With new polls showing Joe Biden possibly winning in South Carolina tomorrow, suddenly the Democratic Party nomination contest is unsettled again. Oddsmakers and polls in other states still say Crazy Bernie is going to clean up next week on Super Tuesday, but because of the crazy proportional delegate rules the Democrats are using the contest might go to a contested convention. And the primal screams of the Democratic Party establishment are becoming more and more audible from under the pillows they are pressing to their faces.
“Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders,” the New York Times reported earlier this week. It is always fun to read the Times when its “reporting” is just a thinly disguised memo to the Democratic Party to get its act together:
Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. . . Bill Clinton, in calls with old friends, vents about the party getting wiped out in the general election. . .
In a reflection of the establishment’s wariness about Mr. Sanders, only nine of the 93 superdelegates interviewed said that Mr. Sanders should become the nominee purely on the basis of arriving at the convention with a plurality, if he was short of a majority.
A contested convention that denies Bernie the nomination will be a disaster for Democrats. But it may be a price they are willing to pay. Chris Matthews has openly speculated that Democrats might be better off losing this election even to Trump if it means staving off the disaster of a Bernie nomination.
Meanwhile, Times “conservative” columnist David Brooks, who has previously written that he’d vote for Lizzie Warren over Trump, offers his own primal scream, declaring that even NeverTrumpers are also BanishBernie:
Bernie Sanders is not a liberal Democrat. He’s what replaces liberal Democrats. . . Populists like Sanders speak as if the whole system is irredeemably corrupt. Sanders was a useless House member and has been a marginal senator because he doesn’t operate within this system or believe in this theory of change. . . He believes in revolutionary mass mobilization and, once an election has been won, rule by majoritarian domination. . .
Sanders also claims he’s just trying to import the Scandinavian model, which is believable if you know nothing about Scandinavia or what Sanders is proposing. Those countries do have generous welfare states, but they can afford them because they understand how free market capitalism works, with fewer regulations on business creation and free trade.
Chaser, just for the sheer fun of it (just 17 seconds):
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.