This Is A Really Stupid Reason NOT To Support Bernie Sanders

First, the standard issue disclaimer: I’m not a supporter of Senator Sanders or Secretary Clinton. I have agreements and disagreements with both of them both on policy, style and substance.

That being said, one of the reasons offered for opposing Bernie Sanders doesn’t make a damn lick of sense to me.

It is the idea that Republicans will use Sanders’ admitted stance as a “Democratic Socialist” against him.

Who cares?

I’m not saying that as far as the substance of what “democratic socialism” and its practical applications may or may not be. That’s something to be hashed out and decided between Sanders, Clinton, and their supporters.

I’m talking about the notion that Republicans and conservatives will “use” it in the election. How is that new? How is that different from what they always do.

I have been voting in U.S. presidential elections since 1996. In that time I have seen the following people described as socialists, communists or hardcore leftists by the right: Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama (twice).

Yes, you didn’t misread it, that’s every candidate for president the Democratic Party has ever nominated for the last 20 years.

The Republican Party and their allies like Fox News are one-trick ponies on this topic. They have no other setting possible. It is the same, worn-out attack every time whether it is raising questions about the time Bill Clinton spent in Russia as a teenager, making allegations about John Kerry’s decision to oppose the Vietnam War, or idiotic hand-waving about who Barack Obama associated with in Chicago.

This attack always comes. And it isn’t as if they wouldn’t say the exact, same, boring thing about Hillary Clinton if she won.

If anything, the right has been the Boy Who Cried Socialism, to the point where it is unlikely to sway a single vote on its own. It is a boring, useless, lazy line of attack and the right is so stuck in its own feedback loop it has now idea how limp it appears.

The right spent millions caricaturing Senator Barack Obama as the second coming of Vladimir Lenin and for all of that he got 69.4 million votes and became President Barack Obama. They tried the same four years later and he was reelected. They used it against Al Gore, and he got more votes than Bush. They used it against Dukakis and Kerry and they lost, but those campaigns had their own problems and mistakes far removed from Republican red-baiting (and in the case of Kerry, he was one state away from victory at the end of the day, not exactly a resounding rejection of a socialist).

They’ll call Bernie Sanders a socialist. They’ve called every Democrat a socialist.

Of the reasons to oppose Sanders, this isn’t one. It’s silly.

Oliver Willis @owillis http://oliverwillis.com