Summary: Bernie Sanders held a rally in Cathedral city today. Though our local Gannett newspaper has already given it fawning coverage, which supports an inference of less than honorable motivations given the near certainty of their endorsement of Donald Trump in the general election, the rally permits us to draw certain entrances about Senator Sanders’s campaign. Both insurgent campaigns, that of Donald Trump and that of Bernie Sanders, are much alike. Bernie Sanders supporters’ aggressive rudeness has become almost proverbial, while Donald Trump demonstrates that he is a major-league asshole every time he opens his mouth. The Cathedral City rally is too little, too late. Sanders doesn’t have the faculty his opponent does for retail politics, for working an intimate gathering and coming out with new supporters who will carry her message to every corner of the country. Indeed, Sanders’s whole campaign has been curiously tone deaf on issues of race, coming across as ham-fisted and condescending. His choice of surrogates of color is also remarkably poor. The Sanders campaign at this stage has started to resemble the Titanic. Sailing into the open ocean brilliantly illuminated, steaming toward inevitable doom.
Bernie Sanders came to Cathedral City today.
The Desert Sun’s somewhat fawning coverage of the Bernard Sanders rally at Cathedral City’s Big League Dreams sports facility claimed that the rally had drawn “thousands.” My own sources tell me the number was right around 1,000, certainly not the kind of vast number that the Sanders campaign or its eager propagandists might want to put out. Of course, The Desert Sun has not been known to traffic in truthful reporting. Given that the Desert Sun has not endorsed a Democrat for president in recent memory, one may be excused for a cynical view that the Desert Sun’s reportage of the event was designed to bolster Bernie Sanders’ primary campaign in the hopes of setting up a weaker candidate against Donald Trump in the general election. For we know that the Desert Sun will engage in all kinds of contortions of reasoning in order to justify endorsing Donald Trump, as Gannett corporate has no doubt instructed it to do.
It does not matter that, six months out, polling shows Sanders defeating Trump. Sanders has not yet been vetted, and we know that if Sanders is in fact the Democratic nominee he will be walking into a torrent of abuse, redbaiting, and personal invective from Donald Trump and his enablers.
Yet, the irony is how much alike Trump and Sanders really are. Indeed, one observer, writing from the safe vantage point of Ireland, referred to them as “Donald Sanders and Bernard Trump, the Tweedledum and Tweedledumber” of the 2016 presidential season. And indeed, both insurgent campaigns are virtually indistinguishable. Now the truth is, there are some distinct contrasts: Bernie Sanders is more of a gentleman, but to this Hillary Clinton supporter, he fails the character test because of the way in which he enables bad behavior by his supporters. Indeed, the bad behavior of Sanders supporters has become almost proverbial during this campaign. Indeed, in this blog, I commented on this political phenomenon as long ago as June of last year in a piece entitled “Bernie Sanders Woman Problem.” Indeed, the belligerence of the Sanders “True Believers” has been remarked upon in numerous print and digital media outlets since then. So, too, has been the penchant of the Sanders campaign for indulging/engaging in magical thinking.
The Trump campaign differs from that of Bernard Sanders in the most obvious way that Donald Trump is himself a major-league asshole. Indeed, he is so thin-skinned and vindictive an asshole that the inevitable Hillary Clinton attack ads almost begin to write themselves. He is truly a bull who brings his own china shop with them, as his classless performance when he attacked New Mexico Republican Gov. Susanna Martinez, who has not seen fit to endorse him, demonstrates. Indeed, a great many people, your blogger included, have resolved to quit the United States if he is elected. Though, the truth be told, I am sure, given the vindictively assholish nature of the man, his national security apparatus would aggressively hound every American who does not see fit to live in Donald Trump’s America.
Both insurgent campaigns have made themselves obnoxious to reasonable people. Thus, when Bernie came to Cathedral City, I did not see fit to attend his event. As a committed supporter of Sec. Clinton, I not only did not want to take away some Sanders supporters’ opportunity to hear the Vermont Senator rile the crowd, but I also had no desire to associate with a mob. Now certain Sanders supporters have tried to make much of the fact that Sanders routinely addresses large crowds. Hillary, by contrast, prefers smaller, more intimate gatherings where she can work the magic of one on one or small group outreach, as her husband has been able to do so brilliantly.
Though the Sanders campaign spins the Senator’s faculty for riling up a crowd as sign of his ineluctable greatness and of his divine right entitlement to the nomination, I tend to take issue with such interpretations. For what I divine from Senator Sanders’ preference for a large rallies is a kind of Marxist disdain for the people he’s talking to. It strikes me that Bernie Sanders has great love for “The Masses” in the abstract, but that he doesn’t much care for individuals. As the English writer Edna St. Vincent Millay put it: “I love humanity and hate people.” In short, the senator comes across as a man who tolerates large crowds, but where two or three are gathered together would find it difficult to control his urge to yell “you kids get off my lawn!”
And so the Sanders campaign, with its preference for large set pieces that, in another time, could have been filmed by Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite propaganda filmmaker, comes at last to Cathedral City. The Senator will get some fawning coverage from the Desert Sun, as well as from some of the mainstream media. Certain pro-Sanders websites will also fall all over themselves to present this rally as some kind of history-making, Earth-shattering, “how-could-you-not-have-been-there” event. No doubt Sanders True Believers will see it in that light.
But as the Sanders campaign approaches endgame, people should think twice about whether to get on board. Local elected officials should ask themselves whether, if polling data are correct in predicting a Hillary Clinton victory in California, being seen at a Sanders rally might not be political kryptonite. Certainly, councilmember Greg Pettis and Assembly hopeful Greg Rodriguez flirt with Bernard Sanders at their own risk. If they are thinking of supporting the Vermont Senator at this late hour, he should consider the possibility that they are boarding the Titanic at her last port of call before venturing out into the open Atlantic, and whether there are icebergs between Titanic and her destination.
For the Secretary’s lead is well-nigh insurmountable. For Bernard Sanders to stage a comeback and grab the nomination away from Hillary Clinton would involve a series of miraculous events whose likelihood is infinitesimally small. Their likelihood is infinitesimally small in part because Bernard Sanders cannot command the support of the communities of color who will drive the Democratic momentum in this election. Bernie Sanders does well in small, largely white, caucus states. The math shows he does not do nearly so well in a large, diverse, primary states where there are significant communities of color. In trying to discount the legitimacy of Sec. Clinton’s victories in those large, diverse, primary states with significant communities of color, Senator Sanders has displayed a kind of tone deafness that causes many of us to wonder whether he is not in fact dog whistling to that part of the Democratic electorate which doesn’t feel comfortable around people of color.
As I noted in March, in a post entitled “The Unbearable Whiteness of #FeelingtheBern,” the Sanders campaign has been largely a monochromatic, white phenomenon. His surrogates of color have themselves been a lightning rods of controversy, including former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner and perennial academic disturber of the peace Cornel West, who is amusing to listen to but about as congenial as the notorious Ward Churchill, whose airy dismissal of the victims of the 9/11 bombing as “little Eichmanns” earned him a place in infamy. Even when the Sanders campaign attempts to recruit surrogates of color, their efforts seem curiously tone deaf. Writing in the Washington Post on January 22 of this year, columnist Jonathan Capehart observed that “Cornel West hurts Bernie Sanders,” suggesting that the Sanders outreach to the African-American community has been ham-fisted at best and condescending at worst. Readers can follow the link here: (https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/01/22/how-cornel-west-hurts-bernie-sanders/)
For the reality, uncomfortable as it may be to Senator Sanders’s unbearably white supporters, is that this election will be decided by the communities of color that now represent a plurality of the American electorate. It’s no longer possible to write off African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, first peoples, or queerfolk. Hillary Clinton seems to have got that memo rather better than Bernard Sanders. His visit to Cathedral city is too little, too late, and reflects only his thinly concealed disdain for The Masses on which he stakes the fading hopes of his insurgent campaign.
