Now That He'll Probably Lose the Delegate Count, Sanders Supports Superdelegates Voting Against the Voters' Wills

Cartoon by Steve Sack

Remember the superdelegate stink, in which Sanders supporters furiously* yelled into the Internet that superdelegates must be required to adhere to the will of the voters? There was a Moveon petition that ended up in my feed easily two dozen times, although it turned out to not be a particularly popular petition.

The problem was that they believed that Sanders would win the primaries but lose the nomination because Clinton "purchased" the support of superdelegates, which would be against the law but is perfectly reasonable to assume was committed hundreds of times by a woman under harassment levels of "investigation" while leaving no evidence of any misdeeds. The reality is that she "purchased" them by helping the party, helping the downmarket election campaigns, and spending 4 decades of activism working with their rights organizations, unlike Sanders. Such a terrible, terrible woman. I can't imagine why so many people believe that she's a criminal based on the word of obviously lying white dudes who have found no evidence. Oh wait. Ha ha.

For an antonym of work

Now it's fairly sure that Clinton will win the (not super) delegate vote, so much so that the Sanders Cheerleading Team's "Sanders Can Still Do This" articles now cheer for a bit about white voter percentages in the remaining states ("hooray for white people!"), and then do some actual math that they explain makes a win difficult and unlikely. So it was a reasonable for Rachel Maddow to ask Sanders whether his stance on superdelegates had changed since it started to look like he would lose the delegate fight. Thankfully, she did not allow Sanders to deflect the question during his interview, which he tried to do. Why?

Because now, he believes that superdelegates should be able to vote for who they want. People have framed this as allowing him to woo superdelegates and get them to vote for him even if he loses the delegate fight and the popular vote, because he wants to win. At least that's the way that the articles framed the issue. As usual, I have a slightly different, Occam's Razor based stance.

You see, this year, Bernie Sanders became a superdelegate. He has to allow for superdelegates to "vote their hearts" instead of the "will of the voters" if he is losing, or he couldn't vote for himself. In what should be a surprise to no one, he has stated that he will vote for himself. Anyone would. That's a completely reasonable thing for someone to do.

Cartoon by A F Branco

While his stance is hypocritical (if we assume that he personally argued against superdelegates voting against the will of the voters like his campaign and his supporters did*2), he knew that he had already publicly pledged to vote for himself. Had he answered that superdelegates should be required to adhere to the will of the voters, Maddow could have pointed to his pledge to vote for himself and caught him red handed on camera.

I don't think he's going to launch a superdelegate campaign to try to win. That would be work and he's proud of how little work he's done to win while still being successful. I'm not even convinced that he ran to win, although I suspect that he ran thinking that he could take advantage of his gender like he has in the past*3. His wins have been the result of sexism, the long and sexist GOP campaign against Hillary Clinton, and his staunch online supporters who write articles about how terrible Clinton is*4 and how Sanders is so much better, which they do by omitting relevant facts.

Cartoon by Ruben Bolling

So, Sanders fans who support superdelegates voting "the will of the voters," does that mean that if Clinton wins the most delegates that Sanders shouldn't be allowed to vote for himself? Or are you willing to admit that you were just throwing a tantrum*5 because you weren't getting your way?

*And by furiously, I mean, I got attacked by someone that I know as "opposing democracy" for saying that Clinton earned her superdelegates through decades of work and fulfilling her contract with the DNC that Sanders signed but refused to fulfill, and that people don't get to change the agreed upon rules in the middle of an election to void the work of the woman in favor of the man who has proudly refused to do the work. And then I was unfriended because I'm such a terrible person, says the guy who called me a traitor for siding with Sanders on the Iraq War and for questioning a President during wartime, which was fine when he and his friends did it to Obama. (He recently went to college, got some critical thinking skills, and switched parties, but critical thinking is still very new to him.) I'm such a horrific, informed, logical, consistent person who doesn't routinely insult people's patriotism for disagreeing with me. It's a huge loss for me. LOL

*2 I'm not spending the time to look this up right now because I have two longer posts in progress.

*3 One of the posts in progress is on this.

*4 The hilarious thing about this article is that the author refers to things as "racist dogwhistles against Obama" when they are actually social justice platitudes that are generally supported by race rights activists. For instance, "it was as if Hillary implied 'it took a white man to get blacks to the mountaintop'" is aligned with the extremely common idea that racial equality can only happen when white people stand up to racism, and thus it is white people's job to stand up to racism. It's not an insult towards black people's mountain climbing skills. However, the author imagines that someone else said that "it was as if" Clinton said a phrase that the author invented to be a racist dogwhistle to attribute to Clinton, but accidentally invoked social justice speak instead. Womp womp.

*5 Can I get a "holy shit" for Sanders supporters threatening Clinton superdelegates? Oh right, GooberGate.