"Is that even legal?"
A political party can pretty much do whatever it wants internally. If Bernie was running as an R, you can bet Cruz and Trump would demand to see papers. D's are like "it's cool; rules are made for breaking". I wish I had seen this when it first came out.
Bernie Sanders slips up and admits he’s not a democrat and he’s trying to hijack the party
By Bill Palmer | March 15, 2016
Call it his “oops” moment. Bernie Sanders made the mistake of admitting a core truth last night that he had been trying to downplay throughout his 2016 campaign for President. Although those with detailed knowledge of the political landscape were already well aware that Sanders has never been a registered democrat in his life and is now merely trying to hijack the party for his own personal use at the end of a long political career, the average voter likely didn’t know the distinction. But after his slip up last night, the perception of “forthright Uncle Bernie” on the part of democrats may quickly shift to that of a disingenuous opportunist.
During last night’s MSNBC Town Hall, Sanders was finally forced to explain why a registered independent like him was running for the democratic nomination. His fumbling answer was that it was the only way he could get “media coverage.” In other words, he has no interest in furthering the goals of the Democratic Party, or of paying attention to the priorities of its many millions of members. Instead he’s spent the past nine months using the hard work of others within the party for his own gain, in almost parasite-like fashion. None of this should come as a surprise to those who have been paying attention.
Sanders has run for election and reelection in Vermont as a registered independent, and has never once been a democrat at any level of government in his career. In fact he’s spent numerous words over the decades insisting that democrats and republicans are no better. ““I am not now, nor have I ever been, a liberal democrat,” he said in 1985. His attitude never did change. He doesn’t respect the Democratic Party one bit and never has. But now he wants the party for himself.
It explains why Bernie Sanders has only tended to do well in states where legal loopholes allow non-democrats to vote in their democratic primary races. It’s one thing for a democratic candidate to try to win over independents. It’s an entirely different thing for a so-called democratic candidate to rely specifically on the independent vote to sabotage the will of democratic voters, trying to stick them with a nominee most of them don’t want and can’t identify with. Worse, at least some republicans have been crossing over and voting on the democratic side where the law allows it. They’re voting for Sanders over Hillary Clinton simply because they want a relative weakling like him to be the nominee they’ll face in the fall. Sanders has done nothing to disavow himself from such antics, even though he certainly knows that many of them don’t actually support him.
The strategy has not been working. Even in Michigan, which has among the most lax primary voting laws in the nation, he was only able to exploit things to amass a victory by a 1.5% margin. In most other states he’s been losing badly. In fact, the same day he slightly won Michigan, he lost Mississippi to Hillary Clinton by a stunning 66% margin, but it went almost unreported. Despite Bernie’s best efforts at exploiting every unbecoming angle he can find, including having filed opportunistic lawsuits against the democratic party and against one of the states he’s likely to lose, he’s behind Clinton by about 1.7 million popular votes. For all the visible enthusiasm coming from his biggest supporters, he is simply not the people’s choice. Even as the vast majority of the voting public continues to reject his campaign, he continues to insist that he’s only losing due to superdelegates, which is an easily disproven lie.
The non-democrats who have been voting for Bernie Sanders perhaps couldn’t care less about his relationship, or non-relationship, or parasitic relationship, with the Democratic Party. But for those democrats who have been on the fence about whether to support Bernie or Hillary Clinton, what they learned last night is that there is only one democratic candidate in the race. Sanders has about as much business running as a democrat as Donald Trump has running as a republican. In whatever other ways they may be similar or different, Sanders and Trump are simply two guys who woke up one day and each decided to hijack a political party they despise for their own personal gain. And now the public appears to be finally taking notice.
Up to now, Bernie Sanders has been almost impervious to his own mistakes and faults. Even as he ran on a promise of campaign finance reform he’s been flagged but the FEC for several thousand different instances of improper donations. Can he really be trusted to reform the system if he can’t be bothered to follow the relatively few rules that are in place now? And that’s before getting to the numerous controversial stories from his past, from his praise for Fidel Castro to the fact that he never held a real job until the age of forty.
But most news outlets have taken a pass on these things, perhaps because the Sanders phenomenon has been too good for ratings and they don’t want to burst his bubble just yet. Or perhaps because they don’t want to get on the wrong side of his most rabid fans, who have become notorious for acting online in much the same way that Trump’s most rabid fans act in person, and don’t care about his faults anyway.
But after last night, the tide of the media coverage suddenly appears to be changing. Television news has been treating him with the gentlest kid gloves of all, but now CBS News is indeed reporting in a headline that he only ran as a democrat for “the media attention.” Even his biggest cheerleader MSNBC, which has practically rebranded itself as the Bernie Sanders Network, is now acknowledging that he only has “loose democratic ties.”
Is this the point of no return, where even cable news stops trying to milk the Bernie phenomenon for ratings, and finally begins covering him with all the scrutiny of a real candidate? In the long run it may not matter. He’s now so far behind in the democratic race, based on the popular vote alone, that he would have to win more than sixty percent of the remaining vote across the remaining states just to catch up. Even his close “win” in Michigan, where he got just under 51% of the vote, didn’t help him. He closed the gap by seven delegates there; he’s still behind by more than two hundred delegates overall. And again that’s before getting to the superdelegates, which are merely icing on the cake for Hillary’s massive and growing lead.
Bernie Sanders has a big future in the Senate if wants it, with his newfound clout and popularity making him potentially one of the most powerful voices in either house of congress once he returns there, after decades of having been more of a middling congressional figure. And he’s already a lock for 2018 reelection in Vermont. But the popular vote is making clear that he’s not going to be the President or even the nominee. If he’s not careful during the gradual wind-down of his current campaign, he could end up damaging his newfound brand and hampering his own potential role over the next eight years. The sooner Bernie does the math and figures out he’s not going to win, and decides to get out of his own way, the sooner he’ll stop making self-inflicting mistakes like the one he made last night.
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