Bottom line, he is a Jewish socialist. This country doesn’t elect a Jewish socialist. Most of the country doesn’t even understand what a socialist is; they think socialism is interchangeable with communism. And he’s Jewish. There’s still plenty of anti-Semitism out there.
With those two huge targets on his back, the GOP attack machine will slice him and dice him. There’s nothing more they can do to Hillary, because they’ve been doing it for twenty years and she’s still here.
What worries me is that when Hillary wins the nomination, the Bernie supporters will bail and just refuse to vote for Hillary. Unless she does the smart thing and makes him her running mate. I just hope to God that they don’t bail, because we cannot, CANNOT, have the GOP running the White House. If that happens:
Good-bye to health care. Good-bye to legalized abortion. Good-bye to environmental protection. Good-bye to sanity.
Please, folks: whatever Democrat gets the nod, VOTE FOR THEM. The alternative is unacceptable.
PAD
• 
Unfortunately, this is my take as well. If he were to win the nomination (unlikely due to the superdelegate system but that is a whole different topic) all you would hear is ‘Old Jew’ and ‘Old Socialist’. Not from the candidate of course, but the PACs would be firing off mailers every 13 seconds saying ‘Don’t let Amurrica become a Socialist Country..’
Fair? No. Accurate assessment of current political situation? Yes.
When it comes to head-to-head match-ups, Sanders beats any of the Republican candidates. You forget who Hillary is to the Republicans. The rage that was directed at Democrats in the ’90s by the Republicans was thanks in large part to Hillary, not Bill (I was part of the political system back then, so I had front row seats). Hillary, to Republicans, is the incarnation of everything they dislike, and Sanders is far more likable, even compared to their own candidates. I, myself, am among the many Republicans who have crossed the lines and are campaigning for Sanders (to me, he’s like a modern day Teddy Roosevelt, though I’m sure he’d rather be more associated with the other Roosevelt). Many Republicans do like Sanders, but almost none like Hillary. If Sanders does not make the nomination, I’ll have to settle for whomever is the Republican candidate. There is no way I can stomach Hillary. Her evilness makes Trump seem likable (a very sad statement to make). Even the independent voters have a dislike for Hillary. Hillary as Democrat candidate can not win. The Republicans haven’t even brought out the smear campaign. And if Hillary is the candidate, the Republicans will bring everything they have to smear her and tear her down.
“The rage that was directed at Democrats in the ’90s by the Republicans was thanks in large part to Hillary, not Bill (I was part of the political system back then, so I had front row seats).”
The rage that was directed at Democrats in the ’90s by the Republicans was thanks in it’s entirety to the Republicans and their petulant refusal to act like adults. They don’t get to escape that responsibility by blaming the victim.
“There is no way I can stomach Hillary. Her evilness makes Trump seem likable (a very sad statement to make). Even the independent voters have a dislike for Hillary.”
Can you elaborate? What evil acts has she committed and what makes her so dis-likable to independents? To me she looks like a centrist that would be willing to compromise. Maybe even compromise too much. I though the Republicans would prefer that.
I was just thinking about that yesterday, “what is the position of Peter David?” I imagine that an artist like you has been pressed to give an opinion on
Hugs my hero
What amazes me is just how utterly naive and politically blind so many of Bernie’s supporters seem to be.
For some unfathomable reason, they seem to think that Bernie will be able to work with Congress (which, more likely than not, WILL be controlled by the GOP come January 2017) more easily than Obama has. Mitch McConnell (who’s been accused by certain extremist factions within his own party of being insufficiently conservative) put forth the statement that he was going to do his best to ensure Obama would be a one-term President. That was in January 2009, even before Obama took the oath of office.
The far-right has tagged Obama as a “socialist” for the past 8 years–and yet, Bernie’s supporters think that he (who has embraced the dreaded “S” word to define his vision and policies) will somehow manage to overcome any obstructionism put forth by the GOP (neglecting/failing to remember that, in 2009 and 2010, the GOP was a minority party in both the House and Senate).
I remember the primary battles of 2008 within the Democratic Party. And I remember the sheer fervor (bordering, at times, on outright fanaticism) of Obama’s supporters, caught up in the “hope and change” mantra; that fervor is almost eclipsed by Sanders’ supporters.
Bernie’s ardent supporters feel that all they need is for Bernie to win the nomination and down-ticket Democrats will (somehow) blow out their GOP competition–even in many “deep-red” states (most of the comments I’ve read are largely of the “my far-right Tea Party relative/friend/neighbor/co-worker now supports Sanders” variety–while conveniently forgetting that these people, once in the safety and privacy of the “voting booth” are likely to vote for whichever GOPer is nominated; these are the people who need to revisit the pre-election polls vs election results for Colorado’s Amendment 2 in 1992 as well as California’s Prop 8 in 2008 to see how fantastic poll results don’t translate into election night victories). The fact is that most states are pretty well gerrymandered to favor one party or the other and those lines aren’t going to change anytime soon. Bernie could easily be elected by the “people of Michigan” or the “people of Ohio” and still deal with a 9-5 GOP majority House delegation from Michigan and a 12-4 GOP majority House delegation from Ohio; both of Michigan’s Senators are Dems with neither seat up, while Ohio’s GOP Senator is up for re-election while the Dem Senator’s seat isn’t up this year–but Senators, like the President are elected by the whole electorate. The “coat tail” effect might help with the Senate (emphasis on “might”) but highly doubtful with the House. Obama was lucky in 2008 because he was starting with a Democratic majority in the House (but ALL the House gains made in 2006 and 2008 were wiped out completely in 2010–and there’s that pesky 2018 mid-term election, when the “opposition” party tends to pick up seats even with a moderately popular President).
I’ve also been a bit disheartened from reading a few comments by Sanders supporters who’ve already “vowed” they won’t vote in November UNLESS Bernie is the Democratic nominee. They literally would rather deal with a GOP President than vote for Hillary (and every single GOP candidate right now is 10 times worse than Hillary by EVERY metric), yet they feel they have some “moral duty” to vote only for the candidate they feel to be the better choice (even though Bernie’s not exactly stood up to the NRA and his record on immigration isn’t exactly as “progressive” as it should be–oddly, these views are completely ignored but his supporters seem almost fixated on Hillary’s Iraq War authorization vote and her “ties” to Wall Street).
I’m not all that wild about Bernie–I honestly don’t think he’s had to deal with the full-on attacks on him that Hillary’s had to deal with since she became First Lady in 1993 and whatever Hillary’s thrown at him is peanuts compared to what the GOP (and its propaganda machine of Fox”News”) will throw at him. No matter how “respected” Bernie may be with his Senate GOP colleagues, no matter how many times he’s “worked with” those GOP colleagues, he hasn’t dealt with a fraction of what’s going to come if he becomes the nominee. Now, I live in Alabama–there’s NO way he’s going to get more than 40% of the state’s vote (and probably less than that, considering Obama couldn’t even crack 39% in 2008 or 2012); I can “afford” to vote for someone else if I choose to (I wasn’t happy with Obama in 2008, being a Hillary supporter and far more familiar with Obama’s actual track record than the average Obama supporter seemed to be; I voted for Cynthia McKinney as a write-in, knowing that my vote was a waste, regardless) but *I* will vote for whichever Democrat is nominated (I just wish Bernie had formally affirmed his status as a Democrat before announcing his candidacy–his official Senate website is still playing it both ways; he’s a Democrat on some pages and an Independent on others; that lack of being a FORMAL Democrat from Day One of his campaign has always been a sticking point for me–if you want to run for the Democratic nomination for President, you need to “man up” and formally declare “I am officially a Democrat as of today” rather than waiting for months and doing it piecemeal, but that may just be me).
Sorry for the long rant but some supposedly friendly Democratic-leaning sites have people who don’t like any criticism of Sanders. Not at all.
re: JosephW:
This is exactly why it’s so crucial that people not only vote for President, but vote in ALL elections, all the way down to the local level. A President cannot magically fix every problem by himself; the Legislative branch of government needs to be able to work with the President to accomplish the changes voters want. It is so, so, so important to not rest on one’s laurels and to KEEP VOTING for the people you want representing you in your government.
Contrary evidence: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5A4pJgsmFzdY1dvUDRSS2xSdDIwbWRhaFRrVWdWVUtsaC00/view?usp=sharing
That’s a link to a Facebook conversation where a friend of mine made it VERY clear that she would rather vote for Trump than see Sanders make the White House, for many of the same reasons JosephW went into – his supporters are “naive”, he doesn’t know how to actually get things done, etc etc.
Look, I’m supporting Bernie in the primary because I agree with him on a lot of issues, and I disagree with Hillary on a lot of issues. She’s a hawk, she’s pro-death penalty, her email server is a blatant clustersnuggle she’s failed to account for, and even if she’s sincere about reforming Wall Street she’s open to a lot of lobbyists against the idea.
More importantly, we need someone in government who’s actually arguing for real liberal policies, and not the Bill Clinton-brand neoliberalism that he and Obama have been running. I’m tired of having to support Democrat policies that are center or slight right of center just because the GOP is running batshit radical right policies.
And let’s be frank, neither Hillary nor Bernie is going to get sweeping reforms done while the GOP holds the House and possibly the Senate. But they will be able to argue a position, nominate judges, and determine how likely America is to go to war, and I want Bernie doing that, not Hillary.
But I’ll still go and vote for her in the general if it comes to it, because jeebus, have you seen the GOP?
I don’t know if whether Senator Sanders can win or not. Back in late 2007, I didn’t think a black man could be elected. I am very happy to have been wrong about that. I will, of course, be voting for whoever ends up winning the Democratic nomination as your predictions for what would happen are likely to be accurate and not even the worst that would happen.
I find it fascinating how much Sanders seems to downplay his Jewishness. I mean, as much as you can and still sound like half my older male relatives…
Why should he be playing it up? Religion already has far too much involvement in our politics. I’ve got no problem, actually prefer, a candidate who doesn’t make a big deal of whatever their religious beliefs are. It shouldn’t be a major part of their campaign.
Regardless of who gets the Democratic nomination (probably Hilary at this point), the Republicans will hate them. While Yewi refers to Hilary’s “evilness,” Republicans who support limited government will certainly oppose Bernie’s government-funded college tuition and government-funded healthcare ideas. I don’t believe the Republicans who say “I could never support Democrat X, but I’m not that opposed to Democrat Y,” because if Democrat Y ever gets nominated, we then hear them saying how truly awful Democrat Y is.
I really want to like Bernie. I probably agree with him on more issues than I do with Hilary (though his utter disregard for foreign policy worries me more than Hilary’s hawkish attitudes on the same). But I just don’t see him as electable. Or, for that matter, actually able to do a thing if elected.
The country doesn’t elect a Jewish socialist. The country doesn’t elect an Irish Catholic. The country doesn’t elect a black guy. The country doesn’t elect a guy in a wheelchair (especially one who many think is a socialist or communist because of his unprecedented New Deal.) The country doesn’t elect an abolitionist third party republican. https://xkcd.com/1122/ (And let’s not forget the constant belief among some that the country will never vote for a woman.)
Jonathan, people at the time didn’t know that FDR was in a wheelchair. He had hidden that fact so well that… Well, see the last dance in the movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy”. James Cagney was magnificent, but I doubt Roosevelt could have done what he did when impersonating him.
I don’t think he can win, either, but I’m still voting for him, because I’m tired of voting for the lesser of two evils, or voting strategically (we’re voting for the leader of the free world, not the next person to be eliminated from Survivor!). If (when) Hillary gets the nomination, I will of course vote for her … because she’d be the lesser of two evils.
Your comments reminded me of the slogan for one of the CTHULHU FOR PRESIDENT campaigns: Why settle for the lesser evil?
Obama won two elections. Trump is currently the front-runner among the nucking futs collection that is the GOP. Hëll, if Hillary wins the nomination, she’ll probably be labeled a socialist anyway Just Because.
Anything is possible, up to and including President Sanders (and, far more frighteningly, President Trump).
So, I tend to agree about problems with Sanders electability, and even were he to be elected, I highly question his ability to get anything passed through a Republican Congress. (Hey, it’d be nice, but…) Unfortunately, I don’t know about Hilary Clinton’s electability either because I think the Republicans will try to indict her from now until the election, and were she to win the election, they would continue to try to indict her until the day she leaves office (and possibly after).
I really don’t know how this is going to be taken: What are your thoughts on a Michael Bloomberg independent run?
So, I tend to agree about problems with Sanders electability, and even were he to be elected, I highly question his ability to get anything passed through a Republican Congress. (Hey, it’d be nice, but…) Unfortunately, I don’t know about Hilary Clinton’s electability either because I think the Republicans will try to indict her from now until the election, and were she to win the election, they would continue to try to indict her until the day she leaves office (and possibly after).
I really don’t know how this is going to be taken: What are your thoughts on a Michael Bloomberg independent run?
Some relevant words from economist Richard D. Wolff earlier this month:
Bernie Sanders did something absolutely extraordinary. In many ways, this candidacy of his is already a victory. It actually was a victory before Monday night’s vote results were in, and it only got bigger when those vote results were counted. I’ve spent many years of my life working in the Democratic Party, in the machines in big cities where the Democratic Party is strong. I know how that works, I’ve been part of it, I know how you get out the vote, I know the whole apparatus. The Clintons had spent the last twenty years building the machine that gets out the vote. They had the Presidency, which is how you give out the goodies that get people to work that machine. Those of you who have done this know what I’m talking about; those of you who don’t, it’s a lot worse than you suspect. And that’s the machine that delivers the vote. That’s how these elections are organized. It has never had much to do with democracy. I hope that doesn’t come as a shock to you. It’s a vote-getting operation. The old slogan, ‘vote early and vote often’ is very serious, and I assure you, if any of you are interested, I can give you my own experience. There have been elections in which I have voted hundreds of times, and I’m not alone, not even close.
So for Mr. Sanders, a person who carries the label ‘socialist’, in a country like ours, to be able to come from what he was thought to be – a three or four percent maximum candidate, just a few months ago – to becoming the serious candidate he obviously is, is an astounding achievement that has very little precedent in this country for what this is. The previous people who have been a little bit reformist, a little bit different from conventional politics – MacGovern, McCarthy, Jesse Jackson – did not have the stigma attached to them of ‘socialist’. It wouldn’t have been possible at that time. They made that decision, and it’s perfectly understandable why they did. What’s hard to understand is that Sanders made a different decision. He wasn’t going to walk away from the title, he was going to call himself a socialist, and he was going to look everybody in the face and say, “You’re wrong, it can be done in the United States, and now is the time.” Most of his advisers – and I do know this – most of his advisers were highly skeptical. There were big debates amongst his folks about whether he should do this or not, whether this just wasn’t a country ready for what it is he represented. They made the decision – and I’m not part of the inner circle, I don’t know the details – but they made the decision to do it, and I am very confident in suggesting to you that they are almost as surprised as everybody else about how this has evolved.
….
A taboo has been broken. The impossibility of a socialist standing up and saying, “Yeah, I’m a socialist, deal with it,” is now real. That’s what that Iowa vote – Iowa, no disrespect to you, but…. Iowa. In November, I went to Ames, Iowa and I gave a talk in downtown Ames, Iowa. I say ‘downtown’, because downtown, midtown, uptown… it all looked the same. It’s a little place, it’s where the university is. I had a really good time, there’s a really wonderful radio station that carries our program, which is part of why I went there…. but Iowa is not a center of boiling radical politics, in case you thought it might be. Not even close.
Half of the people who went to the Democratic caucuses there voted for a socialist. But an even more powerful number, for those of you who didn’t see it, ’cause they broke it down: what was the vote between Clinton and Sanders of people in the ages of seventeen to twenty-nine years of age? Ready? Eighty-four percent of them voted for Sanders; fourteen percent voted for Clinton. If I were a leader of the Democratic Party, I’d be shaking in my boots. That’s the future. Those are the young people. They’re the ones who aren’t going to die in the next twenty years. They’re going to be around. They’re the new, the up-and-coming leaders, the people finding their jobs, building their families and all the rest. Eighty-four to fourteen? That’s not close. That’s overwhelming. What does that mean? Where does that mean the country is going? Eighty-four percent of young people were not scared by the term ‘socialism’, not even a little. It rolled right off their back, and that’s new in the United States. That’s absolutely new. Something very big has been going on in this country since the Occupy Wall Street movement in the Autumn of 2011, and it is changing people’s minds.
I think he can be president despite being Jewish. Obama won despite being in a country with racists. But to tell you the truth Sanders probably won’t get anywhere. The moment he wins the election is the moment the 1% take their money off shore. So unless he can fart quarters, his ideas will fail (he sure seems likable though and I am afraid the stress of the presidency would kill him but then again I thought in the race of Obama vs McCain I thought either of them would end up dead too). I also don’t think republicans will destroy everything despite threatening this. It’s very hard in the government to do anything and once things are in place it’s particularly hard to destroy it. Besides, even if they do, who’s to say that the next Democratic president won’t put it all back.
I’m more worried about a Trump vs Hilary election. This is the worst possible outcome for me because I can’t vote for either of them in good faith. Trump is too volatile and is in over his head without knowing it. Though I must admit he might be good at playing certain foreign leaders by getting them on his good side–I’m not entirely sure if he even means half of what he says now or if he’s just pawning the republican voting base in order to win. But a part of me thinks that once he gets into office and finally learns everything that the president knows in the first week, he just might quit.
Hilary: as an employee of this country (if you catch my drift), if I were to do half of what she has done, I would be in jail. I don’t care if she’s a woman, and sure she might be the most qualified but she is so desperate and so dubious in her actions and general demeanor. She isn’t her husband and I’m sure he won’t have a role in her presidency, she won’t automatically make the economy prosperous again.
Now what I don’t get is why the southern democrats, inferring to those of lower income status always go for Hilary. Bernie is offering them and everyone more. Do they not believe him or is the Clinton name just too big of a draw?
If this story is accurate, then you may be right, Peter: http://www.christiantoday.com/article/bad.news.for.bernie.atheism.and.socialism.most.unpopular.characteristics.for.presidential.candidates/80704.htm
The biggest problem with Bernie Sanders is, to me, he comes off way too much like Hans Moleman from the Simpsons. You got the idea that he might keel over if someone touches him. The fact that he apparently didn’t own a comb for quite a while didn’t help either.
To be fair, Jeb Bush completely came off like a grown-up Ralphie from A Christmas Story.