Up until then, find out who your delegates and superdelegates are, and lobby them to vote for the candidate who polls best against Donald Trump. Remind them that states Clinton won, like Arizona, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York were rife with irregularities, with two of those primary results still under investigation for possible election fraud. Clinton's wins in Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Missouri were all ties in which she split delegates evenly with Sanders, putting her from 28 wins to 23 wins and 5 ties, while Sanders has won 22 states. I think it's accurate to say claims of Clinton being the strongest general election candidate are highly questionable.
Additionally, over 116,000 Sanders supporters who want him to run through November as an independent have signed a petition calling on him to do just that. As Trump's campaign continues its plummeting in the polls, Sanders may have enough justification -- along with Clinton's baggage of a possible federal indictment -- to continue his campaign. He's proven that he can out-raise the most prolific fundraiser in Democratic Party history for three months in a row with online donations of $27 apiece, overcome a 60-point deficit in national polls to poll ahead of Clinton several times, and win nearly half of all primaries and caucuses despite astonishingly little coverage from the media.
Should Sanders run as an independent, he would only need roughly 35 to 40 percent of the vote in a five-way race (when including the Libertarian and Green tickets) in a given state. And unlike Democratic primaries, the general election is open to all independents, a majority of whom prefer Sanders over Clinton or Trump. Also, electoral votes aren't proportionally awarded, so if Sanders wins a majority in any state, he takes all of its electoral college votes. When looking at the math, it's possible for Sanders to win 270 electoral college votes. Even when writing off all of the states that don't allow write-in votes (Arkansas, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Oklahoma, or South Dakota), and deep-red states in the South and the Great Plains, that still leaves 494 electoral votes available for the taking. Clinton and Trump are two of the most disliked presumptive nominees in history, and Sanders is favored by a majority of people. He could very possibly be the first independent president in history.
I guess that would be a long-winded way of saying Bernie's supporters should feel justified in pushing for an independent presidential run after the convention.
JB: Interesting scenario, Tom. I'd like to go back to the press collusion in tipping an already unlevel playing field. Can you give us a historical perspective? Has this been done before? Is this a totally new phenomenon? Can you fill in the picture for us?
TC: We all remember the way the media railroaded Bill Bradley in 2000, as he was the only candidate who had a chance at winning calling for universal healthcare and getting big money out of politics. They did the same thing to Howard Dean in 2004, especially when he started picking up steam and becoming a real threat to the Democratic establishment. You could make the case that had Bradley and Dean been the nominees in 2000 and 2004, the Republicans would have lost badly. And Dennis Kucinich was no exception in 2008, when the media completely blew him off to cover Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, neither of whom embody the values Kucinich campaigned on. But I think the 2016 primary is the first time there's been such a coordinated effort on behalf of the media and the party bosses to rally behind one candidate from such an early stage. It really is unprecedented.
I think you'd have to go all the way back to 1968 to come anywhere near the corruption seen within the Democratic Party today. After RFK's assassination, Eugene McCarthy was the only real anti-war alternative to Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic establishment's favored candidate, who favored expanding US presence in Vietnam. Of course, 1968 was slightly different, since Humphrey jumped in the race at the last minute after LBJ dropped out, and people were rightly upset that party bosses wanted Humphrey despite not actually winning any real races. Of course, I'm sure your readers are familiar with what happened next -- party bosses met behind closed doors at the convention and nominated Humphrey, who lost by over 100 electoral votes to Nixon.
However, 2016 is similar to 1968 in a lot of ways. On one hand you have a grassroots candidate who not only opposes foreign wars, but who opposes the entrenched system of standard pay-for-play Washington politics and vows to upend it. On the other, you have an establishment candidate who secured the support of some 400 superdelegates -- almost 10 percent of the entire delegate vote -- over six months before the first primary and caucus ballots were cast, and before anyone else entered the race. After Guccifer's leak, we have proof that the media quickly rallied to the side of that candidate to project an aura of inevitability, again, months before anyone actually voted. And barring something completely unexpected, it looks as if the establishment candidate, who has the Sword of Damocles of a federal investigation hanging over her head, will be nominated with the help of Democratic party bosses to push her over the line. And as the saying goes, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
JB: In all this, has anyone - Hillary, her staffers, the DNC, the corporate press - actually done anything illegal, committed any crime/s?
TC: Not at all, and that's the crime of it. The DNC is perfectly within their legal rights to feed talking points to the media, and the media is completely allowed to cooperate. If lying in the media was a crime, as Debbie Wasserman Schultz has done on multiple occasions when claiming the DNC was neutral throughout the primaries, then there would certainly be ample case to file charges. But until there's actually a law on the books preventing people from knowingly spreading lies on the media to misinform the public, nothing will be done.
JB: I guess this is the bottom line: Where does that leave us, the public? Don't we deserve a press that protects and informs us? Wasn't that why the Fourth Estate received the unique privileges it did? And how do we go forward, knowing that the media deliberately (and dare I say maliciously?) misled us regarding something of huge national importance? How can we trust anything they say, especially about the elections? What's our recourse?
TC: That's an easy one. Stop giving the media your money. By that, I mean don't just boycott cable TV news, but stop going to their websites. If you have to read an article from a site that has a paywall, like the New York Times or the Washington Post, use incognito browsing. If you have to click on a CNN/MSNBC/FOX link, use ad-blocking software so they don't make any money from your visit. Don't share links from their sites on social media, and don't retweet their tweets.
But that's not enough -- we have to give our money to honest media. Donate to honest, alternative news sites like OpEdNews, of course, and also Democracy Now, Jacobin Magazine, Counterpunch, Truthout, and the Real News Network. When reading articles from independent media outlets like OpEdNews.com and USUncut.com, turn off your ad-blocking software, and click on ads. Share their links on social media, and encouraging your friends to do the same. If enough people, for enough time, actively work to divest from big media and put their money in alternative media, we can take back the Fourth Estate.
JB: All good suggestions. In the meantime, how do we get the word out about all of the collusion and deceit? Since many people still read conventional newspapers, watch TV news and depend, one way or another, on corporate media coverage, how do we spread the word about what you've learned through these fortuitously timed leaks?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
5
5
5
