On the road with Bernie: Taibbi looks at the Sanders campaign
"candidate Trump in 2015-16 often borrowed from Sanders-esque critiques about corporate power; he even regularly made it a point to praise Sanders in speeches."
"But Sanders no longer has the breeze of low expectations at his back. What was merely a lack of institutional support in 2016 has transformed into active institutional opposition. Among the donor class, his own party’s leadership and in most of the commercial media, he is roundly despised. He is blamed often for Clinton’s 2016 loss, and denounced as a dangerous socialist, a narcissist obstructionist, even the Kremlin’s candidate. (Multiple Washington Post columns have claimed Vladimir Putin is pushing the Sanders campaign in order to help “elect Trump.”) "
" He and many members of his staff also believe that on issues like climate change, the country can’t afford to wait out either another Republican or corporate-backed Democratic presidency. Ultimately, the calculation was no more message campaigns. Sanders not only has to run, he has to run and win."
"Of course, to win, he’d essentially have to overturn the whole political system — two parties, big-dollar donors and the media. "
" we’re not just taking on Donald Trump. We’re also taking on the corporate establishment, the Democratic establishment, the drug companies, the health insurance companies, Wall Street. . . ."
"The Sanders campaign’s point of view is that Bernie’s voters are the party’s authentic base, or at least were, once upon a time. "
"They believe Democrats don’t have a problem with working-class white voters, but a problem with working-class voters of all races and backgrounds — lost to the party over the years due to frustrations with free-trade policies, a 50-year decline in real wages, disillusionment with bipartisan-supported foreign wars and their costs for military families, failure to regulate an increasingly exploitative financial-services sector, exploding incarceration rates "
"it is about using the vote to forcibly detach the Democratic Party from corporate donors, to return it to its roots as a labor-dominated organization."
" an all-labor, no-corporate-money run is the closest thing to guerrilla politics you’ll see on an American campaign trail. It couldn’t actually work, could it?"
" Biden is exactly the sort of Democrat that for decades has traded working-class votes for employer-class donations. "
"Biden’s schizoid approach is a perfect expression of the counterintuitive electoral dynamic between unions and Democrats. "
"I think there are a few people who watched who are working two to three jobs, who have nothing set aside for retirement, and they’re wondering: Who cares about us? "
"both the strength and weakness of Sanders is his relentless sameness."
"What Turner says about Sanders never being bought off is true, if only because if the senator tried to sell out, he wouldn’t know where to start and would suck at it. He’s also never tried shutting up, and probably couldn’t do that, either."
"For Sanders to win, all his voters have to do is overthrow basically the entire political system, which would be ridiculous except that all the other options may be worse: "
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/bernie-sanders-campaign-trail-taibbi-833386/sidd