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| Bernie Sanders |
When in 1992 Queen Elizabeth had been asked how she felt
after Windsor Castle had suffered a severe fire gutting 100 rooms, she
responded, “Awkward.”
Moderate Democrats and recovering progressives likely
consider Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders’ primary losses to former Vice
President Joe Biden a propitious sign. Many Democrats are silently wishing
Sanders will have the good grace to slink off silently into obscurity after he
had been decisively rejected by voters. The association of the party of
President John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt with Sanders’ batty socialist
ideas has been awkward. And why, friends of the Democrat Party are now asking,
should Sanders cast a shadow over Biden’s presidential prospects when every
Democrat’s nightmare, President Donald Trump, is waiting in the wings for four
more years?
Super Tuesday washed most of the lesser Democrat presidential aspirants out of the primary race. Licking his wounds after primary losses in Missouri, Idaho Mississippi and, most importantly, Michigan – supposedly Sanders’ San Juan Hill – Sanders addressed reporters in Burlington, Vermont. He acknowledged he was “trailing badly in the race to secure enough delegates to clinch the nomination before the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee,” according to an Associated Press (AP) account.
Teasingly, Sanders added, “While our campaign has won the
ideological debate, we are losing the debate over electability. That is what
millions of Democrats and independents today believe.” Sanders and his
clamorous supporters still believe he has a better chance of wrestling Trump to
the ground in a general election race: “Trump must be defeated, and I will do
everything in my power to make sure that happens. On Sunday night, in the first
one-on-one debate of this campaign, the American people will have the
opportunity to see which candidate is best positioned to accomplish that.”
Sanders’ message to the Democrat
Party establishment is that his socialist programs appeal to young people supporting his candidacy: “Today, I say to the Democratic establishment, in order
to win in the future, you need to win the voters who represent the future of
our country. And you must speak to the issues of concern to them. You cannot
simply be satisfied by winning the votes of people who are older.”
The AP notes, “Sanders has indeed been widely favored over
Biden by voters under 30, but he has not delivered on his strategy of getting
them to the polls in great numbers, according to AP VoteCast surveys of voters
in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries. Also problematic for him: Sanders showed no
overwhelming strength with voters age 30 to 44, typically a larger share of the
vote than the young, in Michigan and Missouri.”
Moderate and liberal, as opposed to socialist, Democrat voters obviously have not
been persuaded by Sanders’ extreme leftist ideological prescriptions, and many traditional Democrat politicians tend to disagree with Sanders’ leftist spiel -- when they
are not fishing in progressive ponds to pull in leftist votes. It is one thing for
U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal to appear with a socialist leper on a public
platform during a primary, quite a different thing to embrace the leper by
endorsing him. Biden’s ascendancy among a majority of Democrat voters show
that Sanders has lost the ideological argument, while it still may be an open
question whether he or former Vice President Joe
Biden are better able to defeat Trump in a general election, assuming Trump is
not defeated by the economic consequences of the coronavirus outbreak first.
Democrats have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at
Trump before and since he had been sworn
in as President nearly four years ago, yet Trump, though embattled, remains unbowed. Can a microbe do what
prominent impeachers such as Connecticut’s two U.S. Senators, Blumenthal and
Chris Murphy -- not to mention a Democrat dominated U.S. House that provided
a bill of impeachment rejected by the Republican dominated U.S. Senate -- failed to do?
There are Democrats who believe that Sanders never wanted to
be president. His ideological path, increasingly rejected by Democrat voters, will not lead to the White House. But Sanders is a booster rocket for destructive
socialist policies in the US. He views himself as an ideological precursor to
some future, transformist, socialist autodidact, and as such his self-removal from
the Democrat primaries appears less and less likely. Sanders cannot defer and
cultivate the far left extremist wing of the Democrat Party. He is now in a position to press his ideological points to the bitter end.
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