''Every seat in the theater in LA filled up so Bernie went outside to talk to the people ... ''

[Tom Rinaldo]

309. Fair enough

I have no quarrel with anyone who believes that some other political leaders are or can be more effective at advancing civil rights than Sanders, I may or may not agree in any given instance, but that is an honest and yes important debate to have, especially during a presidential primary. In that instance voters are often asked to choose between two or more generally acceptable choices. View points as to which can be most effective at advancing specific causes are highly relevant in that context.

I will note that I did not raise the matter of the Crime Bill which, as you accurately point out, was a complicated matter. I commented on it only because you posted about it above in what I took to be a criticism of Sanders for voting for it: "No - he was voting for the crime bill and "speaking out" against things while others were doing the heavy lifting". If I misread your meaning there at least grant me that it was easy to reach that conclusion from your comment.

I've watched a lot of primary battles go down by now. I haven't seen any hotly contested one in which candidates and/or supporters of both sides haven't "spun" some issue to make one person look good and the other bad in a less than totally even handed manner. It happened a lot when Obama and Clinton ran against each other also. I accept your point about the attempts to use the "Crime Bill" against Hillary. For anyone who feels all of the people who backed it at the time were wrong to do so, it does not surprise me that Bill would get burdened most for doing so. He was the President of the United States at the time where "the buck" is said to stop. Hillary, however, wasn't.

I also agree with you that others (not Bernie) were doing the heavy lifting on civil rights during the time we speak of, although Sanders did consistently register one of the best voting records on civil rights of anyone in Congress. But I also read things on this thread, (not from you) that strike me as just plane foolish. It was said above that Bernie "fled to Vermont" from New York. No, but he did move there. It is a tiny percentage of those who stand strongly against racial discrimination, black or white, who make that fight the determining factor for where they choose to live their life (leaving aside those who may be forced to move for reasons of their own physical safety). But is is correct to note that some people do just that, go where the need is greatest and the fight is most dire, and those people, of any race, deserve to be considered true heroes for doing so. Granted, Sanders wasn't one of those heroes.

Three things bother me when I stumble upon threads that contain extensive criticism of Sanders. One is the fiction that repeatedly "speaking out" against "wrongs" in favor of positive alternatives is somehow inconsequential. We agree that words do matter so this is not addressed to you. High visibility on an issue is an essential precondition for moving public opinion regarding it. Republicans know this all to well, but unfortunately they practice the art for all the wrong reasons - most recently with constant hammering about "dangerous" immigrants, and attacks on the rule of law under the guise of countering a "deep state conspiracy". It moves the needle in their direction. Frozen out of the White House and out of leadership in both houses of Congress, Democrats need more not less barnstorming Senators carrying a progressive message. Sanders of course is not uniquely capable of doing so. Others do so also, be it Elizabeth Warren or more recently the emergence of Kamala Harris, it's all good - but Bernie Sanders seems to be almost uniquely targeted for so doing.

The corollary to the above complaint of mine is a fixation on whether or not Sanders has anything unique to offer. OK, this can be argued from both sides I suppose. Some Sanders fans get carried away in thinking that he invented progressive thought in America, which clearly he didn't. Nor are his ideas new under the sun. Nor is he always the first person in recent months or years to advocate for them. I doubt there are many issues of significance that anyone born since the turn of the 20th Century is radically breaking new ground on. Maybe internet privacy I suppose, but even that was foreshadowed by the Bill of Rights. FDR stole many of his policies from Socialist presidential candidates who preceded him. So what? FDR helped to successfully move those concepts into the mainstream of political debate at the time, the prerequisite for change. To deny that in some cases Bernie Sanders is effective in doing just that is petty. It does not take credit away from those who preceded him to acknowledge that. Others powerfully decried racial injustice in America long before MLK Jr was born. Thank God for the Giants who precede us all, and for all those who were first to introduce important pieces of legislation. It isn't a zero sum game.

What bothers me most though is a refusal on some people's part to acknowledge the effort some have made to paint Bernie Sanders as being more racist than your average Democratic bear, or at least to be overly dismissive of whatever actual contributions he has made. An OP with this subject line got 52 Recs here last week: "True Colors: Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution, and the Racist Left." True, it didn't literally say Bernie Sanders is a racist. But if someone recites two plus two equals ___, what number springs to mind? Remember when photographs first were published of Bernie Sanders leading a sit in against racism at the University of Chicago? Someone went to a great deal of trouble then to develop an alternate theory of that event, going so far as to convince the University to change the captions associated with those photos in the University archives to remove Bernie Sanders name from those photos and replace it with that of a different student. It took the public intervention of the subsequently famous photographer who took the actual photos, who retained the original photo negatives in their original photo sequencing, before the correct Bernie Sanders caption was restored. It's called politics and all sides practice it to some degree.

I accept that people in good faith have wildly divergent views of Bernie Sanders in some regards. i respect your opinion of him for what it is, an opinion with the same intellectual integrity as mine, just different - but with substantial areas of agreement.