From the Washington Post, this afternoon, “Some top Sanders advisers urge him to consider withdrawing”:
A small group of Bernie Sanders’s top aides and allies — including his campaign manager and his longtime strategist — have encouraged the independent senator from Vermont to consider withdrawing from the presidential race, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
The group includes campaign manager Faiz Shakir and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a top Sanders surrogate and ally, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive private discussions.
Sanders himself has become more open to the prospect of dropping out, according to one of the people with knowledge of the situation and another close ally, especially if he suffers a significant defeat in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, which polls suggest Joe Biden will win handily.
Beyond Shakir and Jayapal, longtime strategist Jeff Weaver has privately made a case that exiting the race more quickly and on good terms with Biden would give Sanders more leverage in the long run, according to one of the people; the other said Weaver has used a light touch in presenting his case. Weaver and Jayapal did not return calls and messages seeking comment. Shakir declined to comment.
Sanders has not a made a final decision, the people said, and other close allies have privately urged him to keep running, such as national campaign co-chair Nina Turner, while Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) is also said to favor him remaining in the race. Larry Cohen, a longtime ally who chairs a nonprofit aligned with Sanders, is waging a public campaign for him to stay in until the Democratic National Convention.
The Sanders campaign declined to comment on internal deliberations…
Emphases mine. Vulgar speculation: Maybe Shakir and Jayapal were not the ‘two people with knowledge‘ mentioned in the first paragraph, but that phrasing is a well-known form of reportorial snark. Also, if Jeff ‘Comic Book Guy’ Weaver thinks it’s time to cut & run, that’s a prime indicator there’s no hope left of reviving the embers. Nina Turner is either nuts or playing nuts for the media, and Tlaib backed herself into a bad corner when she publicly encouraged Sanders supporters to boo Hillary Clinton — no other campaign will touch her now, and she’s liable to lose the seat she won in a split race in 2018. And Larry Cohen, chairman of ‘Our Revolution’, has his own reasons for encouraging Sanders to continue running the grift all the way to the end.
Elsewhere, the postmortem infighting has already begun!
New: Once a front-runner, Bernie Sanders' contempt for the Democratic establishment and traditional campaign tools won him adoring fans, but undermined his path to the White House. An in-depth look at a campaign that rose and fell very quickly: https://t.co/NRBA4LmKYt
— Daniel Marans (@danielmarans) April 2, 2020
… Over the course of just 10 explosive days between the Nevada caucus on February 22 and Super Tuesday on March 3, that campaign cratered, with Sanders going from an unrivaled front-runner to a distant second-place contender, likely due to finish with far fewer delegates than he commanded in 2016.
HuffPost spoke to more than three dozen Sanders aides, allies and critics about why the progressive leader stumbled. Many of them requested anonymity to speak freely.
The answers they suggested are myriad. He failed to erect a campaign nimble enough to overcome the built-in challenges he was bound to face from a skeptical press corps and a hostile party establishment. He hung his electoral success on the relatively risky bet that he could both expand the electorate and do so in a way that would benefit him disproportionately. His staff feuded unnecessarily with Elizabeth Warren, and he failed to make inroads with older Black voters ― a repeat of 2016 dynamics.
Perhaps most significantly, Sanders failed to expand his core bloc of support into a coalition capable of winning a majority, and he did not adequately prepare for the prospect that moderates would consolidate behind Biden.
“There was a strategy to get to 30% and not to 50%,” one Sanders ally said.
Many of these shortcomings go back to a defining feature of Bernie Sanders’ political career: He is going to do it his way or not at all…
Sanders trusts a very small circle of trusted advisers and is slow to make decisions, particularly when it comes to considering potential changes in his approach. It’s a tendency that would later be evident in his relatively drawn-out response this month to the COVID-19 outbreak. Biden incorporated fears of the pandemic into his critique of Trump in late January; Sanders began blasting Trump for his response to the crisis about a month later.
Likewise, Warren rolled out her first plan to address the crisis at the end of January, and second, more detailed one, at the beginning of March. But while Sanders convened a roundtable to discuss the topic on March 9, he did not unveil a comparable policy plan until March 17, the day after his first head-to-head debate with Biden…
In the absence of a nimble communications operation, some aides and surrogates ended up crafting their own messaging that was at odds with the official campaign line.
Briahna Gray, a national press secretary for Sanders who joined the campaign after a career in law and a brief stint in journalism, spent many days tangling with his antagonists on Twitter, including a number of media figures. In one string of late September tweets ripping the Warren campaign, she appeared to back the campaign into a position of publicly blessing a newly contentious stance toward Warren that the campaign never followed through on.
Turner also sometimes initiated assaults on Sanders’ rivals that the candidate himself had not yet engaged in. Ahead of the November debate in Atlanta, for example, Turner took thinly veiled shots at former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, before clarifying that she did not speak for the campaign.
And Sirota, a journalist with Capitol Hill and campaign experience, launched a Sanders campaign newsletter “Bern Notice” that offered a disclaimer that the newsletter reflected his views and not those of the campaign. He was still admonished for using the newsletter to promote a January op-ed by Sanders-backing law professor Zephyr Teachout on Biden’s “corruption problem.”
The disarray beneath Sanders ― whether on the communications side, or elsewhere ― might have been less harmful if Sanders himself had a sharper grasp of the tools it took to make a campaign succeed.
But at times, he appeared to be penny wise and pound foolish. He was known to complain to aides about the number of advance staffers it took to erect his events, wondering why it was necessary to employ so many people just to put on rallies…
…[T]he talk of a brokered convention spoke to a flaw in Sanders’ underlying strategy that the campaign never effectively confronted: Their coalition was considerably smaller than in 2016 and would not be able to withstand a sudden consolidation among moderate voters…
A pro-Sanders progressive activist described feeling as though the Sanders campaign felt entitled to the support of left-leaning groups and as a result, did not treat activists as respectfully as Warren’s campaign. The campaign sought organizations’ input on multiple policy proposals just a day or two before their rollout, providing little time for input, and did not answer emails from activists on multiple occasions.
“The outward motto of the campaign was ‘Not me. Us,’ but the real motto seemed like ‘Everybody against us’ or ‘Just us,’” the activist said…
There’s a lot more stories at the link — it would surprise me if Marans doesn’t have a book deal in mind, if not in hand. Also, since this report (unlike any other I’ve seen) credits Jeff Weaver as the wise, sensible voice of experience for the campaign… I have a suspicion about Maranis’ main source!
An overarching theme in the story: When expert campaign advice made Sanders uncomfortable, his discomfort usually took precedence.
When he let experts do their thing, as in green-lighting polling in May and unlocking funding for TV ads in October, his fortunes generally rose. pic.twitter.com/NYITvGWdzT
— Daniel Marans (@danielmarans) April 2, 2020
Pete Buttigieg’s former campaign manager:
There are two types of people in elections: people who know when to pack it up gracefully and end on a high note (see Buttigieg, Pete) and people who douse themselves in lighter fluid and strike a match while they’re plunging in the polls and facing a certain loss —> https://t.co/iN4AbLPlBr
— Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith) April 3, 2020
Soonergrunt
If they can’t win gracefully or otherwise, they’re happy to lose ugly.
FelonyGovt
He really does seem quite irrelevant now. It’s definitely time for him to go.
Mary G
?♀️
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’m pretty sure it’s not an act
Morzer
Time to end the HeartBern and focus on dragging the shit-faced ape out of the White House.
Jackie
@Mary G: ???????
burnspbesq
The only thing that matters is beating Trump. Unless there is a strong case to be made that Bernie is more likely than Biden to be able to do that, Bernie should stand down.
jon
Maybe Sanders will figure out that nobody can get Medicare for All if Trump gets three more Supreme Court appointments and another 15-20% of the Judicial Branch. Or maybe he thinks that’s what the country deserves. We’ll find out, won’t we?
Amir Khalid
That Sanders won’t follow practical expert advice that he’s not comfortable with is itself disqualifying. Right now, we see every day what such a POTUS is like.
Morzer
@Amir Khalid: What’s worse is that Trump apparently believes his own propaganda about being a genius. He’s begun prescribing medications for the coronavirus again. It hasn’t been two weeks since some gullible old people took his advice and ended up dead or critically ill in hospital.
Morzer
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: If it was an act, that would be proof she’s crazy. If it’s not an act…
Redshift
@Amir Khalid: And things like that are why I never supported him. If you’re president, you can have the greatest ideas in the world and it won’t mean a thing of you don’t have the ability to make them happen. And that inability is even worse for all the things you have to deal with that aren’t the brilliant ideas you’re enamored with.
Mary G
This is the only Wilmerite I haven’t long ago blocked, and I’m constantly on the fence:
Ya think?
NotMax
Take your bawl and go home, B.S.
Yutsano
Spoilers: Wilmer won’t take this advice. He can’t. It’s literally the only thing Jane is doing for money. She can’t exactly get that fourth house and keep her legal fund flush without those $27 donations coming in. Her grifting is what will keep him going no matter what the maths say.
NotMax
@Yutsano
It’s also déjà vu . We’ve seen essentially the same mantra about staff and withdrawal front paged in stories previously, in 2020. Mantra keeps on repeating, like burps after eating a bowl of radishes.
CaseyL
Berners are still out there, saying Bernie can still win… if he gets 60% of the vote.
I don’t know if that’s true (probably not) – but, shit, the guy barely cracked 30% on his best showing. Now he’s gonna double that?
Mary G
I think he’s gambling that Biden will get coronavirus, because he’s probably not good at social distancing.
Amir Khalid
@CaseyL:
There’s an old math puzzle: Two cars set off for the same destination, one doing 30mph and the other doing 60mph. The slower car reaches the halfway point. Can its driver speed up to overtake the faster car and beat it to the destination? No; in the time it took to reach the halfway point the faster car had already arrived at the destination.
It’s not an exact analogy, but Bernie is in about the same position as the driver of the slow car.
Chetan Murthy
@Amir Khalid: I don’t think Bernie realizes how stront the antipathy is, regarding him, in the ranks of Dem elected officials. And frankly, amongst some of the electorate. And this, despite that his -policy- ideas are well-received. The antipathy is for his -person-, b/c he’s an asshole. And a mirror-image of this, is that his Bros seem more attached to his -person-, than to his ideas. B/c they sure AF can’t stand Warren, and that says everything.
mrmoshpotato
@Mary G:
^^ LOL
Let’s go see if agraybee needs some company.
mrmoshpotato
@Mary G: LOL What a realization for the children!
“Bow to us! What? No. Telling us to go fuck ourselves was not an option!”
Amir Khalid
@Chetan Murthy:
Its been said that Bernie and Warren are very close ideologically, but there’s a big difference in why they were running. She was running to get her policy ideas in the White House; if she can get Biden to adopt them, as she has been doing, that’s still a win for her. Bernie, whose policy thinking doesn’t extend beyond his stump speech, is running solely to get his 78-year-old self in the White House.
Chetan Murthy
Christ, what an asshole.
Martin
@CaseyL: Give Biden Covid.
That’s basically been the strategy since Super Tuesday.
Chetan Murthy
@Amir Khalid: Yeap, yeap. And he’s convinced his bros that that’s not the case. Fucking cult of personality. Creepy.
Martin
@Amir Khalid: Well, that and that Warren is a very serious capitalist and Bernie is the opposite.
That’s a pretty fundamental difference between them. What’s lost on a lot of voters is that a serious capitalist and a socialist both see single payer as necessary. It’s every other industry that they differ.
opiejeanne
@Morzer: Oh no! What medicine did the Orange One tell people to take today?
I had a bad day physically and am very much out of the loop.
OzarkHillbilly
@opiejeanne: The same one he’s been pushing for a while, hydroxychloroquine.
Amir Khalid
@opiejeanne:
I hope you feel better soon.
Barb 2
BS is not a Democrat. He seems to hate democrats.
Trump has to make up stuff about Biden. But there is a lot of material to use against BS and his wife.
Barb 2
@Martin: Covid 19 could be what convinces the Nation that some form of single payer is life of death.
bjacques
@Martin:
Warren was happy to win the argument but lose the nomination, and not do a Corbyn by winning the argument but lose the general election.
Amir Khalid
@Barb 2:
Bernie and his movement have all along been fighting for a hostile takeover of the Democratic party. Fortunately, they seem to be losing.
opiejeanne
@OzarkHillbilly: Thanks. I was worried he’d found another toxic item to tell people to take. Hasn’t anyone told him about that couple who took the stuff, and the husband died?
opiejeanne
@Amir Khalid: Thanks. I’m much better now, but annoyed that I ended up sleeping most of this first sunny day in the past ten.
It’s hay fever and I think stress.
Amir Khalid
@opiejeanne:
If they did tell him, would he listen?
mrmoshpotato
@opiejeanne: If they did tell him, would he give a damn?
Hope Sunday’s better to you. :)
opiejeanne
@mrmoshpotato: Thanks. I’m already better.
Geminid
The picture of Sanders above reminds me of how rough he has looked this winter. With the nomination seemingly within reach following Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, he seemed to be going all out. The South Carolina primary, Super Tuesday, and Covid-19 may have saved Sanders’ life.
Chyron HR
@Barb 2:
If only President Sanders had sent the national guard into the hospitals to shoot all the bourgeois doctors and class traitor nurses as part of his great leap forward, we’d have this Coronavirus licked by now.
Anne Laurie
All of DSA twitter cries out: He was willing to die for our sins, and you hateful normies refused to accept his glorious sacrifice!
Geminid
@Anne Laurie: I don’t doubt that some of the people around him might have thought that to them he was worth as much or more dead than alive.
waspuppet
The thing I just cannot wrap my head around from a tactical angle is the notion that it really never occurred to them that people would drop out. They seem to really think 30 percent would do it.
Richard Guhl
As a retired pastor, I may not know much, but I can smell a religion from a mile away, and Bernie’s campaign was always a fanatical religious quest. From the us-versus-them mentality to the ecstatic reaction of his devotees to the bird alighting on his podium, the religious fervor was plain as day. But that always comes back to the man himself. Anyone who has spent even a passing moment in his political vision quest attached to the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party is clearly a man of big ideas, all with capital letters.
It demands the conviction that Class Warfare is the key to all Truths, and everything else is a distraction. It demands the belief that powerful,nefarious enemies are arrayed against you, which have to be named and exposed in order to be defeated— Corporate Democrats! Neo-Liberals! Normies!
Righteousness can only prevail by a Revolution which overthrows the old regime ( which, curiously enough, is the exact same premise of reactionary movements).
Bernie’s campaign was doomed from its beginning, because it flowed from the assumption that you can simultaneously trash whole groups of people (leaving them with the suspicion that you’re talking about them) and try to convince them that you have their true interests at heart. That was never going to fly.
Geminid
@Richard Guhl: When I read up on Sanders’ life in the 70’s and 80’s, I came away thinking, this is someone who really loves “the People,” but does not really like people as such.
Richard Guhl
@Geminid: I share your suspicion.
ThresherK
I didn’t remember whether Buttigieg ended gracefully and on a high note, but, reading his ex-mgr’s tweet, yeah, he did.
I guess the takeaway is: if I don’t remember how someone dropped out, it didn’t stick out like a sore thumb, it was probably cool.
Certain exceptions I shall always remember.
Ken
To be minimally fair, the couple didn’t take hydroxychloroquine, they took a fishtank-cleaning chemical that has “chloroquine” in the name.
There is some evidence coming in about hydroxychloroquine, but the studies are still kind of small and results are mixed – as in one study says a small effect, another says no effect. Derek Lowe has made several posts in his “In the Pipeline” blog.
SW
The thing is the cranky old bastard is right on most of the issues and certainly health care. But there is no way he could manage the federal government. There is no way he could deal with Congress. There is no way he could BE president. But this is his moment of leverage. Biden has to move off of his opposition to Medicare for All. This is THE moment for the American people to grasp the wisdom of decoupling healthcare from employment. It is a no-brainer. Old Joe can do this gracefully by claiming that he isn’t flip flopping. That Obama care is the logical bridge to the future. A future where we have a single payer system where your health care isn’t dependent on your employment. And that Old Joe will make sure that all those white collar or union guys who still think their jobs are never never going away will get to keep their shitty insurance. But he has to make it clear that the position of the Democratic Party is a future of America joining the rest of the civilized world and having a government health service that plans for nation wide emergencies and takes care of everyone. And he needs to do that NOW!
SFAW
@OzarkHillbilly:
Someone should tell the Murderer-in-Chief that the miracle drug, ethylene glycol, has been shown to end COVID-19 symptoms
ETA: And I’ve heard that it tastes — or at least smells — sweet. “The President says ‘having a pint’ would do wonders for the country.” It could be a two-pronged PSA: Have Obama tell people NOT to drink it.
[NB: For those not aware, ethylene glycol is the key ingredient in anti-freeze, and is toxic.]
Eolirin
@Martin: Is he though? I don’t recall him proposing any measures that would affect our market system or nationalize anything other than the health care system. And he’s very willing to defend making millions off of book deals.
Unless by opposite you mean unserious about socialism.
SFAW
@opiejeanne:
“Did they vote for me? No? Then why should I care?”
SFAW
@Morzer:
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22.”
SFAW
@burnspbesq:
Maybe he heard that “heightening the contradictions” was the right thing to do?
different-church-lady
Donations must be drying up fast.
different-church-lady
@Chetan Murthy: If that doesn’t make your blood boil, you’re not paying attention. The man compulsively white-washes EVERY inequality in our history.
Miss Bianca
@Richard Guhl: Late to the party on this thread as usual, but I just wanted to say that I think your analysis is right on.
Betty
@Chetan Murthy: They continue to trash her on Twitter any time you praise something she has done. Not doing Bernie any favors.
Barbara
@jon: The fly in the ointment of “heightening the contradictions” is that there is too much that needs to be rebuilt before you can actually make progress. The upside to destruction is long term if you are lucky, and it is rarely something you can plan and control for. The Bubonic Plague set the stage for increasing the value of labor and weakening feudal systems in many European countries. Did that make the plague a good thing? How you answer that question and with what conditions and caveats probably says a lot about how you balance progress against destruction. Think of Trump as the figurative plague before he became the literal plague.
In any event, Medieval Europeans had no political means to bring about progress for individuals, but we do, and that means we shouldn’t settle for destruction as the cost of progress.
Richard Guhl
@Miss Bianca: Thank you
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@SW: “Single payer” is not a panacea, and in fact very few among other First World nations (who all, each and every one, have better overall health care coverage for their populations than the US) have single payer as their system.
Iis wrong to focus on this method of getting to universal coverage as if it’s the only or even the best way, and it’s especially foolish and counterproductive given the political realities of America. We can get to (or at least closer and closer to) universal coverage here, but it’s highly unlikely to be via single payer.
different-church-lady
@CaseyL: Here’s a sure-fire way of gaining 60% of the remaining vote: alienate every possible political ally you could have.
Bernie gotta Bernie.
J R in WV
@Ken:
Don’t forget, the medical placebo effect shows that administering an inert substance to a patient can help that patient recover from a disease.
So even if hydroxychloroquine trials show a net improvement in patients in the trials, that doesn’t mean there is a real medical effect, it could just be that ol’ placebo effect showing up again.
artem1s
@waspuppet:
They couldn’t imagine it because they will never drop out. They expect everyone to play right into their hands. They don’t make contingency plans because they don’t believe their will be a need for them. Chances are this musing about ending the campaign isn’t real either. It’s a last chance fundraising appeal. And the Bro’s will pony up again and roll out a bunch more twitter attacks. In a month or two when things start to open up, they will start dangling the line that there is still a chance. This is the way all expert grifters operate. Keep tickling the mark with the possibility that they can hit it big if they just roll the dice one more time. Grifting, conmen, everyone of them.
SFAW
@waspuppet:
I imagine it occurred to them. I think they just assumed — mistakenly, of course — that persons who voted for the other non-Biden candidates were anti-Biden/DNC, in much the same way the BernBros were anti-Hillary and are anti-Biden/anti-DNC, and therefore those voters would move over to Jesus of Vermont. I expect they also thought that the Warren supporters would immediately jump to Bernie, because some of his positions were/are close to hers, or vice versa.
It’s a not-unreasonable assumption set, but maintaining those assumptions (if that’s what happened) indicates a lack of understanding, or rather a lack of interest in checking those assumptions
ETA: It also indicates zero-sum, black-or-white-but-not-gray understanding of the world, especially the political arena.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Berni Bro Joe Rogan, as predicted, shows he was always a Republican, but to embarrassed to admit it;
Joe Rogan on why he’s set to vote for Donald Trump: Democrats have ‘made us all morons’ by running Joe Biden
SFAW
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Someone should send that fucking imbecile a Mumia sweatshirt.
The only surprising thing (to me) was that Joe Moron talked about voting for Bernie. I’ve thought for years that Rogan is a RWMF.