Stop the whining, Bernie Sanders

Stop whining, Bernie. Your “the establishment is against me” shtick is getting old.

Here’s a novel way to beat back the establishment: Stop losing.

The socialist senator needed a big Super Tuesday string of victories to grab a firm hold of the Democratic nomination but Joe Biden’s early wins were depriving him of that.

Bernie Sanders lost badly to Biden Tuesday in the states of Alabama, Virginia and North Carolina, his second, third and fourth defeats coming on the heels of his South Carolina drubbing.

Biden put up a fight in Massachusetts. And Biden was competitive in Texas, a state he wasn’t given a chance in.

Sanders’ big weakness — his failure to get black voters to join his “revolution” — proved fatal Tuesday night in states like Virginia and North Carolina, with large African American populations. It was the major reason Biden won big in South Carolina and a major reason Biden kept the momentum going on Super Tuesday. Biden won more than six in 10 black voters in Virginia, according to exit polling.

It was also a crushing night for former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who dumped a half-billion dollars of his own fortune into Super Tuesday states. Bloomberg heavily outspent Biden and other competitors in Virginia and was getting trounced.

Sanders was looking for big Super Tuesday victories in California and Texas, but it clearly was not the night he was hoping for.

Biden’s remarkable political comeback from the dead means it’s going to be a two-person race from now on, and it’s likely to get bloody in the days and weeks ahead — possibly heading for a contested convention.

Leading up to the primaries in 14 states on Tuesday, Sanders complained that Democrats were trying to rig the election against him, this time resorting to the dreaded third person — a sure sign of inflated ego. The Sanders campaign continued its whining on Tuesday.

“The political establishment has made their choice: Anybody but Bernie Sanders,” campaign manager Faiz Shakir wrote in a fundraising email. “The truth is, we’ve always known we were taking on the entire damn 1 percent of this country. But we have something they do not have: people. Lots and lots of people.”

Yeah, Bernie won his home state of Vermont. Big deal.

Where Sanders really needed to crush Biden was in Virginia — a swing state with large populations of non-white voters, as well as rural, white voters that Sanders appeals to.

But the Biden surge kept that from happening, and there’s evidence that Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar’s endorsements helped the former vice president at the polls in other states.

“I had liked Pete,” said Brooke Allen, a West Roxbury voter. “I ended up voting Biden.”

But there was one endorsement Biden didn’t get.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh took a pass on Super Tuesday, refusing to endorse his buddy Biden or home-state favorite Warren.

A Walsh spokeswoman wouldn’t even tell who the mayor voted for.

“The campaign has no comment,” Walsh spokeswoman Megan Costello said.

Walsh commands a strong organization in Boston and could have unleashed his forces in favor of one of the candidates, but that never materialized.

Warren, meanwhile, appeared to be suffering another miserable night at the polls, facing a tough fight even in her home state of Massachusetts.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2Tlo43b