Why There Was Never Going to Be A President Sanders

Being a Post-Mortem and After-Action Report on a Campaign

First off, I take no pleasure, at all, in being right. I am not saying ‘I told you so’. But there was never going to be a president Sanders. Ever. At all. I said that at least eight months ago, and dammit, I was right.

There are three fundamental reasons why the Sanders candidacy was disingenuous, and why a DNC insurgent candidacy was dead-in-its-crib from the word ‘go’ — and everyone would be more than wise to fully understand the nature of all of them before 2024 rolls around.

First — the DNC

The sad and sorry truth of the matter is that the DNC has been fine-tuning the whole ‘sheepdog’ strategy since 1968, when they first used it with Eugene McCarthy as the ‘foil’. The Dems were already in hock to Wall Street, but had to make good on their ‘party of the people’ facade. That’s where McCarthy came in; flogging the brush at countless college campuses for the DNC banner. Legions of disillusioned McCarthy supporters dutifully voted for Humphrey in the general — not enough to beat Nixon, but enough to prove the strategy worked. (Note: They did it again with candidates ranging from Jesse Jackson to Howard Dean, in nearly every election since then, culminating with Sanders in both ’16 and now, in 2020.)

To ace the whole thing, the Dems introduced the ‘superdelegate’ in the mid-’80’s, mainly to thwart the very notion of an insurgent candidate that was perceived by the committee as ‘unelectable’. (Further note: ‘Unelectable’, in this context, means ‘any candidate not vetted and approved by Wall Street’.)

Putting these two together, the DNC has stacked the deck and rigged the game; there is no chance an insurgent or populist candidate will get to a point where nomination is possible. Period. End story.

Next — Wall Street

I hate to break it to the last holdouts who are also true believers, but the DNC has been owned by Wall Street for the last several decades. The first round of Dem presidential candidates this year met with Wall Street firms to secure funding; the Street itself made it clear that Warren and Sanders were a no-go in 2020.

I can’t help but believe that the likes of Blankfein and his cronies are sitting in some exclusive club not far from Wall and Broad Streets, chuckling over their smuggled Cuban cigars and Louis XIII cognac; they’ve placed their bets already on the winners in both parties. No matter which party wins — they’re covered.

Last — The candidate, himself.

A bit of background.

A very good friend of mine is a psychiatrist. Apart from smoking equally-smuggled Cuban cigars and drinking far cheaper cognac than our Wall Street betters, he and I have been observers of life for some decades now. One thing I learned from him: Prior behavior is the best indicator of future behavior. Using that as a litmus test, my earlier predictions weren’t hard.

I hate to be the one to piss in your Cheerios, but Sanders was never serious about this process. He proved that in 2016, when he said he would ‘take his fight to the floor’, then proceeded to cave in a month later and call for the nomination of Hillary Clinton at that very convention. To date, he’s never offered one shred of explanation for this behavior, which stiffed his thousands of supporters and left everyone who’d voted for him high and dry.

Understand something else, please.

No one was a bigger fan of Sanders in 2016 than I was. I phone banked, canvassed, and donated directly to the guy’s campaign. I watched as he drew thousands to his rallies, dwarfing Clinton’s. For the first time in some decades, I was tempted away from my third party alignment to actually believe in a candidate again.

So, when he caved in and dutifully endorsed Clinton, I was initially disappointed — but I also learned my lesson, and that lesson is this:

Sanders is an establishment Democrat.

Whither now?

First, by way of another modest prediction, Sanders is going to either stand on the convention floor (or in his living room, if the convention really does turn out to be virtual), and fold up like a cheap card table by way of endorsing Joe Biden; the candidate having transformed from a ‘fire breathing leftist’ to a dutiful establishment sheepdog. It’s too late to put another name in play, and Bob’s Your Uncle.

(Madame Clinton might leave her Versailles-on-the-Hudson, mount her leathery wings, breathe fire for the cameras, and fly in the general direction of Milwaukee to accept the VP slot by way of further political theatre — or, she might accomplish the same task from her garden gazebo. Time will tell.)

There are a lot of hard lessons for a lot of people from this election cycle. The first three, I’ve just outlined. The others? They’re more difficult, but they’re also pretty self-evident:

1. Both parties are owned by Wall Street and the 1%.
2. You are not going to change things by voting (Lucy Parsons was right, after all)
3. The average American is interested in political theatre-as-entertainment; not genuine political involvement.
4. The current system is the result of voting for the ‘lesser evil’ for decades.
5. ‘Incrementalism’ does not work — specifically; you’re not going to elect Joe Biden and then ‘hold his feet to the fire’.
6. ‘We’re not the Republicans!’ is not a strategy.
7. Trump is not the problem (I really shouldn’t have to state this last one, but apparently, I do).

The ‘vote blue no matter who’ folks are about to learn these lessons, in spades.

My hope? That the DNC gets whipped like a bad dog for pissing the carpet; so badly, in fact, that they can’t get up again. This will pave the way for something genuinely new — whether we call that a ‘party’, or something else entirely. With a dab of luck, a real leader (not an establishment politician spouting slogans and pandering to the masses) will emerge.

At that point, we can begin kicking the Dems, ‘vote blue no matter who’, incrementalism, lesser evilism, and the whole rotten lot to the curb.

I’ll be there to cheer — and get to work on What Comes After.