Wow, more bullshit from Stone. Just what the world needed. I’ll just cover a few details:
“Bernie Sanders went after Hillary so viciously that he might as well have run as a third party spoiler candidate. He did the majority of the damage”
The actual 2016 campaign, of course, saw Sanders run a principled issues campaign. Not only did he really noticeably fail to “viciously” attack Clinton, he entirely declined to personally attack her at all, despite readily available material. He said from the beginning he was going to run his campaign this way and that’s exactly what he did, to his own significant disadvantage (because if he’d hit her the way she hit him instead of just being a punching-bag, he probably would have won). The defining moment of his campaign in this regard was when he was given the chance to hit Clinton about her State Dept. emails and very loudly refused. No other candidate would have passed on going after Clinton over that or the million other things he could have used.
Clinton, by contrast, attacked Sanders relentlessly, lying, slandering, wallowing in the worst sort of demagoguery, as is her custom.
“Why on earth would anyone turn away from vocal, powerful and highly engaged voting blocs like women, the LGBT community and African Americans — for decades the most loyal and important Democratic voting bloc?”
For no reason. The real question is, “who do you think you’re fooling by suggesting anyone would?” Sanders certainly doesn’t suggest that. He was stronger on the issues that specifically affected those groups than was Clinton. The thing to which Sanders has objected is the weaponized faux-“identity politics” of the kind you’re peddling here (and it’s an unfortunate habit of too many to simply call that “identity politics”).
On the Republican right, issues like school prayer, anti-gay-rights and anti-abortion are deployed in order to whip reactionary voters into a frenzy and get them to vote for candidates who have an economic agenda that is toxic to their own interests. Vote for the pol who says he’ll get tough on the queers and what you actually get is the pol who is going to work to export your job in the name of corporate profits (a portion of which are returned to the same pol as campaign donations). These pols never deliver on their phony “issues” and reuse them in campaign after campaign. The Clintonites use that faux-“identity politics” bullshit the same way. EMILYs List and Planned Parenthood, closely — and corruptly — integrated into the Democratic Establishment, endorsed Clinton in the primaries, even though Sanders is far better on reproductive rights than was Clinton (Clinton has said at every opportunity she would support restrictions on abortion if certain conditions were met, whereas Sanders flat-out refused to endorse any restrictions). And the Clintonites do this for the same reason as the Repubs; because they support the corrupt bribery-and-donor-service system, support grant-superpowers-to-multinationals bills that export jobs, support keeping the underclass underpaid, support constant warfare that ships people from the lower economic stratas to foreign shores to be killed and so on. This fake “identity politics” is the squid’s ink meant to get people to vote for such things.
What always accompanies this ID bullshit is the suggestion that if a candidate talks about other things instead of just talking about these issues, he doesn’t care about them or has downgraded their importance. That’s all part of the same game. Note that Stone is battling a straw man here; no one has even suggested “discarding” these issues. There is, rather, a substantive critique of using them as a weapon as the Clintonites have. The Clintonites don’t want to talk about the big economic issues — issues that affect everyone — because they suck at them. They’re up to their necks in the bribery-and-donor-service system and don’t like having it pointed out that this is both rightist and utterly corrupt. They don’t like people talking about Medicare-for-all because they’re in the pay of the health insurance industry and want to keep that gravy-train rolling. They don’t want people talking about the $15 minimum wage (an issue that disproportionately affects both women and women of color) because the businesses that pay for their campaigns are inexorably opposed to it. So we just get this faux- “identity politics” talk from them and see it used to vilify the progressives — the people who are actually trying to look out for the interests of the public.
“Unfortunately for Bernie Sanders, he neglected to even bother reaching out to black voters during the primary and when he realized his mistake he wrote it off as “conservative,” meaning it doesn’t help in the general so it doesn’t matter. Yeah, it matters. No modern democrat since Civil Rights has won without winning the black southern vote in the primary.”
Any correlation there is entirely irrelevant, as the sad truth, whether you find it convenient to your current narrative or not, is that those states and their populations — both their black and their white populations — don’t contribute a single electoral vote to Democrats in the general. Sanders’ comments about the results from these states had nothing to do with their black populations and everything to do with this.
And despite your insinuation, Sanders is, today, not only more popular with people of color than with white folks, he’s the most popular politician among people of color. Do I really need to start pulling out the polling on this again?
