Bernie Just Being Bernie

Jul 18, 2016

Bernie Sanders finally did it. “I am endorsing Hillary Clinton,” he pronounced on July 12th.

Anyone who was surprised by this has been fooling themselves. He was just keeping the commitment he made at the beginning to endorse the Democratic nominee: that is, to bring back all the disaffected people into the Democratic Party fold.

Sanders himself stated, in an article titled Why I endorsed Clinton, “We mobilized over 13 million voters across the country. We won 23 Democratic primary and caucus contests. We had literally hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country.” Now he is telling all of them to vote for Clinton.

For the last 15 months he has been portraying Clinton as the candidate for Wall Street billionaires, doing their bidding. But in his speech endorsing Clinton–with the slogan “Stronger Together” poster in front of him–he redirected those accusations to Trump, saying his proposed tax cuts would be a windfall to wealthy Americans.

This isn’t really anything new for Sanders. It is his standard operating procedure to pretend to have certain policies and then vote the opposite. The war is an obvious example. He claimed he was opposed, but voted for the war in Afghanistan and the budgets that paid for all the other wars.

For all his talk about the gap between the rich and everyone else–he voted for the government bailout of the banks. He supported measures that increased the criminalization of black men. He supported the Senate’s unanimous statement of support for Israel’s attack on Palestinians in Gaza in 2014. In fact, Sanders has voted with the Democratic Party leadership 98% of the time over the course of his political career.

In the end, Sanders led his followers right back into the Democratic Party. The very same party his followers are frustrated and disillusioned by–the party of the wealthy and the banks that Sanders pretends to oppose.