April 21, 2016

The media bullies Sanders

Sam Smith - When you have the two leading candidates for president also having the highest unfavorability scores of any such duo in history, it's not a particular good time to tell alternatives like Bernie Sanders to get out of the race. Sanders, after all, is not just a candidate, he's a movement and among those he's trying to move - hard as it may be - is Hillary Clinton. 

Unfortunately the major media that has become so effective in spreading the propaganda of whoever is in the White House, has now  gotten itself similarly embedded in the Hillary Clinton campaign, passing on the nonsense that Sanders has some moral responsibility to drop out. 

A rare exception is the NY Times which editorialized:
 Mr. Sanders has voiced the concerns and energized millions of young people, many of them voting for the first time. His candidacy has forced the party to go deeper on addressing issues like wealth inequality, college tuition costs and the toll of globalization — important points of distinction with Republicans. What’s more, Mr. Sanders’s commitment to small individual contributions has put the lie to Democrats’ excuses that they, too, must play the big money game to win. This is a message too seldom heard in the party that first championed campaign finance reform. That it’s back is long overdue, good for Democrats and good for campaigning. Mrs. Clinton “is clearly irritated by the fact that she has to deal with this guy,” the Democratic strategist David Axelrod said in an interview. “But he’s pushed her on a lot of issues in a positive way, and I think that his young supporters will be bitterly resentful if anyone tries to shove him out of the race.”
And as one further consideration, of 18 states where there is comparative polling data, Sanders does better against Trump than Clinton in 14 - ten of them by more than four points. Perhaps it is Clinton who should consider dropping out.

2 comments:

Tom Puckett said...

I agree - the Huffington Post kept running headlines about how Bernie Sanders got slammed or trounced in NY but what I saw of the numbers he was only a few percent behind Hillary Clinton - 16% behind - but still got 108 delegates to Clinton's 139. That means that Hillary only increased her lead by 31 delegates out of a possible 247. That doesn't sound like a "stomping" by her campaign.

Cheers, Tom

greg gerritt said...

When Bernie drops out ≤ or loses at the convention keep the omement alive by working with Jill Stein for President