The Bitter Last Days of Bernie's "Revolution"

I have conjectured about Bernie Sanders' bitterness and refusal to accept that Hillary Clinton has defeated him - something abhorrent to his seemingly huge ego - and now a piece in Politico with information sourced from within his campaign confirms some of my thoughts.  Moreover, it appears that Sanders has been extremely "hands on" in running his campaign which is not a bad thing in and of itself.  However, it makes it very difficult for the candidate to blame missteps and nastiness on others.  The piece also suggests that there is strong split in the campaign between some staffers and Sanders as to a rational basis for continuing the campaign now that no path to victory remains.  Here are highlights:

There’s no strategist pulling the strings, and no collection of burn-it-all-down aides egging him on. At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders.

It was the Vermont senator who personally rewrote his campaign manager’s shorter statement after the chaos at the Nevada state party convention and blamed the political establishment for inciting the violence.

He was the one who made the choice to go after Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after his wife read him a transcript of her blasting him on television.

He chose the knife fight over calling Clinton unqualified, which aides blame for pulling the bottom out of any hopes they had of winning in New York and their last real chance of turning a losing primary run around.

There are many divisions within the Sanders campaign—between the dead-enders and the work-it-out crowds, between the younger aides who think he got off message while the consultants got rich and obsessed with Beltway-style super delegate math, and between the more experienced staffers who think the kids got way too high on their sense of the difference between a movement and an actual campaign.

But more than any of them, Sanders is himself filled with resentment, on edge, feeling like he gets no respect -- all while holding on in his head to the enticing but remote chance that Clinton may be indicted before the convention.

Convinced as Sanders is that he’s realizing his lifelong dream of being the catalyst for remaking American politics—aides say he takes credit for a Harvard Kennedy School study in April showing young people getting more liberal, and he takes personal offense every time Clinton just dismisses the possibility of picking him as her running mate—his guiding principle under attack has basically boiled down to a feeling that multiple aides sum up as: “Screw me? No, screw you.”

This isn’t about what’s good for the Democratic Party in his mind, but about what he thinks is good for advancing the agenda that he’s been pushing since before he got elected mayor of Burlington.

Sanders owns nearly every major decision, right down to the bills. A conversation with former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin about getting left in personal debt from his own 1992 presidential campaign has stayed at the top of Sanders’ mind.

Aides say Sanders thinks that progressives who picked Clinton are cynical, power-chasing chickens — like Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of his most consistent allies in the Senate before endorsing Clinton and campaigning hard for her ahead of the Ohio primary. Sanders is so bitter about it that he’d be ready to nix Brown as an acceptable VP choice, if Clinton ever asked his advice on who’d be a good progressive champion.

Every time Sanders got into a knife fight, aides say, they ended up losing. But they could never stop Sanders when he got his back up.

Top Sanders aides admit that it’s been weeks, if not months, since they themselves realized he wasn’t going to win, and they’ve been operating with a Trump’s-got-no-real-shot safety net. They debate whether Sanders’ role in the fall should be a full vote-for-Clinton campaign, or whether he should just campaign hard against Trump without signing up to do much for her directly.

They haven’t been able to get Sanders focused on any of that, or on the real questions about what kind of long term organization to build out of his email list. They know they’ll have their own rally in Philadelphia – outside the the convention hall—but that’s about as far as they’ve gotten.

Losing a campaign is hard, as I know from my own run for office years ago.  But part of Sanders' bitterness may be from the fact that in the last analysis, he has no one to blame but himself.  Whatever he decides to do, being bitter, angry and nasty will not attract sympathy or support over the long haul.  

Hillary Announces Her Agenda

Hillary Clinton made her first "big speech" yesterday on Roosevelt Island in the East River of New York City.  Reportedly, the crowd turnout wasn't what was hoped for, yet her speech which some described as "flat" covered many issues and, as The Atlantic notes, laid out details that no Republican presidential candidate, declared or not, has yet to offer.  The event underscored what are Hillary's biggest challenges: (i) she does not have her husband's charisma, and (ii) she has yet to ignite any real excitement.   Personally, I find ALL of the GOP would be presidential nominees to be frightening, and not merely because they all seem to be seeing who can be the most anti-gay, but because they seem only too willing to betray our troops by launching more fool's errands in the Middle East and because their economic policy continue the GOP war on the middle and working classes.  Will others support her and turn out to the polls in November 2016 merely because they find the GOP candidate too frightening?  Here are excerpts from The Atlantic piece:

In her 45-minute address on New York's Roosevelt Island, a wooded sliver in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, Clinton laid out many proposals that Democrats care about. She did so in a speech that was almost aggressively pedestrian, devoid of soaring rhetoric or big ideas. “America can't succeed unless you succeed,” she said. “That's why I am running for president of the United States.” Clinton’s entire candidacy, it seemed, was built around a non sequitur.

The occasion itself was a strange one. Saturday's speech was, according to Clinton's campaign, a “launch,” yet Clinton announced her candidacy two months ago. Was she hoping to start over? Certainly not, her staff insisted—everything, they say, is going just fine, terrifically even. The chairman of Clinton's campaign, John Podesta, resorted to a baseball metaphor to explain the double beginning: “We've had spring training,” he said. “Now it's opening day.”

In keeping with the campaign so far, Saturday's speech was quite substantive and quite liberal. It was also quite flat. Clinton read it slowly off the teleprompter, articulating every word, sometimes with odd emphasis, in a near-monotone. Clinton spoke in Four Freedoms Park, a locale chosen for its symbolic freight.

She segued into what she called her “four fights”: to make the economy work for the middle class; to strengthen America's families with pro-worker policies; to “maintain our leadership for peace,  security and prosperity”; and to reform government and revitalize democracy. Under these vague headings she crammed expanding renewable energy, fighting climate change, funding infrastructure, universal preschool and childcare, making college affordable, paid sick days, paid family leave, equal pay for women, services for the addicted and mentally ill, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, a ban on discrimination against gay and transgender people, and automatic voter registration.

[N]o one could accuse Clinton of not having an agenda; none of the Republican candidates has offered such a barrage of proposals. Recent polls have shown that most voters do not find Clinton trustworthy. She is apparently betting that policy and substance can be a substitute for character and personality.

Clinton’s advisers worry about the lack of passion the candidate elicits, but Saturday's speech was so non-rousing as to make one wonder whether that wasn't intentional—was it an attempt to bring Clinton down to earth, to make her ordinary? To deflate the aura of fame that clings to her and turn her into just another candidate, one who is solid and sensible and not too flashy, with lots of concrete plans?

Clinton tried this tack before, in 2008, when she tried in vain to convince Democratic voters that Barack Obama was all style and no substance. But this time, she is hoping she won't have that kind of competition.