Dear Senator Sanders:
Are you riding the wave, or is the wave riding you? You are way busy keeping folks all hot and bothered. “The system is rigged; Kentucky reported a bad count.” All this is a drive for you to hit the convention riding a wave of explosive support.
You will want things from the platform committee and time on the podium (of the convention of a party of which you are not really a member). You will win some battles at the convention; you will speak at the convention; you will lose on other issues. You will be okay with that (emphasis on the YOU).
BUT, how will your supporters take that horror of horrors—compromise with the Corrupt Devils of the Democrat party? I am sure that you think you can play this game of pushing the limits and then drag it back in so that Trump gets walloped.
When a correspondent asked recently if your criticism of Hillary might hurt her general election chances, you launched into this lame rant about why not just appoint someone King without any discussion. If that is the level of sophistication you are working at, then I fear you may be as delusional and narcissistic as I sometimes think.
But, remember “riding the tiger” (mixing metaphors here, but you can deal with it). Tigers stop when they want to stop. They don't care what the rider wants. You may decide that it’s time for your tiger of a movement to slow down or come to a stop, but I’m not so sure (and you can't be either) what the tiger will want to do.
Best you start trying to help that tiger respond to the reins by ratcheting back the rhetoric on Hillary and the Democratic Party. Focus more on Trump. Your response to the “Nevada Incident” was not a step in the right direction. The Kentucky challenge is BS, and you know it. The change in delegate count from a reversal will be trivial.
But, a reversal would wonderfully feed the theme of a “rigged system” that both you and Trump have been spouting. Trump dropped that line because he won, and I have to say I don't think your support of that idea is, in all honesty, much more altruistic. If it were, you would be attacking caucuses are hard as closed primaries.
Along the same line, remember that you stifled your griping about super-delegates as soon as it was clear you would need them to give you a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning. You, at some level, and I know that a good measure of your blistering righteousness about all this alleged “unfairness” is really just political self-interest dressed up in church choir robes.
Unfortunately, the rigged system mantra is also the theme that will keep your Berners at home with pizza and a beer on Election Day. That may not be you and your minion’s mission, but the risk-filled strategy that you are now pursuing could put you in the history books as the 2016 version of Ralph Nader in 2000.
Bernie, start building a progressive coalition for the post-election period to keep President Hillary Clinton moving in the left direction. But, leave her and the Democratic Party alone for the next few weeks.
A sure path to defeat is fighting a two front war. No candidate you want to win an election (you know she will be the nominee, no matter what you say) should be forced to fight that type of war, especially when one of the fronts involves an opponent like The Donald. That piece of waste will absorb anything you say about HRC or the D party and turn it into fodder to feed his hordes and to draw others like them into the political arena.
Remember the early 1930s when the German communists thought their socialists brethren more of an electoral and political threat to their progress than the National Socialists with their weird, mustachioed, ex-convict leader. How’d that work out for them? Don't make a similar mistake three-quarters of a century later.
Bernie, your crowds will cheer you just as loudly when you attack Trump as the meat-sack incarnation of all our society’s ills—as they do when you attack HRC and the D party.
Now is the time. It’s time to all come together, hold hands, and sing “Kumbaya,” because the orange-skinned Devil is dancing wildly just outside the cabin. We don't want those gyrations to become his victory dance.
To wildly mis-quote Mark 8:36: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain California, and cost the Ds the general election?”
[This post and others related to political and social issues appear on my blog—theleftcorner.com]