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Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Time for Bernie to Land the Plane

Matt Yglesias says it's time for Bernie to admit he's lost and drop out.

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/7/11878108/bernie-sanders-lost

This is also the message Bernie is getting from the few Dem Senators who supported him.

"Hillary Clinton decisively defeated Bernie Sanders in the big delegate-rich states of California and New Jersey, and in a rousing, emotional speech last night, she laid claim to a piece of American history as the first woman ever to be the presumptive nominee of a major party. But Sanders is still digging in, and in his own speech last night, he vowed to fight on to the convention, adding: “the struggle continues.”

"In interviews with me, however, two of Sanders’s most important supporters in Congress — Senator Jeff Merkley and Rep. Raul Grijalva, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — said Sanders would have to accept the inevitably of Clinton’s nomination, and begin the process of getting behind her."

“Once a candidate has won a majority of the pledged delegates and a majority of the popular vote, which Secretary Clinton has now done, we have our nominee,” Merkley, who is Sanders’ sole supporter in the Senate, told me. “This is the moment when we need to start bringing parts of the party together so they can go into the convention with locked arms and go out of the convention unified into the general election.”

"Clinton has now won not just a majority of the overall delegates, with super-delegates factored in. She also has easily secured a majority of the pledged delegates, who are allocated proportionally according to the voting in primaries and caucuses. The voting is now all but over, but Sanders is apparently going to continue to try to persuade super-delegates to support him."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/06/08/top-supporters-of-bernie-sanders-gently-tell-him-its-time/

Sure he is. The same Super delegates who he calls part of the corrupt Establishment and who Bernie has even talked to his staff about opposing in primaries are suddenly going to overturn the will of the voters.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2016/06/bitter-bernies-end.html

I looked at this yesterday. Don't let anyone tell you Hillary is a weak candidate or she had a weak primary. Historically she is as strong or stronger than previous primary winners.

http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2016/06/resolved-hillary-clinton-is-not-weak.html

Her margin of victory is comparable to Carter, Dukakis, and her husband-if you add Tsongas and Brown''s numbers together. A truly weak nominee was Mondale who beat Hart by only 2 points and got just 38 percent of the Dem vote.

Dukakis beat Jesse Jackson by 13 but he still had only 42 percent of the total party vote. Carter had a 13 point win while Hillary has a 12 point win. But Carter was a sitting President and Hillary actually has a higher percentage of the party's vote at 55 percent than any of these other previous nominees, even Carter and her husband-Bill had 53 percent, while Carter had 52 percent.

Hillary unlike many previous nominees-Obama, Dukakis, Mondale-has not just a majority of delegates and votes but even pledged delegates.

"The problem for Sanders is that this now requires him to explicitly call on the super-delegates to overturn the will of the voters as expressed in Dem primaries and caucuses. Given that she currently leads among them by 571-48, this would require a massive stampede away from the person who won far more votes."

"Merkley — who is a super-delegate himself — said flatly that Sanders should not pursue this course any longer. “The super-delegates are set aside when you make the judgment that you have a majority of the pledged delegates,” Merkley told me. “I would not support a battle that involves trying to flip super-delegates.”

Remember Merkley is an actual living, breathing, Super delegate. Funny, he doesn't seem like the Devil.

Even better he's one of the few SDs who were supporting Bernie. And even he won't support this.

Grijalva, meanwhile, told me that he expected Sanders to continue trying to win over super-delegates, but only for a limited period of time.

“The reality is unattainable at some point. You deal with that. Bernie is going to deal with this much more rapidly than you think,” said Grijalva, who is also a super-delegate. “At some point, when we’re trying to flip 400 super-delegates, and it’s not gaining traction, I think you have to come to the conclusion that it’s not going to happen. You just move into a different direction. And that different direction is that we begin to try to integrate the party.”

“He’s gonna do the right thing,” Grijalva said.

I do think that Bernie is trying to land the plane. I actually do.

I saw some silver linings in his speech last night. First of all-I didn't expect him to concede. Even Hillary didn't that very night back in 2008, though she did get there soon.

But he didn't attack her, he did focus on beating Donald Trump and he did mention meeting with the President on Thursday and he did talk about 'a gracious call from Secretary Clinton.'

Naturally the crowd booed, but that's another thing.

Jon Favreau who was Obama's speechwriter in 2008-and 2012:

"If Bernie truly intended on contesting the convention, he would've kept attacking Hillary. He didn't. Just needs time to land the plane."

https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/740423498686992384

As a Hillary supporter back in 2008, I was never PUMA. But even I needed the weekend to come to terms with the disappointment of coming so close but just not close enough.

By the following week I was all in with Obama.

I think Bernie gets there, as he's' got nowhere else to go. His money has dried up and the media loses interest soon if he remains a Dead Ender.

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