DensityDuck says:

      Counterpoint: Screw him good and hard. I would like for at least one major party to nominate a candidate who isn’t pants-on-head stupid.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

      My assumption is that most of the screwing that Bernie got was related to that he was the sole “Not Clinton” left vote out there and The Establishment players *KNEW* that Clinton would win the primary and so Bernie was nothing but a distraction.

      That said, the Not Clinton left voters wanted to be heard and, since the Dean vs. Kerry days, the whole “should we be more principled or more pragmatic” fight has taken place in some weird place where Triangulation ruled. We want someone principled, but not too principled, we need a pragmatically principled person to run…

      Luckily, Obama was as pragmatic as you were going to get but voting for him *FELT* principled in a way that voting for Clinton just… well, it just didn’t.

      If The Establishment ignores the whole “principled” thing again in service to pragmatism, BernieBros will feel screwed.

      Look to see how they’re handling Harris. That’s probably going to be where we’ll see the first cracks. How will they treat the Prosecutor thing?

      If the counter-argument is “you hippies need to understand that law and order plays really well with the rubes”, expect BernieBros to get all petulant and for contradictions to be heightened in response.Report

  3. DensityDuck says:

    Obama was only pragmatic in retrospect. He certainly ran on a liberal platform, not to mention the idea of being America’s First Black President ™.

    “most of the screwing that Bernie got was related to that he was the sole “Not Clinton” left vote out there and The Establishment players *KNEW* that Clinton would win the primary and so Bernie was nothing but a distraction.”

    Much of Clinton’s campaign was focused on the idea that a win was guaranteed, but she wanted it to be unquestioned, because anything other than an overwhelming near-unanimous Mandate Of The Voters would be seen as weakness. She wanted to be able to point to historically-high percentages of historically-high turnouts and say “see? People want me to be here, they like my ideas, now shut up and approve my budget package.”

    In that context it’s understandable why Sanders was such a problem, because not only did he refuse to go away, he was actually damaging the story about how America’s First Female President ™ was a Historical Imperative that the People were Clamoring For.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

      Obama was only pragmatic in retrospect.

      True but that’s why I opened with “luckily”.

      He certainly ran on a liberal platform

      Oh, indeed he did! This makes his pragmatism so much more pragmatic. What’s fascinating is that he still *FEELS* progressive to have voted for. (I think that this is aesthetics as much as anything.)

      If the establishment could find someone who is as pragmatic as Obama but feels as progressive as Obama to vote for, they’d glom onto this person in a damn heartbeat. I think that Kamala Harris is probably them trying to capture lightning in a bottle… dunno if it will work, though.

      The pragmatists, for example, are already talking about how pragmatic she is.

      Good point about Bernie in that last part.

      I think that that particular dynamic might already be in play this election. The need for everybody to have a united front is something that everybody agrees upon.

      It’s the “therefore, you need to support my preferred candidate” that gets all of the trouble. (And Bernie is a handy person to point to if you want to explain what might happen if you don’t shut up and get in line and agree with me.)Report

  4. North says:

    Meh, in this field Bernie’s “we need a political revolution” answer to every question is going to sink like an anvil in a pool. It’s hard to believe he’ll have much of a shot in a crowded field.Report

  5. George Turner says:

    Hillary hasn’t ruled out another run, either. In such a huge field, it’s likely she would walk away with the early primaries, at least if more women don’t let their husbands tell them how to vote, which is one of her explanations for 2016. However large the “Not her again!” share of the vote turns out to be, it’s going to be split twenty different ways.

    And she must know that if she runs, and has a shot at winning the primaries (in some minds making her an almost certainty to beat Trump in a re-match), money will again flow into the Clinton Family Foundation and her various other quasi charities. Even if she loses the general election, she’ll still have a much bigger pile of money when it’s over, and a bigger pile is better than a not-bigger pile. “Which pile is bigger?” is, I would suggest, a useful way to predict what she’ll do.

    Elizabeth Warren, however, might challenge Hillary more directly about the charity activities than Bernie did, even though all three live in mansions. Hillary could counter-attack on Warren’s plan to tax the assets of anyone worth more than $50 million, which is unconstitutional (directly taxing income required a Constitutional amendment). It’s basically a 2 to 3% “protection” fee, with the percentage being directly subtracted not from the returns on an asset or investment, but upon the principle. So if you held bonds with a return of 1.5%, they would actually be losing 0.5 to 1.5% per year because they’re an asset getting taxed at a higher rate than they even return, making them absolutely worthless as an investment. As an aside, the halving-time of a 3% annual loss is 23 years. Hillary is all about building a financial empire, not losing one, so I’m sure she’d counter-attack quite directly.

    I don’t think Kamala Harris has much of a shot (read her wiki page for her history as a prosecutor), but she has been playing up her ethnicity by announcing her candidacy on MLK day, even though both her parents came to the US in the 1960’s, one a cancer researcher and the other an economics grad student accepted to Berkeley. I think they might have skipped the struggle part of the struggle that still resonates at the heart of US identity politics.

    But unless someone with more direct claims to MLK’s (and Obama’s!) mantle jumps in (aka Corey Booker), she might be able to carve that block out for herself, perhaps pointing out that Bernie’s rallies were all whiter than Pat Boone eating a mayonnaise sandwich on Wonder bread in a Minnesota snowstorm.

    I think Jay Inslee is undone by his decision to spend $1.1 billion dollars of state funds to save 74 killer whales in Puget Sound. That’s almost $15 million a whale. Now everybody loves whales, but the Japanese would only spend about $90,000 on a whale that size – to eat it. And the whales are starving because we cut back on killing sea lions, whose numbers have increased by a factor of ten, and which are now busily eating all the salmon so there’s not enough left for the whales. In any event, 74 orcas need about 10 million pounds of meat a year, so Inslee’s $1.1 billion is enough to buy them 30 years worth of packaged cod fillets. Or perhaps they should feed them sea lions chops until nature’s balance is restored.

    His decision makes it easy to portray Inslee as someone who might, some fine morning, decide to do something entirely crazy with all your money. Who knows? Perhaps he’d wake up and give the entire Social Security trust fund to a starving Indian swami so he’d bless the planet. If 5% of his state’s tax revenue is spent on 74 whales, how much might they spend on their bears? And what about owls? And that’s aside from stopping global warming. His heart is in the right place, but his hand is in everybody’s wallets, pulling out $150 each to make himself feel better. Not a good steward, and other candidates are going to have to point that out. There are cheaper ways to help the whales, and more important things to spend on, like Seattle’s massive homeless problem. In ads, the whale spending might be his Dukakis helmet.

    So far, I think Biden is looking pretty good just by not being them.Report

  6. Jaybird says:

    Good news, everyone. Footage of a shirtless Bernie Sanders (and his shirted wife Jane) on their honeymoon in the USSR in 1988 singing “This Land Is Your Land” has just surfaced.

    He’s sunk now!Report

    • George Turner in reply to Jaybird says:

      Two Bernie points:

      1) That footage was reportedly released by a Beto 2020 backer.

      2) Not everyone needs to be wearing a shirt all the time. In fact, most people only have a shirt on for two-thirds of the day. So in a country like the Soviet Union, or in America, it doesn’t make sense to have more than 200 million shirts for 300 million people. Now, based on that video, maybe the number of available shirts should be tweaked a little bit because, as it turns out, most of the shirts happen to be worn when the sun is up. But the Soviet Union had something like 11 time zones, so you still wouldn’t need to have a shirt for each and every person, just an efficient system to getting shirts from the timezone experiencing sunset over to the timezone experiencing sunrise. Once any distribution kinks are worked out, you’d have a highly efficient system, but with the side effect of nobody having a shirt at night, which is pretty much what the video shows.

      Old Soviet Socialist Republic joke: A man sees his neighbor Igor struggling through deep mud with only one boot on. He shouts “Igor, you’ve lost a boot!” Igor replies “To the contrary, comrade. I have found one!”Report