Friends of Bernie, Relax: WE Got This!!!
What a week, huh? I’ve started 42 different blog posts trying to keep up with all the news on the American political scene, from the…
What a week, huh? I’ve started 42 different blog posts trying to keep up with all the news on the American political scene, from the Idiocracy in Iowa to the Paper Shredder Pelosi to the many ways the oligarch media did backflips and face-plants trying to tell those of us who merely want a reasonable, accurate, non-corrupt election system that we just have to be patient and trust the process…
By the time I finished writing long-ass sentences like that one, well, I’d check my news feed and all Hell would be breaking loose somewhere else and off I’d go chasing another bread crumb down a sewer drain until eventually my body would sink into my chair like a sad balloon, the little Lifeforce I had left exiting my various orifices to take a semi-permanent vacation, I’d pass out, and wake up and…
More craziness! Time to start another blog post!
AGH!!!
But folks, I think I’ve finally got this thing licked. The key is to just keep on typing, don’t check anything as you do so, speak the Truth and press the ol’ Publish button. Or is it? Ha ha. Okay, the answer is probably somewere in between that and the way I’ve always bee.
You see, this is hard for me because I’m trained as a classic, pre-Internet newspaper journalist and I was the guy on the sports desk of the Los Angeles Daily News in the 1990s who, even as an intern, was often called over to do a full read-through of the paper before it went to print because I was known as the “details guy,” always able to find a grammatical error, a misplaced period or an Armenian name that was misspelled. Okay, not really on that last part — those names are hard!
In all seriousness, though, as I am re-entering the journalism fray, I’m realizing I’m gonna have to catch up with the times and change some habits. And so, I’m going to write these political updates much as I wrote on Facebook all these years; doing my best not to make mistakes as I go and to have a clear goal and reach it before the news changes so much that my words are irrelevant.
All that’s one of those long-winded ways of asking for your patience but telling you that I’m pretty good at changing, so these posts are only going to get better with time.
With that out of the way, let’s get to the main point of today’s article which is:
Face it, Dems: Bernie Sanders Will Be The 2020 Democratic Nominee
You see, it dawned on me this morning that this 2020 Democratic Primary was, in some ways, a mirror of the 2016 Republican Primary.
A bunch of rather boring, traditional candidates, a few kooks, and a very popular outsider who the Establishment despised.
What got me thinking about this was Marco Rubio. Remember him?
Yeah, the kinda weasselly guy from Florida who couldn’t even win his home state. To his credit, he finished third. A distant third.
Rubio won his first state, Minnesota, on Super Tuesday, and by the end of that night Trump had won 11 states. Yet, as this Vox article pointed out, “For weeks, the media has portrayed Marco Rubio as the most potent threat to Donald Trump. But the election results so far haven’t borne this out.”
I can remember that period in late February where those experts called pundits (I prefer dumb-bits, myself) were trying to convince the nation that this guy Rubio was the best chance the party Establishment had to stop Trump.
Face it, he never had a chance. To be fair, over the next two weeks before a key battle in his home state of Florida, he did go on to win the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Unfortunately, during that same period, Trump won five more states and Ted Cruz won three.
And then Rubio went to his home state where politicians are supposed to do good (because if a guy is really someone who thinks he can represent the country, you’d think the people he represents currently would vote for him, right?). And Trump kicked his ass, beating him by 441,209 votes (46 to 27 percent) and sending the upstart home just a few days later when he suspended his campaign.
Of course, then the media told us Ted Cruz could do it. Well, we know what happened. Cruz had a short run bolstered by a few caucus wins, but from April 19th on, Trump swept the rest of the 16 states and cruised (sorry, not sorry) to victory.
But enough of this walk through Wikipedia-aided memories. Why should any of this matter now? Well …
Bernie is Poised to Clean Up The Next Few Weeks
That’s right. A new poll released by someone not known for his love of Bernie, Nate Silver of Fivethirtyeight.com, reveals that Bernie’s odds are looking damn good and that Super Tuesday is gonna be a glorious day for us Bernie Bros, Babes and Badasses.
Take a look at that poll one more time (I’m assuming you peaked at it at the top of the article). The key thing to notice is what the impact of Iowa truly was. You can see that before the caucuses, FiveThirtyEight predicted Biden had a 43 percent chance to win and Bernie was at 30 percent roughly.
Then, Biden falls off a cliff and Bernie climbs a mountain, totally switching places, to where Bernie is now just shy of a 50 percent chance to win the nominee and Biden is at 18 percent by the graph and 21 percent from the article.
Meanwhile, the guy the media is telling us has the momentum, Mayor Pete, well, he’s at 4 percent in the graphic and 6 percent in the article, but either way, that’s almost no change from where he was at before Iowa.
So shouldn’t the headline be something like, Bernie and Biden Switch Places, Bernie Climbing to Top, Biden Falling to Third?
How do they reach these numbers?
Well, I’m gonna leave it up to you to go figure out the answer to that. One can spend hours in the weeds of these stats, and they admit at the end of the article that because of the confusion out of Iowa the polls may be a little less accurate.
Still, all signs point to Bernie being the only candidate like Trump in 2016, meaning he can be consistently at the top or near it just about everywhere.
Super Tuesday Looks Super Good … For Bernie
And this report from The Hill, one of the better YouTube news channels for getting the real skinny on what’s going down in the Democratic Primary, used that same site to show us that they are predicted a big win for Sanders on Super Tuesday, March 3rd.
From the site, its predicted Sanders has a 67 percent chance to win Calfonia and Biden was at number two with 16 percent. Again, where’s this upstart Mayor Pete?
When you look at that map of Super Tuesday projections above you, if Sanders takes all of those states and has New Hampshire under his wing from next week, how do you really expect anybody in their right mind to suggest he is not on the way to the nomination?
But here’s the rub. After Iowa, we all know that the Democratic Establishment will do everything they can to stop Sanders. Michael Moore did a great bit on his fabulous podcast Rumble the other night, where he talked about how Sanders is taking on so many things — Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the Democratic Establishment, the corporate, oligarch-owned media, etc. — so we have to expect that we are in the fight of our lives. No one said this would be easy.
But things worth fighting for usually aren’t. The last trick they’ll want to play is to use the media to control the narrative. Which is why it’s so important to share real journalists covering the job, and to distrust the stories that the CNNs of the world put out.
In a press conference today, Bernie pointed out that there were more young people actively caucusing in Iowa than there had been for Obama in 2008.
You see, folks, all signs are in. The Democratic Establishment has been exposed and a new movement is making sure they don’t hold onto power. Same thing happened with Trump.
One of the differences, though, is this time those elite have nowhere to go if Sanders wins. When Trump ran, the assumption by our expert classes was that Hillary would beat him so they could just vote for her. For those who hate Trump and Bernie, what will they do?
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For the time being, we have to expect more crazy stories, more media complicity, more gaslighting, more of the same gross behavior we’ve seen already.
In the end, this really is all about WE, not Bernie. Which is why it’s so important that, no matter what you hear, you keep your head up and keep doing the work to make this campaign a successful one. It won’t be easy, but so long as we work at it and stick together, we got this!
Thanks for reading! If you want more of my media output (and this episode in particular), be sure to check out my new podcast, The B&P Realm Podcast. It’s very experimental and often very uncensored, covering a lot of ground – politics, personal growth, reflections on music and other media, and a reading of my novel, “The Teacher and The Tree Man.”