Opinion Democratic Party Leadership Is Moving Away From Bernie Sanders

[PEB]

It really feels like Bernie is becoming more an more irrelevant as the party is moving away from his more progressive ideas on healthcare, education and wealth disparity. He looks less and less like a leader on these issues going into the 2018 and 2020 election cycle. It looks like the DNC been working on this for sometime slowly pushing Bernie into the sidelines and he looks like he is running out of steam trying to get his message out.



Denver Post
"
Their movements reflect competing strategies for establishing their reputations and shaping a party that lacks a clear leader and consistent message in the Trump era"


https://www.denverpost.com/2018/05/20/what-election-2018-means-2020/

 

[Anung Un Rama]

On the contrary. He looks like more of a leader on the important issues while the DNC just flails around hoping Trump and Russia are enough to win them seats and the general. The DNC is trying to disassociate from him because their neoliberal corporatist machinations don't jive with Sander's populist positions.

 

[Ayin]

Was there a time recently when the Democratic Party Leadership was moving TOWARDS Bernie Sanders?

 

[7437]

Thry never supported sanders.

 

[VivaRevolution]

It really feels like Bernie is becoming more an more irrelevant as the party is moving away from his more progressive ideas on healthcare, education and wealth disparity. He looks less and less like a leader on these issues going into the 2018 and 2020 election cycle. It looks like the DNC been working on this for sometime slowly pushing Bernie into the sidelines and he looks like he is running out of steam trying to get his message out.



Denver Post
"
Their movements reflect competing strategies for establishing their reputations and shaping a party that lacks a clear leader and consistent message in the Trump era"


https://www.denverpost.com/2018/05/20/what-election-2018-means-2020/

Lol, his town halls are doing bigger numbers then fox news and CNN.

Wonder if this piece has anything to do with this piece.

Sanders Among Few US Lawmakers to Condemn 'Horrific' Israeli Attacks on Unarmed Gaza Protesters

Though many U.S. lawmakers chose to stay silent on Monday as Israeli forces massacred Palestinian protesters in Gaza, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was among those speaking out to condemn the violence—which Amnesty International warned may amount to "war crimes"—as he also called for the United States government to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, instead of sanctioning the intensification of it.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2...ers to Condemn 'Horrific' Israeli Attacks on%

 

[HomerThompson]

Thry never supported sanders.

Exactly. No more than they were forced to by the people.

"Bernie Sanders was never my friend."

- Kenny Schumer

 

[PEB]

On the contrary. He looks like more of a leader on the important issues while the DNC just flails around hoping Trump and Russia are enough to win them seats and the general. The DNC is trying to disassociate with him because their neoliberal corporatist machinations don't jive with Sander's populist positions.

I almost never see or hear from him so you will have to enlighten me where all this support your talking about because it's not on the general media. There was a time he was unavoidable because he had the DNC in a place they did not want to be in especially on healthcare and education. The party leadership was held to answer to his message about single payer and free education. We almost never hear about this message anymore and he seems tired from fighting to stay in the game.

On network TV I saw Hillary's name mentioned several times where I had to wait nearly 2 hours before his name was mentioned.

 

[PEB]

Thry never supported sanders.

I never said he had support from them but they could not avoid him he represented nearly 55 percent of the party. He was not someone you wanted to avoid because so many Democrats liked his message.

 

[Diamond Jim]

I don’t believe Sanders can be a successful nominee or a leader of the party but he definitely left his mark. Most 2018 candidates are running on a lot of his issues he brought up in 2016. Just need a better messenger IMO.

 

[xcvbn]

The established Democrats are paid too well by their corporate donors to take up any message that hasn't been sent to them in a memo. Not to mention that Bernie and his movement is a direct threat to the way the Democratic party is ran so it's not surprising they and their favorable media outlets ignore him. Too much money is at stake to allow national discussions on transferring wealth from the elite class to the poor and middle classes.

 

[VivaRevolution]

I almost never see or hear from him so you will have to enlighten me where all this support your talking about because it's not on the general media. There was a time he was unavoidable because he had the DNC in a place they did not want to be in especially on healthcare and education. The party leadership was held to answer to his message about single payer and free education. We almost never hear about this message anymore and he seems tired from fighting to stay in the game.

On network TV I saw Hillary's name mentioned several times where I had to wait nearly 2 hours before his name was mentioned.

Bernie Sanders Is Quietly Building a Digital Media Empire

For a brief moment in late October 2016, when Hillary Clinton was surfing on a six-point national lead over Donald Trump and James Comey had yet to dive-bomb the presidential race, the talk of the political class was a set of curious reports suggesting that after losing embarrassingly, Trump could soon pursue his own TV network. The chatter grew loud enough that, just two weeks before Election Day, the candidate had to start publicly fending off rumors about his aspirations of a media venture, for fear that his supporters would lose interest in him just as early voting was getting underway.

“No, I have no interest in Trump TV — I hear it all over the place, I hear it,” he announced to one Cincinnati radio host, clearly reveling in the speculation but straining to get the attention back to the election at hand. “I have a tremendous fan base, I mean, we have a tremendous base, we have the most incredible people. But I just don’t have any interest in that.”

Denials aside, it made some kind of sense. Here was a screw-the-system, longtime student and manipulator of the press who’d just upended one massive institution (a political party) turning his attention to another that he’d spent years rhetorically ripping to shreds (the mass media), just as everyone finally — after all these decades — knew, and would never forget, his name.

The calculation still works. But Donald Trump isn’t the 2016 candidate who’s got a mini-media empire with a dedicated following all figured out. It’s Bernie Sanders.

The Vermont senator, who’s been comparing corporate television programming to drugs and accusing it of creating a “nation of morons” since at least 1979 — and musing to friends about creating an alternative news outlet for at least as long — has spent the last year and a half building something close to a small network out of his office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill.

He understands, but resents, the comparison to the man who’s described the news media as the “enemy of the people.” His take is different, and he has his own plans. “[Am I concerned] that people might see me and Trump saying the same thing? Yes, I am,” Sanders conceded, leaning back in a leather chair in a conference room in his office on a recent Tuesday, as footage of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony one building over played on TVs throughout his office. Wearing his standard uniform — long tie, jacket in need of a few swipes with a lint roller — he launched into the critique now familiar to anyone who’s watched one of his rallies. “My point of view is a very, very different one. My point of view is the corporate media, by definition, is owned by large multinational corporations: their bottom line is to make as much money as they can. They are part of the Establishment. There are issues, there are conflicts of interest in terms of fossil fuel advertising — how they have been very, very weak, in terms of climate change.” Needless to say, the content he produces is not sponsored by advertisers.


Sanders hosts an interview show (“The Bernie Sanders Show”) that he started streaming over Facebook Live on a semi-regular basis after his staff got the idea in February of 2017 to film the senator chatting with the activist Rev. Dr. William Barber. After they posted that simple clip and it earned hundreds of thousands of views with no promotion, they experimented with more seriously producing Sanders’s conversation days later with Bill Nye.


The chat with the Science Guy ended up with 4.5 million views. Sensing an opportunity, the next day Sanders’s aides turned down multiple network TV requests and took his response to Trump’s first address to Congress directly to his Facebook page

Things escalated. Audio recordings of his conversations, repackaged as a podcast, have since occasionally reached near the top of iTunes’ list of popular programs. Sanders’s press staff — three aides, including Armand Aviram, a former producer at NowThis News, and three paid interns — published 550 original short, policy-focused videos on Facebook and Twitter in 2017 alone. And, this year, he has begun experimenting with streaming town-hall-style programs on Facebook. Each of those live events has outdrawn CNN on the night it aired.

“The idea that we can do a town meeting which would get a significantly larger viewing audience than CNN at that time is something I would not have dreamed of in a million years, a few years ago,” Sanders says.

The result is a growing venue for Sanders’s legions of backers, and other curious progressives, to take in tightly curated lefty takes on policy news — one that, increasingly, competes directly with more traditional news outlets for eyeballs. There’s little room for minute-by-minute analysis of White House drama or Robert Mueller’s probe — and no panels full of opining “strategists” — but also little room for dissent. The scale is unmatched by any other politician, inviting obvious questions about whether Sanders plans to pivot it into a massive primary campaign-mobilization machine come 2020. But the mainstream media criticism implicit in the venture also invites obvious comparisons — if equally stark contrasts — to the man crying “Fake news” at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Bernie TV (that’s my shorthand: there’s no one name for the enterprise) is online only, and there are no plans to move it elsewhere, cable or otherwise. There’s no profit scheme — it’s produced using Senate resources — and there’s no plan to expand it beyond social media. But the programming represents by far the most advanced evolutionary stage of Sanders’s longtime goal of finding new ways to get around the traditional media and spread his “political revolution” directly.

Kenneth Pennington, a former Senate staffer who later became the presidential campaign’s digital director, recalled Sanders’s refrain from long before he ramped up the current operation: “‘What we are doing is what the news media should be doing. Our goal is to create the biggest network possible for distributing information about public policy.’”

Sanders’s splashiest offerings are the spare 30-minute interviews with figures like Nye, Al Gore, and Bill de Blasio conducted in a small Senate studio. But the bulk of his programming are the short, tightly produced, and highly shareable videos that cover everything from Trump administration greed and lessons to learn from Canada’s health-care scheme to explainers from his staff (“John Bolton Should Scare Everyone,” says his foreign policy adviser in one recent offering) and real people’s straight-to-camera testimonials about their experiences with health care or tax systems. Only around one-quarter of the videos feature Sanders himself, though each is branded with his name.

It’s been a goal of politicians to get around the press and reach voters directly for as long as the nonpartisan news media and elections have co-existed. Barack Obama’s White House, for one, regularly came under fire for producing slick videos rather than taking questions. Those efforts have intensified as the technology has improved. The Democratic National Committee now has a Facebook Live show and multiple senators have their own podcasts. It’s an attractive model: by more tightly controlling their output, they can avoid challenges from tough questioners altogether. They can also get around the embarrassing slip-ups that sometimes come from being too comfortable with friendly anchors. (Sanders experienced this in 2016 when his 2012 suggestion to a supportive radio host that Obama get a primary challenge resurfaced.) Trump, meanwhile, has mused that running his Twitter account is better than trying to play the press game. “It’s like owning my own newspaper,” he said in 2016. “I have, like, 16, 17 million people. That’s like owning the New York Times.” (He rarely does interviews or press conferences now, and has over 50 million followers.)

Sanders is after something bigger, and he’s getting there, in eye-popping fashion. In its first year, Bernie TV’s viewership soared: His office says his 2017 videos were viewed over 800 million times, led by a clip described as “Here’s what happened when a Republican senator challenged a Canadian doctor on their single-payer health care system,” which has been watched 32 million times.

Two videos from Trump’s inauguration and the next day’s Women’s March each got around 15 million views. Then, when Sanders first televised a town hall on his Medicare for All proposal this January, 1.1 million saw it live, and another 1.6 million tuned in the next morning, a plurality of them men between the ages of 25 and 34, according to his staff. When he hosted a similar event about inequality with Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and Michael Moore in March, 1.7 million watched live, and 2.5 million saw it the next day.

This has never happened before. But most of it emerged without Sanders’s fellow senators paying attention; he rarely coordinates with his colleagues. That’s caused some grumbling among senior Senate staffers who would be happy to see their bosses join Sanders on air, and among others who are nervous that he’s stealthily building a huge operation ahead of a 2020 run.

Sanders himself is open about the central role his media operation would play if he chose to run again (even his closest aides say he hasn’t yet decided). Already, potential opponents are closely studying his programming.

“I would think that any serious political person would be thinking about this,” he said, opening his eyes wide to look around his office, a bit bewildered. “Why would you not?”

“Ultimately, anybody that chooses to run in 2020 will be seeking to build their own audience and production capabilities,” predicted Brian Fallon, Clinton’s press secretary in 2016. “The communications arms of national campaigns will be more like production studios and less devoted to the ability to spin reporters.”

If you buy Sanders’s formulation of What Went Wrong, those campaigns may not have much of a choice if they want to get their message out somehow. His theory of 2016 holds that the corporate media’s inability to focus on long-term issues is a big part of how Trump won in the first place.


“Because people turn on the television, and they’re working longer hours for lower wages, they don’t have health care, their kids can’t afford to go to college, and they’re watching TV: ‘Hey! What about me? You know, I don’t care that Trump fired somebody else today, what about my life or my kids’ lives?’ So what we do, is we look at media in a different sense, we try to figure out what are the issues that impact ordinary people, and how can we provide information to them?”

“And that,” he says, glancing toward his producers in the next room over, where they work in front of large screens, waiting for Sanders to rush through and ask for updates, “is basically what these guys do.”

Those guys’ work amounts to what Sanders has been tilting at for decades, however improbable. The technology just finally made it a bit more possible.

***

Even before he became a national figure, Sanders made his outsized aspirations explicit to his early Senate staff. Prior to running for president, he would regularly pull aside a small group of aides and muse aloud about creating a news agency that focused solely on policy — telling them that he considered his office to be a competitor to the New York Times.

He considered his media operation so central to his broader mission of educating and galvanizing the public that during 2013’s government shutdown he changed Pennington’s official designation from “non-essential” so that Pennington could return from a mandatory furlough to the work of churning out independent content. By then, Sanders’s team was uploading everything he said in public to YouTube, often with little editing, and it tried circumventing traditional press by posting his materials to Reddit, too. Soon, Pennington was issuing regular formal reports to Sanders and other senior staffers that compared the engagement on Sanders’s Facebook page not only to other congressional offices, but to the Times, as well.


Sanders had been building to that ambition since day one of his political career.

When, in 1984, it came time for him to run for a second term, Burlington’s rookie mayor Sanders gathered his close aides and allies, and told them he’d announce his reelection campaign in a new way: with a small imitation newspaper he’d print himself. He’d made no secret of his disgust with the mainstream press (five years earlier, he’d referred to the advertising industry’s use of “Hitlerian principles” in conjunction with TV in a Vanguard Press column), and he was telling friends he was looking for ways to create his own alternative. He soon went multi-platform: He launched a Sunday radio show (“The Mayor Speaks”) and a cable access television show (Bernie Sanders Speaks With the Community), which he would use to interview locals or experts on a relevant topic, to recite poetry, or to rove around Burlington. The seeds of today’s production are visible: In October 1987 — almost exactly 30 years before his interview with Canadian doctor Danielle Martin racked up over 30 million Facebook views — Sanders conducted another long interview with a doctor about the Canadian health-care system. Then, when he got to Washington as a congressman, he regularly produced another program (Eye on Vermont) with his aide Jeff Weaver — 20 years later his presidential campaign manager — that he recorded and sent back to constituents.

The presidential campaign poured gasoline on these long-flickering flames. Sanders’s behind-the-scenes frustration with the mainstream press and desire to create a parallel way to reach millions of peoplemounted as the race intensified, turning by 2016 into openanger about the “Bernie blackout” — a perceived lack of coverage of his campaign and its crowds in the national press, even if local reporters took notice when he touched down in their city. (To Clinton’s side, this claim was laughable: He may not have been getting much press, but little of the coverage he was getting at the time was negative.) His team started livestreaming rallies, which racked up more and more views as he challenged Clinton more directly.


https://www.google.com/amp/amp.nyma...-quietly-building-a-digital-media-empire.html


The revolution will not be televised.

 

[Jack V Savage]

Was there a time recently when the Democratic Party Leadership was moving TOWARDS Bernie Sanders?

There's been a perception since the election that the Sanders wing has gained influence. The messaging of the party has been much further left than it previously had been (for example, with increasing support for single payer or a job guarantee). I don't know how much that reflects Sanders' influence or how much is just a natural tendency for out-of-power parties to be bolder. Compromise (and thus disappointment for the hardcores) is inevitable when the rubber hits the road, but when there is no concern for that, everyone can be an idealist.

 

[bobgeese]

Good, he’s a fraud.

 

[D3thr0n3d K1ng]

Democrats are a corporate party. Of course they won't move towards a social democratic platform. Just because they're not full blown fascists like the GOP doesn't mean they're turning into social democrats.

 

[irish_thug]

The DNC moved away from Bernie during the primary when they stacked the deck in hillary's favour.

 

[Anung Un Rama]

I almost never see or hear from him so you will have to enlighten me where all this support your talking about because it's not on the general media. There was a time he was unavoidable because he had the DNC in a place they did not want to be in especially on healthcare and education. The party leadership was held to answer to his message about single payer and free education. We almost never hear about this message anymore and he seems tired from fighting to stay in the game.

On network TV I saw Hillary's name mentioned several times where I had to wait nearly 2 hours before his name was mentioned.

Of course the MSM isn't going to cover Sanders.
But he's had these town halls lately that have been very well received.

Bernie Sander's Economic Inequality Town Hall Draws 1.7 Million Live Viewers
Bernie Sanders talks universal Medicare, and 1.1 million people click to watch him

Who is watching what Tom Perez has to say?
And why is Hillary's name being mentioned ....

 

[SBJJ]

I actually like Sanders and respect him. But let's be serious, he's a huge pussy. He let the DNC fuck him in the ass and did next to nothing

The appeal of Trump was that he was willing to attack both parties. Bernie is going to need to go after those that are ignoring his popularity or worse yet working against him

 

[VivaRevolution]

And why is Hillary's name being mentioned ....

Who?

Never heard of her.

 

[VivaRevolution]

I actually like Sanders and respect him. But let's be serious, he's a huge pussy. He let the DNC fuck him in the ass and did next to nothing

The appeal of Trump was that he was willing to attack both parties. Bernie is going to need to go after those that are ignoring his popularity or worse yet working against him

I wanted Bernie to fight on the convention floor more then I can explain to you. With that said, he was right not to. They would have destroyed his image for it.

I understand calling him a pussy, but I think it is more accurately described as calling it a strategic retreat.

Bernie really is playing 4-D chess.

 

[Anung Un Rama]

I wanted Bernie to fight on the convention floor more then I can explain to you. With that said, he was right not to. They would have destroyed his image for it.

I understand calling him a pussy, but I think it is more accurately described as calling it a strategic retreat.

Bernie really is playing 4-D chess.

Bernie should have ran 3rd party. It was a huge mistake, imo. Especially considering we still got Trump.
But that is a move that takes gigantic balls. Not making that move may have been a mistake, but it doesn't make him a pussy, or anything close, for not doing it.

edit: actually, I think you're right. If he didn't win and Trump still did win, they would have blamed him for the loss just like they blamed that fascists pig Ralph Nader for W's win. Then we'd have Trump and no hope.