There’s a reason that Bernie Sanders has never joined the Democratic Party. The fact of the matter is that it’s an institution that is beholden to capital and wealth and not any of the liberal values it espouses.
This is why Elizabeth Warren is being thrown up as the main front runner by so many of the media class with a vested interest in the party.
Having stoked the flames of the Mueller Report coverage and exaggerated Russia’s influence on the 2016 election, Rachel Maddow and other journalists have rewritten the reasons for Hilary Clinton’s loss.
In doing this, figures close to America’s political centre can ignore Sanders’s popularity and the reasons behind it. He’s authentic, with a voting record to back it up going back to his time as the mayor of Burlington in Vermont. He views American society as completely unequal and has a vision to change it.
Ultimately though, the fact that we’ve been talking about nominees since half a year before the first primary is ridiculous. Statistics show that unfortunately most people don’t engage politically until very close to the actual time of voting. Essentially they are waiting a week before to google the candidates and make a quick pick.
This is why the recent media portrayal of Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren as having momentum seems merely an attempt to increase the profile of these two candidates while ignoring what should be the Democrats’ true base, the working class.
By tilting the balance of power to Hilary Clinton at every opportunity in the 2016 and ignoring disenfranchised potential voters, the Democrats lost to what is the least popular president ever.
Although both these candidates, Warren, in particular, have nowhere near the same baggage as Clinton did, they both do not represent ordinary people well.
Buttigieg is coming from the centre of the party, and Warren’s support for Medicare For All seems unlikely, to say the least, as she has not officially backed it.
Trump’s election showed that Americans are fed up with inequality and the status quo in America even if it meant doing a deal with the devil. They knew he was corrupt because he admitted it, Clinton did not and that made a huge difference.
We’re a long way from the final candidate to be chosen to face Trump, so this could all be shown to be a completely ill-judged analysis with Warren sweeping to victory and bringing forward reform after reform when she’s elected.
However, history has shown that the electorate can often smell a fraud, and even when they can’t like in the case of Obama, their record when they leave office while making it all the harder to keep up the pretense of radical change when none ever occurs.
This is why a candidate like Sanders cannot afford to be shafted yet again.
Peter O’Neill
Image: Flickr
