In the week after the election, I didn’t listen to or read any national punditry. I still don’t. As a result, I was late to the Hillary supporters “Bernie Bros” smear which identifies Sanders supporters as crypto-racists who want to throw POC, women, and gays under the bus in order to appeal to white nationalists who live in the rust belt. Entering late, I’ve been on my heals and frankly confused about the whole zero sum game that was underway. My fist reaction was, “C’mon guys, everyone can be a little right and a little wrong.” But that didn’t work. Collegiality seemed to have completely broken down.
Here is my forensic take on what happened:
In the wake of the shocking election results, Bernie Sanders didn’t do what DC insiders and Democratic Brahmins wanted him to do, which was genuflect in the direction of the Clinton campaign and praise Clinton for her efforts. Instead, he did what he has always done and told the truth about the Clinton campaign’s weaknesses, and basically got some stuff off his chest. Specifically, he said:
““It’s not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry…We need candidates — black, white and Latino and gay and male, we need all of that. But we need all of those candidates and officials to have the guts to stand up to the oligarchy. That is the fight of today.”
In the emmotionally charged atmosphere of campaign post mortems and finger poitning, that bit of plain spoken common sense entered the DC spin machine and came out, “Sanders slams identity politics…Condemns appeals to diversity”
Some of that spin was from High Dems smarting from a loss that should have been a win, but part of the spin was from conservatives who never pass up a chance to try and hammer in a wedge. Politico’ headline, for example, was: Sanders slams identity politics as Democrats figure out their future , even though in the same article, President Obama is quoted as saying pretty much the same thing as Sanders:
“And one message I do have for Democrats is that a strategy that’s just micro-targeting particular, discrete groups in a Democratic coalition sometimes will win you elections, but it’s not going to win you the broad mandate that you need,”
So a lot of shell-shocked Dems wanting to be mad at someone got mad at Sanders and anyone who had the temerity to say that he might have point. And these shell-shocked Dems, who so readily fell into vituperative hatred for their fellow Democrats, all because those Democrats happen to agree with President Obama that our strategy needs to be better, are being played.
That’s my take based on the evidence, but I could be wrong. I always allow for the possibility that I am wrong. I am open to persuasion, and change my views if I find that I have misinterpreted something, or if new information comes to light.
