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I agree that there was no way Sanders was going to get the 2020
Democrat presidential nomination.  imo (as i started telling friends
last summer) the most progressive possible 2020 U.S. presidential
election outcome would be the election of Elizabeth Warren. Just
because Sanders had called himself a 'democratic socialist' when under
pressure in 2015/16 didn't mean that for us working people there was
qualitatively substantial reason to prefer Sanders' program over
Warren's.

Some of my Sanders-supporting friends were aghast at my support for "a
capitalist."  Some of them who couldn't understand that Sanders was
just as much a "capitalist" as Warren, were at least given pause when
i argued that either Sanders supported Warren or he would end up
supporting Biden.

If the election was really "not about me" as Sanders claimed he should
have endorsed and supported Warren and created a progressive force
that would have been a much more serious challenge to the Democrat
Party establishment than Sanders alone.  Instead the Sanders campaign
broke their truce and attacked Warren early this year.  Michelle
Goldberg commented on it in her Jan. 13 NYTimes column titled
"Elizabeth Warren is the Democrats' unity candidate":

"Over the weekend, a minor conflict broke out between the presidential
campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, longtime friends who
have, until now, seemed to operate under an unspoken nonaggression
pact.

"It started when Politico reported on a script that Sanders volunteers
had been given to persuade voters leaning toward other candidates.
Warren backers, the script said, are “highly educated, more affluent
people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what”
and that she’s “bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party.”

This attack escalated into the more visible conflict over whether
Sanders had opined to Warren before the campaign got underway that he
'didn't think a woman could beat Trump.'  I think Warren was telling
the truth.  I noticed that the brunt of the Sanders' campaign defense
was reference to historically previous Sanders' statements in the
abstract that he 'did think a woman could become president.'  imo when
everyone paying attention learned that Warren held Sanders responsible
for calling her a liar on national television both their campaigns
took a heavy blow.

Given, as Mark says, "the very blatant way in which the 'liberal
media' covered this campaign" the two progressive candidates did not
recover from the damage the Sanders campaign had caused trying to get
"me" ahead by cutting down Warren.


On Wed, Apr 8, 2020 at 9:17 PM Mark Lause via Marxism
<[email protected]> wrote:
>  I don't think Sanders ever had a snowball's chance of getting near the
> nomination . . . and arguing that the DNC couldn't have prevented it misses
> the newest player in all this.  Historically, the DNC had been essential in
> tipping the nomination where it wanted to go, especially when tied to a
> seated president.  However, I'd argue that no such intervention was needed
> in 2020 thanks to the very blatant way in which the "liberal media" covered
> this campaign.
>
> They sought to head off Sanders initially by boosting Warren, and, as soon
> as her campaign looked as though she could more to fore, they froze her out
> (and then wallowed in its faux outrage at how sexism kept her back and not
> their own pathetic lying about how a national health care system was simply
> unaffordable).,  CNN and MSNBC reported the view she and Sanders
> expressed--that health care should be a human right--as an attempt to take
> health care away from people. o(It was truly a Democratic version or the
> Republican BS about "death panels.")
>
> In the end, they pulled out all the stops to assert (contrary to the
> evidence) that Biden was the Democratic contender most likely to defeat
> Trump.  And that's what's settled the matter indirectly without any need
> for direct action by the Democratic hierarchy.

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