Defeat? Here Is How Sanders Will Avoid Mr. Corbyns Fate by Joaquin Flores!
(2020-02-29 at 17:16:19 )

Defeat? Here Is How Sanders Will Avoid Mr. Corbyns Fate by Joaquin Flores!

Right now the DNC is working hard to see if they can sabotage Bernie Sanders campaign by pressuring him to take a moderate stand - a change of position - on any one of his main pillars: universal healthcare, student debt cancellation, and the $15 an hour minimum wage.

The idea is to convince Mr. Sanders campaign strategists that in so doing, he will receive better media coverage from DNC friendly corporate outlets like CNN and MSNBC, and as a result of this moderation will become more electable for swing voters. But why would this sabotage his campaign?

The answer lies in the United Kingdom, where we saw Jeremy Corbyn lose because he could not formulate a clear position on Brexit. There was some ill-conceived belief that against Johnson, the Remain vote even among some Tories would go to Mr. Corbyn, and that some positive media coverage - given the Remain tendencies in British corporate media as well as the center-left - would be his to enjoy. All that was required, they thought, was a nice and vague Rorschach position on Brexit. Surely Mr. Corbyns mistaken strategists and "insider friends" were either misguided or were charged with the task of misguiding Mr. Corbyn.

There is really not much more to it than that. The rest are details at best, and plainly wrong ideas about what went wrong - plainly wrong ideas like Mr. Corbyns alleged antisemitism or being too-far left.

If that was the real score, then Galloways new Workers Party would have been founded on Blairite domestic economic policy and a Zionist approach to foreign policy, and a Remain position on the EU. Because Galloway has his fingers on the pulse, the fact that the WP was founded on the opposite of these three media-imagined points helps to show us why Corbyn really lost.

Yet Mr. Corbyns thorough destruction at the polls in the United Kingdom last December is continuously used by United States of American corporate media pundits as some kind of analogy for what awaits Bernie Sanders and the Democrat ticket come November. Of course the real ploy is to get Mr. Sanders to make the same mistake as Mr. Corbyn.

For Mr. Corbyn and Labour, it was the worst outcome since 1935. Dangling concern over this kind of defeat in front of Mr. Sanders is meant to push him closer to the establishment center of American politics.

But this "concern" is not coming from Mr. Sanders camp, but from those in or close to the DNC establishment who do not like Bernie Sanders.

Those folks in turn break-down into roughly two camps: those who think he will ultimately defeat Donald Trump but push forward a social democratic agenda that threatens a solidified cultural shift and change of the tax codes for the very same elites in charge of the DNC, and then those who think his agenda is too radical to defeat Donald Trump.

For two different reasons then, corporate media and DNC pundits promote that the Democrat candidate ought to be more of a "moderate". As such, these are not genuine concerns - no - these amount to "concern trolling".

While certainly Bernie Sanders will have a difficult time defeating Donald Trump, he along with Ms Gabbard are the only two left who had the potential to win.

But Ms Gabbards open war on the DNC and Hillary Clinton has left her excluded from both media space and the debate floor.

Consequently, the momentum she had been building was effectively crushed. In that sense, the ticket boils down to Mr. Sanders. In terms of electability - Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Biden all have the aura of varying stripes of sociopathy about them. For that reason alone perhaps, they had been elite favorites at the top level. Mayor Pete and Sleepy Joe had their turn, now its Mini Mikes.

Will Donald Trump Win?

Donald Trump could still win, with play and room for error in his own strategy and messaging, whereas Mr. Sanders will have to get both of those exactly right to stand a decent chance.

Rahm Emanuel and other DNC insiders have been trotted out on corporate media to say that the history of elections in general indicates Donald Trumps chances at victory are strong and so the Democrat candidate needs to appeal to centrist moderate voters. While Donald Trumps chances are strong, however, it is important not to make Emanuels error in thinking elections in this new populist paradigm work by the same rules and logic as those before.

In Emanuels antiquated view, the DNC candidate has to be a Bill Clinton to defeat Bush 41, so that Donald Trump is a one-term president. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The difference is that in the older model a Democrat candidate would talk more "populist" left at the primary stage but then proceed closer to the establishment center as the campaign focusses on the Republican rival. But in the new model a successful candidate must run as a "populist" all the way to the finish line. That is what Emanuel and the DNC gets wrong, and also partly explains Ms Clintons defeat four years ago.

And so with this great race ahead of us, United States of American citizens are being hit over the head with some absurd notion that Mr. Sanders is making the same errors as Mr. Corbyn, and that this will surely lead to his defeat.

In reality, they want to do to Mr. Corbyn what they did to Mr. Sanders. With Mr. Corbyn it was easier, because Mr. Corbyn has much stronger negative numbers than Mr. Sanders.

It is unclear where Mr. Corbyn really stood on Brexit, and that was the problem. But clearly his strategy was to shore up support from Remainers and hope that other establishment criticisms of him might then be mitigated. Mr. Corbyn found himself stuck between the rock of his opposition to Blairite neoliberalism and the hard-place of Brexit ambiguity.

But while Labour has had ideologically neoliberal candidates in leadership, they have never had a literal billionaire like Mike Bloomberg.

During the South Carolina debate on February 25th, tickets were $1700 apiece and consequently appealed to a purely elite crowd. There was an all sides assault on Bernie Sanders, who survived it nevertheless. But the high price of the tickets and the unpredicted loud applause received by Mike Bloomberg led at least one political analyst and culture writer, C.A Rolinson, to humorously note that Mike Bloomberg had given a new meaning to the phrase "crowd funding" - rightly insinuating that Mike Bloomberg had funded his own crowd to attend the event.

That much certainly appeared to be the case.

Mike Bloombergs entry has been an attempt to add fuel to the anti-Bernie fire. His immaculate simulation of support is intended to make the most electable democrat appear unelectable, and the most unelectable appear electable.

In reality, Donald Trump would easily be able to position himself as morally superior to Mike Bloomberg, and would win in a landslide.

The most realizable goal for Mike Bloomberg would be to taint the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Signs of this already appeared, most recently was Mr. Bloombergs announcement that he would financially back whoever the nominee was, even if it was Mr. Sanders. Mr. Sanders had to openly reject this "offer". Accepting it would prove Mr. Sanders a hypocrite, since campaign finance reform has been one of his important campaign issues.

The sabotage traps are all set up, but all Mr. Sanders has to do to avoid these traps is stay consistent and unambiguous with his message.

He will also have to counter unfriendly trending news and viral memes, by timing his statements to push against these.

The most recent example has been a seemingly left-wing criticism of Mr. Sanders position on Israel that has recently gone viral on social media, which places doubts on the sincerity of his ostensibly pro-Palestinian position.

There are good reasons for these doubts, and on foreign affairs, Mr. Sanders is very much an establishment-aligned actor - at least formally. Because this fact erodes his strongest base, he just recently attacked Israeli leader Mr. Netanyahu, using disparaging language which is no doubt deserved. Additionally, Mr. Sanders said he would "consider" moving the United States embassy back to Tel Aviv.

These are tactically wise moves for Mr. Sanders. Given the attacks from media, one might otherwise think it would be an opportune time to publicly cozy up to AIPAC - but this too would be a Corbynesque error of gross proportions.

By staying on message, Mr. Sanders will have a fighting chance to displace an incumbent Republican president - something that only happened three times (Taft, Hoover, and Bush 41) in the 20th century.

Donald Trump is saving his best ammunition on Mr. Sanders for the big showdown, should Mr. Sanders win the Democrat nomination.

Calling Bernie Sanders a communist or a socialist will not go far enough in a country where 40% of Americans are socialists and some 11% have said in polling that they would prefer communism over the present system. While that 11% is within that 40%, that is an extremely motivated and broad base that will see voter turnout at least as high as Obamas 2008 gambit, and that alone could potentially be enough to beat Donald Trump.

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