Sunday, September 13, 2015
Which way for the Bernie Sanders campaign? Is there a "Plan B?"
In addition to a couple problems which could easily be overcome with a little compromise and many ambiguities in his positions which are leaving many activists leery in coming to support him, Bernie Sanders also has a very serious liability which will prohibit him from becoming the next president of the United States: the Democratic Party.
No matter how much support Sanders has and how much enthusiasm there is for him--- both of which I and many other activists share--- Bernie simply can't get the Democratic Party's nomination. He has himself snared in the two-party trap and it is strangling his attempt to become president.
My suggestion to Bernie would be that he reach out to some other socialists and develop a strategy to run as part of some kind of "New Broom" coalition to sweep Washington clean from the crooked and corrupt Wall Street bribed politicians which includes most Democrats and certainly all Republicans.
I would like to see Bernie reach out to even the other liberals like Jill Stein and socialists like Stewart Alexander who ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket and others like Cindy Sheehan and Cynthia McKinney and those like Ramsey Clark and even liberals like Bill Moyers and even the more free-thinking, pro-peace and civil liberties advocates who are conservatives like Wendall Barry. Let these people all put their heads together and see if they can't come up with some kind of "meeting of the minds" to create the kind of coalition that can bring together the historic coalition of liberals, progressives and leftists who have won such important reforms in the past.
There is talk of a write-in campaign for Bernie Sanders should he not get the Democratic Party's nomination, this could turn out to be an important initiative but if Bernie chooses to endorse Hillary Clinton as he has indicated he will do, there is nothing preventing us from running him as a draft candidate for vice-president on a ticket that would conduct a write-in campaign with someone willing to put themselves forward for president.
We definitely need a "Plan B" because "Plan A" doesn't seem to be panning out the way most of Bernie's supporters would like.
Either we want to run Bernie for president, or we don't really care too much what the Democrats have in mind as they try to derail his campaign in the most insidiously manipulative and undemocratic way.
We need to learn from the New Democratic Party in Canada, the Labour Party in Great Britain and the Communist Party in Greece that the working class needs its own political party if we are going to challenge Wall Street for political and economic power.