This is bullshit. Exit polls clearly showed that a significant fraction of those African Americans did support Sanders' radical agenda and just didn't trust the rest of the party to vote for him. I'm not even sure they're wrong. The demographic that's really impeding change isn't them. It's the suburbian whites who vote democrat because they dislike the republicans' tone but have a meltdown at the idea of taxes or losing their overpriced insurances. African Americans follow the establishment because they believe only the establishment can keep those people in line, and they're the most worried about endangering their chances. And of course the media amplifies this narrative because it's mostly made up of those wealthy suburbian whites.
The only way to break that up is to politicize the vast numbers of non voters so that you don't have to rely on fiscally conservative suburbians and the rest of the party can start believing in a win without them.
This is so wrong that I can't
breathe because I'm laughing so hard. You're taking every soundbite of the BernieBros and not hearing yourself.
Bernie lost because, to quote a
Washington Post article:
My covert intelligence-gathering mission into the “Democratic establishment” began when I was growing up in South Carolina. My mother, a former Black Panther, didn’t believe that a black child could become a fully realized human being in the presence of whiteness, as she recently informed me, so I was home-schooled early on. Without the benefit of a formal social studies curriculum to educate me about political parties, I assumed the “Democrats” were some Illuminati-like secret society. All I knew was that in my grandmother’s house, uttering a negative word about Democrats was like blaspheming the name of Jesus or disrespecting the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
That’s why, when Sen. Bernie Sanders, his surrogates and assorted pundits say the “Democratic establishment” has banded together to stop him from winning the party’s presidential nomination and united around former vice president Joe Biden, I wonder: Which Democratic establishment? For black Americans, particularly Southerners, it is not the Democratic National Committee, or the corporate donor base, or even, as the political strategist Mark McKinnon defined it during the anti-establishment presidential race of 2016: “The measles. A disease. A political disease.” The Democratic establishment is, quite simply, their community. Those who vilify it are, by proxy, impugning the people who voice their concerns and protect their families.
Each Wednesday when I was young, I would journey deep into that establishment, to the Douglas family’s beautiful home for an hour-long piano lesson. It always lasted more than an hour. Patricia Douglas gave piano lessons to subsidize her career as the music teacher rotating among our black elementary schools. Her husband, Charles, was a science teacher, a middle school basketball coach and a city housing commissioner. They were what anyone would call pillars of our community. Many days, I would wade through the overcrowded Douglas living room filled with preachers, educators, politicians and various other neighborhood luminaries who were gathered to solve one problem or another. Sometimes it was a local business that discriminated against black residents. Other times, they coordinated their schedules for staffing the neighborhood polling stations. They raised money to send local kids to college or discussed how to address the city zoning board’s plan to allow a pollution-producing factory in a black neighborhood.
Essentially, the 'establishment' Dems -and Biden- actually went out of their way to help the African-American community (and before go raving about those 'hard on crime' laws,
those laws were backed by the African-American community, those are essentially the posterchild of 'unintended consequences') and meet with them in the living room (both literally and metaphorically) for
decades, Sanders didn't. If anything, he
attacked them, bullied them, hell Sanders almost treated them like
dirt in a way. Even with the youth pools making Bernie a winner, it betrays the reality.
In summary, Biden and the 'Establishment' were the ones that built the community while Sanders is seen as someone who would rather tear it all down in the name of Revolution.
1) I would blame the MSM more for repeating the "electability" bullshit. They downplayed Bernie's pre-super tuesday wins while fawning over anyone else. Remember "The real story is second place"?
2) I have too and Biden reminds me a lot of her.
1) No, blame the trend that started back in the days of JFK, at least the modern incarnation anyway (you could argue that Theodore Roosevelt began that trend back in the turn of the century). Nixon lost because JFK was photogenic, young, and didn't try to rock the boat too much. In addition, politics is Machiavellian no matter what you say or do, and for most of the modern history of the US, the parties have always paired someone who knows how the machinery of politics works with someone who needs to 'learn the ropes' if possible.
2) I had to live with her with dementia for (calculates), oh, between the 8th grade to 10th grade (aka high school sophomore) and started noticing about a year before that. Is Biden getting memory fuzzy? A little, but then again its scientifically proven that our memories aren't as straightforward as we thought.