Bernie Sanders's "Political Revolution" Can Only Come About if He Abandons the Democrats - See more [View all]

[seabeyond]

Roughly 200,000 volunteers have signed up to help his campaign. Clearly, his message of taking on the billionaire class that owns Washington, making four-year college free for Americans, and breaking up the big banks behind the financial crisis is resonating with everyday folks. If Sanders broke with the Democrats and ran as an independent, most of those volunteers and donors would stick with him. They’re supporters of Bernie, not the Democratic Party.

On one hand, it’s easy to see why Sanders launched his campaign within the Democratic Party. Even though the Vermont senator is a lifelong independent, he’s also a realist who knows that to run a campaign that has a chance of winning a first-past-the-post, winner-take-all race with 270 Electoral College votes, it has to be done within the two-party structure. Candidates from other parties, like the Green Party’s Jill Stein or the Justice Party’s Rocky Anderson, have revolutionary ideas but are forever relegated to outside status by the punditocracy that has trained Americans about who is acceptable to vote for based on dollars raised and pollsters’ rankings. Without Elizabeth Warren in the race, Sanders is the standalone progressive populist in the Democratic primary.

However, running as a Democrat means Sanders is second to Hillary Clinton, who has pledged to raise $2.5 billion this election cycle. To highlight the absurdity of that number, it would be more money raised for just one candidate than the cumulative amount raised by both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012, combined. The fact remains that American elections favor those with more money – candidates with the most campaign cash tend to win nine times out of 10. Clinton will be counting on that deluge of cash to flood the airwaves in her favor and drown out anything Sanders would say. She’s also likely to test Sanders’s populist rhetoric in focus groups for her own campaign, and use the more agreeable points to paint herself as the “reasonable” candidate to shore up enough Democrats to guarantee her the win. Sanders has already pledged to throw his support behind Clinton if she indeed wins the nomination, leading some critics to call him a “sheepdog” used to herd leftist energy into the same Democratic Party that’s let the American people down over and over again.

But if Sanders reclaimed his independent mantle, he would be representing not just Democrats, but the 42 percent of Americans who identify as neither Republican nor Democrat. In poll after poll, there are more Americans who say they’re independent of the two major parties than there are Americans who affiliate with the Democrats (31 percent) or the GOP (25 percent). Sanders would very likely break the 15 percent polling threshold that the Democrat and Republican-controlled Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) uses to silence outside voices from alternative parties and be able to share the stage with the Democratic and Republican nominees.

http://www.occupy.com/article/bernie-sanderss-political-revolution-can-only-come-about-if-he-abandons-democrats

first i have seen of this. anything?