"Unelectable" ?

Too many of the USA's Democrats and so-called "progressives" get right up my nose. Some of them are even trying to undermine the current push for change by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. They whine that he's "unelectable", too old, too white, too socialist, not good enough on such and such platform...and so on. Don't they realise that by declaring him "unelectable" they are doing disservice to the very stances and policies he stands for - and which they themselves are supposed to stand for?

"Unelectable"? He'll only be unelectable if enough of us don't vote for him. Perhaps that's what the "unelectable" brigade wants. If the word unelectable is repeated widely and often enough in connection with Sanders, that's what he'll become. I have to conclude that these detractors simply do not want the changes they profess to want. I do seriously wonder whether many so-called progressives are really conservatives in disguise - Trojan horses.

During US election campaigns those candidates who are labelled "unelectable" can become that way by a deliberate, orchestrated repetition of that label loudly and often. Every time someone refers to Sanders as "unelectable" or a "long-shot" it's tantamount to an outright attack on his campaign.

"He's unelectable"...then will follow something along the lines of (mix and match):

He's (in hushed tone) a socialist (shock horror!) He is actually a self-termed Democratic Socialist - different animal altogether.

He's too old (ageist)

He's Jewish (racist)

He doesn't look presidential - what does a president look like?

They cannot say his poll numbers are low - they are not and are still climbing.

They cannot say he can't raise money - he's doing so, all the time, from small donations.

They cannot say he doesn't have name recognition - if someone doesn't know who he is by now they've been asleep for the past few months. It has been pointed out that Sanders is doing better than Barack Obama was in early fall 2007 - around the same time in the 2008 race for the presidency.

Nobody can say with any certainty that "He can't win". If We The People truly seek change, we'd better stop listening and reading about Sanders being "unelectable". After all, that's just a term tossed around by paid and amateur pundits. We have to get ourselves out of our communal stupor and support him - all the way to the presidency!

Words from a very good long piece by William Kaufman at Counterpunch (where the majority of articles on Bernie recently have been slyly or openly negative):
The Sanders Paradox: a Brief for Bernie

Sanders’s campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands and issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary Americans: $15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights; improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social Security; revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewables to combat climate change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an end to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate groups; free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on. If realized in the aggregate, these demands would challenge the neoliberal logic of the prevailing order.

Do, please, go read the whole article.