Politics –
Sanders Was His Own Worst Enemy

The Bernie Sanders revolution is virtually all but over. As political pundits read the campaign its last rites and prepare for an autopsy to determine what went wrong, many are beginning to come to the same conclusion regarding the cause of death:

BERNIE SANDERS!

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According to Internet site Politico, Sanders ignored the advice of his advisors and made the race a personal fight. There were no strategists advising him to do so and no burn-it-all-down aides egging him to continue on. At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, was Bernie himself.

It was Sanders who made the choice to blame the Democratic Party for the melee at the Nevada Democratic convention. It was Sanders who made the choice to personally go after DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz after his wife read him a transcript of her supposedly blasting him on television.  It was Sanders who chose to initiate a knife fight by calling Hillary Clinton unqualified. Aides are convinced these choices not only pulled the bottom out of any hopes of winning the New York primary, but it basically ruined their last real chance of turning a losing primary run around.

“Every time Sanders got into a knife fight,” an aide said, “we ended up losing.”

It was Sanders who personally rewrote his campaign manager’s shorter statement after the chaos at the Nevada state party convention, so as to make the statement more combative and allow him to blame the political establishment for inciting the violence.

An internal email obtained by Politico shed light on that decision:

“I don’t know who advised him that this was the right route to take, but we are now actively destroying what Bernie worked so hard to build over the last year just to pick up two f-cking delegates in a state he lost,” rapid response director Mike Casca said in the email.

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When the candidate appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” and was asked to provide a question to ask Donald Trump, it was Sanders who made the lone decision challenging the Republican nominee to a debate.

Additionally, top strategists Jeff Weaver and Tad Devine begged the senator to spend on TV ads, but he refused and demanded that the campaign bank account never go below $10 million.  “Sanders owns nearly every major decision, right down to the bills,” a strategist said.

Aides admit they’ve known for weeks, if not months, that Bernie wasn’t going to win the nomination, yet the candidate made it a personal mission to remain in the race even if it damned the party.

According to Politico, the campaign has been fractured for some time. Numerous divisions exist within the inner workings of the campaign — between the dead-enders and the work-it-out crowds, between the younger aides who think he got off message while the consultants got rich and obsessed with Beltway-style superdelegate math, and between the more experienced staffers who think the kids got way too high on their sense of the difference between a movement and an actual campaign.

Still, it was Sanders himself who was filled with resentment, who found himself increasingly on edge, who continuously felt as though he was disrespected — all while holding on in his head to the crazy notion that somehow, Hillary Clinton would falter and the superdelegates would magically race to anoint him savior of the Democratic Party.

Now, Bernie Sanders is looking for a way to bow out of the race without further shattering his ego and hurt personal feelings.

Still, the fact remains: the day Bernie Sanders made his campaign a personal vendetta, is the day his campaign virtually died.

OK WASSUP! discusses politics.  Today’s article:
What went wrong with Bernie Sanders?