Washington, DC
The Bernie Sanders campaign has always been touched by irony. Now it is turning into a mad joke. He cannot win the nomination — but, like a deranged old dog, he’s still fighting. Rather than concede defeat to Hillary Clinton, he keeps scrapping away. He hopes somehow to win the primary in DC on Tuesday, but most of the Washingtonians I’ve met are laughing at him. ‘He’s always been strange,’ one DC native told me last night, ‘Now he’s just gone crazy.’ The late-night TV comedians are doing routines about his barmy refusal to accept defeat.
Sanders is determined to keep challenging Clinton all the way to the Democratic Party Convention in July in Philadelphia. ‘The struggle continues,’ he says. But everybody outside of the Sanders fringe thinks that his increasingly zombie-like campaign will only undermine Clinton further and therefore help Donald Trump. So why, progressives are asking themselves, doesn’t he do the honourable thing and give up? No matter how much he dislikes Hillary’s elite party politics, surely he can’t want the Donald to win?
Well, lots of his fans do. Even here in Washington, DC, the heart of the Democratic establishment, I’ve met Democrats who are part of the ‘NeverHillary’ brigade. There is a strong sense that Hillary has ‘rigged’ the nomination process. This isn’t true, she has won more votes than Bernie Sanders (roughly 14 million to his 11). But it is true that she would not have secured the nomination without the help of her superdelegates, which feels anti-democratic and thus feeds into the anti-politics mood.
But what if Bernie’s never-say-die campaign now actually helps Hillary Clinton? By staying in the race all the way into July, even when he has lost by all rational counts, Bernie is starting to make Hillary look sane and decent, two words not normally associated with the former First Lady. By behaving unreasonably, he is making voters start to think that maybe she isn’t so bad. She spoke gracefully about Bernie Sanders’ campaign on Tuesday night; if she keeps doing that while Team Bernie continues to say that the whole system is corrupt and his fans depict her as the establishment anti-Christ, they will help her even more. For all the crazies who think she is the perfect symbol of everything that is wrong with politics (and I count myself among you, brothers and sisters), there is a larger sane majority which would prefer her to a mentally unstable man such as Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump.
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