The Nation: Why Bernie Sanders’s Win in Michigan Is Huge
Couldn't the headline say YUGE?
The results prove it’s far too early to declare the nomination contest over.
http://www.thenation.com/article/why-bernie-sanderss-win-in-michigan-is-huge/
Bernie Sanders supporters rally in Miami on March 8, the day of the Michigan primary. (AP Photo/Alan Diaz)
By D.D. Guttenplan Twitter TODAY 8:00 AM
So that wasn’t supposed to happen. Like many Sanders supporters, I spent the weekend bracing myself for Michigan. And not in a good way. The most recent poll had Clinton ahead by 27 points. The RealClearPolitics average had her winning by 21 points. Even the most optimistic poll had Sanders trailing by 13 points. And that was just the maths.
There was also the fact that Clinton, to her credit, responded early and effectively to the lead poisoning crisis in Flint. Plus the way Sanders seemed to shoot himself in the foot in the last debate by appearing to suggest no white voters lived in poverty—or that all blacks lived in “the ghetto.” Of course that wasn’t what he actually said, but what he did say was easily spun against him, and while that isn’t fair, it is politics. As was, Clinton’s supporters would argue, her claim that Sanders “voted against the money that ended up saving the auto industry”—by itself no more than an artful deception, but coupled with her statement that Sanders “was against the auto bailout” an outright lie. Which Sanders then had to waste precious time—and advertising money—on the eve of the vote rebutting. Call me cynical, but I figured it would probably work, and prepared myself for yet another round of Clinton’s media megaphones singing “Let’s Bury Bernie” this morning.
Instead we have a vivid reminder of how much the Sanders message matters. And why it remains far too early to declare the nomination contest over. As FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten admits, to find an upset on the same scale as what Sanders achieved in Michigan you’d have to go back over 30 years. Those polls that put Illinois and Ohio out of Sanders’s reach look a lot less reliable today. And if Sanders wins in those states, it won’t be his viability as a candidate that is in question.
Forestalling that possibility was what last week’s rash of premature defeatism was all about. That, and cutting the legs off the threat to the business-as-usual corporate sock puppetry posed by the kind of mobilized, organized, militant electorate that carried Sanders to victory in Michigan. Because the longer Sanders stays competitive, and the more delegates he brings to the convention, the harder it will be for any nominee—or Democrats further down the ticket—to “pivot” away from pledges to break up big banks, tear up TPP, block pipelines like Keystone, end voter suppression, prosecute both Wall Street fraud and police violence, and prevent corporations from stashing their profits in overseas tax havens. Which, though it may not add up to a political revolution, wouldn’t be a bad start.
FULL story at link.
= new reply since forum marked as read
we also need to say clearly that the Hillary supporters need to stop denigrating Bernie as a racist or sexist when he clearly isn’t, stop condescending to his supporters for wanting fundamental, rather than cosmetic, change to our rigged economy and corrupt politics, and stop using the kind of underhanded, Nixonian tactics that seem designed to keep Sanders voters home in November."
GO BERNIE!!!!!!!!!!!! 
and the platform and the election----------------------not lackey's from oligarchies and others that are on the take and to all of those young folks and others going to the convention in Philly this summer to represent you and me, and the entire collective called "we"----------------it is our message for those of us that can't be there -------------------(you are correct, and there are million of us that think and feel the same way as you do) -----------------its called trust and we want accountability, for far to long we have been told one thing and then given another--------------enough is enough
Honk----------------for a political revolution Bernie 2016
