Give Us Bernie, Or The Party Gets It

I love paid Clinton shills. They make my job so easy. All I do is shout ideas onto social media, find out which ideas the Hillbots try to stamp out most aggressively, then I write articles hammering those ideas home as hard as I can. Progressives are a thoughtful and intuitive lot who can usually smell a useful idea when it pops up, so they share my article around and Mr. Inquisitr tosses me a few bucks for increasing their ad revenue.

Correct the Record shills are all the same, all operating from the same super PAC-authored playbook, so it’s kind of like they’re running up to me and showing me pages from that playbook saying, “Uh-oh, this is one of the things we really need you not to look at! Please look anywhere but here, okay?”

And it just so happens that it’s always something the new progressive awakening needs to be looking squarely at. I’m not sure how I’ll write articles after the election without my little helpers around, but right now this is the easiest job I’ve ever had.

Yesterday, I shared a meme I’d made on my Facebook page about how Hillary supporters would compromise and vote for Bernie if he ended up replacing her, but Berners won’t compromise for Hillary. It wasn’t the best meme (I employed a lousy screenshot from the “never compromise” scene in The Watchmen), so I expected it to maybe get a handful of “likes” and go mostly unnoticed, but it ended up getting brigaded by a band of pretend Hillary Clinton supporters frantically attacking it.

Hence this article. Apparently, this is something very naughty that I’m not meant to talk about. So here we go!

Hillary supporters will compromise. Bernie-or-busters will not. The #Demexit crowd will not. The legions of progressives who were slowly coming around to Clinton before they heard her calling them naive basement-dwellers and mocking the idea of universal healthcare and tuition-free college will not. Any progressive who isn’t a masochist will not. But even centrist Democrats, when faced with the choice between the oddball Jewish lefty and the scary orange fascist, will compromise and support Bernie.

This will be obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention. It was revealed in poll after poll back when Sanders was in the running, where head-to-head polling had him beating Trump by much wider margins than Hillary has ever had on her very best day at any time before or since. The obnoxious fearmongering “vote for our candidate or you get Trump” shtick will work much more effectively on the centrists with everything to lose than on the fiery rebels who will never say die.

They will compromise. We won’t. How’s that for negotiating power?

Clinton was already struggling just to keep her head above water before the audio leak dropped, and you know more October surprises are coming. The steady trickle of leaks will become a deluge as November draws closer, and the progressive vote is only going to drift further and further away. The Democrats will lose the White House, and possibly the progressive base of their entire party unless they swap out Hillary for someone who can win.

Switching her out for another candidate wouldn’t be entirely unprecedented. In 1968, the Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson bowed out amid abysmal approval ratings and endorsed another candidate to try and give the Dems a chance to retain the White House. This proved to be too little, too late, with the replacement Hubert Humphrey failing to adequately distinguish himself from the hawkish LBJ enough for liberal Democrats (who overwhelmingly favored anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy) to support, but the Dems don’t have to repeat the 1968 fiasco this year. They have a pre-packaged and proven ally all ready to go, who can unite the party, win the White House, and stop the Democratic party from collapsing like it almost did after 1968.

We all want Bernie. Put Bernie in, and all of this goes away.

The Clintons are the uncrowned rulers of the internal Democratic party, so it will ultimately be up to them. Is keeping the anointed queen in the running really worth losing the White House and the progressive base of the Democratic party? I strongly suspect they’re beginning to doubt that. And I think the powerful people surrounding them are beginning to doubt that, too. Another leak drop, another polling dip, and we may be looking at the Sanders candidacy we’ve all been dreaming of.

It’s been painful to watch Bernie get paraded around cleaning up Hillary’s messes all over the country, but if the party unity he claims is so important can help put a true progressive in the oval office and breathe some life into the ailing and neoliberalism-choked Democratic party, we might really have something exciting going for us here.

They can do it. They can switch her out. Don’t let them tell us they can’t. If Hillary Clinton were to drop dead tomorrow, they would find a way to replace her, and there’s no reason they can’t do the same if she agrees to drop out and endorse Bernie. That’s exactly what they’ll do if the Clintons have more brains than pride.

They’ve been trying to hold us hostage with Trump. We’re flipping the script. Give us Bernie or the donkey gets it.

Let’s do this thing. Really, what do we have to lose at this point? The guarantee of more rigged primaries and more forcefully-installed neoliberal war hawks for the foreseeable future? The death of American democracy and an overall movement to the right for American politics in the long term? Eight years of a politician who’s dedicated her entire career to solidifying the oligarchy’s stranglehold on our country and pushing for military aggression at every opportunity, and who is already picking a fight with Russia before she’s even president? Incremental but still fatal movement on climate change, more wars for oil, more of too little, too late?

That’s not worth compromising for. That’s not even worth reluctantly accepting. They’ve got nothing that we want. We hold the power here. Either they give us Bernie or they watch a massive chunk of their votes hemorrhage into a new progressive uprising and see their party go the way of the Whigs.

They’ll compromise, we won’t. That’s our strength.

This is ours, if we take it.

[Featured Image by Spencer Platt/Getty Images]