Green Party’s Jill Stein warned Bernie Sanders that supporting DEM presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton in the general election would essentially be an abandonment of the movement he has built.
Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, and although the Vermont Senator has refused to bow out before next week’s District of Columbia primary, reports suggest that he would be willing to join forces with Clinton in an attempt to stop Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump from becoming America’s next president.
According to CNN , Sanders met President Barack Obama in a meeting that lasted over an hour early on Thursday, where the president reportedly sought his help in unifying the Democratic Party. Even though Sanders attempted to keep away from voicing a direct endorsement for Hillary Clinton after the meeting, he admitted that he would be willing to work with her in the “near future.”
“I look forward to meeting with (Clinton) in the near future to see how we can work together to defeat Donald Trump and to create a government which represents all of us and not just the one percent,” he said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q2SwMZ-4dI
According to Green Party’s presidential candidate Jill Stein, however, if Bernie Sanders was to eventually endorse Clinton, such a capitulation by him would not only negatively impact the strength of his campaign, it would also seriously undermine the issues that he has attempted to bring into America’s political discourse.
Speaking to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, Stein said that what the Democratic Party is doing with Sanders is not unprecedented in the history of the party. Arguing that the Democratic Party “creates campaigns that fake left while it moves right,” Stein quoted instances from the past where DEM has forsaken its ideology to cater to the needs of the political establishment.
“And over the years, the party has allowed principled candidates to be seen and heard, but has, at the end of the day, sabotaged them in one way or the other, often through fear campaigns and smear campaigns, in the same way that Bernie is being called a spoiler now and has been for some weeks. Dennis Kucinich was redistricted and basically, you know, taken off the political map. We saw Jesse Jackson the victim of a smear campaign. People remember the Dean scream that was used against Howard Dean as a peace candidate who was doing well. So, in many ways, the Democratic Party creates campaigns that fake left while it moves right and becomes more corporatist, more militarist, more imperialist.”
Moreover, Stein argued that Bernie Sanders would be abandoning the movement he has built if he decides to work within the folds of the Democratic Party. Stein’s position seems to resonate with a major chunk of Sanders’ supporters, including members of the “Bernie or Bust” movement, who, as the Inquisitr reported earlier this week, have rejected calls for party unity . While most members of the movement have pledged that they would not support Hillary Clinton under any condition, some have even said that they would consider supporting Donald Trump in the general election.
Celebrate Hillary? Not so fast – #BernieOrBust #BernieSanders pic.twitter.com/QypAw8bf3D
— Lee Camp [Redacted] (@LeeCamp) June 9, 2016
Jill Stein then went on to suggest that Bernie Sanders should consider running on a third-party ticket.
“And we’ve offered—I’ve offered, basically, to put everything on the table and to see how we can work together and explore the—what it would take in order for that to happen—to run a joint ticket, for example.”
But it appears unlikely that Sanders would do that, as he has maintained over the course of his campaign that he would not run for president if he doesn’t win the nomination because he wouldn’t want to play a part in “electing some right-wing Republican to be president of the United States of America.”
In any case, Jill Stein’s succinct rebuttal of any capitulation that might now arise on Bernie Sanders’ part with Hillary Clinton having clinched the nomination would undoubtedly resonate with a major chunk of the Vermont senator’s supporters.
Check out the full video below.
[Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images]