I admit: It’s all speculation.
On April 4th, I wrote on Facebook: “My prediction: the next
President of the United States will be someone who is not yet in the race.
(e.g., Possible alternative Dem ticket: Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.) How
crazy am I?”
This wasn’t just a wild guess. It was based on a few considered
convictions.
The first major conviction is that Bernie Sanders was not going to be
Democratic nominee.
To begin with, the Democratic Party, an institution dedicated to
plutocratic class rule and imperialism, would not allow Bernie Sanders to be
their nominee. The plutocracy will not permit Bernie Sanders to be the CEO of American
and world capitalism, let alone the Commander-in-Chief of the American empire.
Furthermore, Bernie Sanders does not want to play either of those roles.
He entered the race, as his advisors acknowledged to the New York Times, “to spread his political message about a
rigged America rather than do whatever it took to win the nomination,“ and
he has repeatedly pledged to support whomever the Democrats nominate.
Whatever unexpected and undeniable success his campaign has had, it’s a
“political revolution” that will be limited to exerting pressure on the Democratic
Party and its eventual nominee. One can complain that it’s been blocked by electoral
hijinks or by the anti-democratic superdelegates, but those sores have been
festering for a long time in the party Bernie chose to run in. At this point,
if Hillary comes to the convention with one more pledged delegate and more
popular votes than Bernie—which she will—she will win fair and democratically
square—and any attempt by him to use superdelegates against her would
contradict his own erstwhile complaints about them. At any rate, those
supredelegates were put in place expressly to prevent anyone like him from
becoming the nominee, and are not going to be persuaded, even by wonderful
arguments based on electoral logic, to forsake their duty. Which of these folks is
going to switch to Bernie because polls show he’d do better against Trump in
the general?
