It's the morning after the March 15 primaries. And it's "morning in America" for Bernie Sanders.
NOTE! It's not "mourning" for him!
Hillary Clinton barely scraped by him in Illinois and Missouri, two of the three states his followers thought he'd win. But he can still catch Hillary in pledged delegates. Remember that the Democrats allocate delegates proportionately. Where Bernie virtually tied Hillary, as in those three Midwestern states, the Democratic party splits the number of delegates almost evenly. Hillary gets no cigar for being first by a percent or a fraction of a percent. You can't get half a delegate! For all the hootin' and hollerin' last night, she only increased her lead by 57 delegates out of the 792 at stake.
Ahead are such big states as California with a whopping 546 delegates, New York with 291, Pennsylvania with 210, Washington with 118, Oregon with 74 and so forth.
A major hurdle for Sanders has been Donald Trump. The latter has sucked all the air out of the room as far as media goes. Unusually lazy this season, the media has chosen to heap all the attention on Trump for months. By this colossal failure of journalism they have played a major role in turning a two-bit huckster into the biggest thing since their last phoney "celebrity". The sad result is that they virtually denied the American public a chance to know Bernie Sanders or a decent GOP candidate like John Kasich of Ohio.
Trump also hurt Sanders in another way. In order to deny Trump getting a majority of delegates in Ohio's winner-take-all GOP contest, many independents voted for Kasich in the GOP open primary. Exit polls: Democrats, independents flood into Ohio Republican primary (An open primary is one not restricted to voters registered in that party. Opened and closed primaries vary state to state.) Ordinarily many of those same independents would have been voting for Sanders in the Ohio Democratic primary. It was, in fact, independents who created Sanders' upset win in Michigan a couple of weeks ago. Michigan shows that the Sanders political coalition is alive ...
Ohio's new voter ID law also worked against Sanders. It is highly restrictive toward college students much moreso than it is to blacks. Happily the young generation is increasing so rapidly that they will soon take over state governments like Ohio's and repeal such onerous laws.
But for now, let us celebrate that we are witnessing an amazing spectacle in American politics, what could actually be a major episode in its history, i.e. the beginning of a political revolution beyond whether Sanders wins or loses. The Party Crashers - The New Yorker. Bernie Sanders is still a Cinderella story, still in its early chapters. A little balding guy from a little state is scaring the beejeebers out of the biggest political machine in America, one that has been 25 years in the making. And he did it in less than a year, with the internet as his main tool — a young people's tool being used by a 74-year-old! — and he did all this with $5 widow's mites like mine. He's called into action millions of young people from the normal self-absorption of youth.
He has done all this with a campaign manager who owns a comic book store. Meet the Comic Book King Running Bernie Sanders ... But get this! Nothing in those comic books about fantasy super-heroes can match the super-hero story of The Man From Vermont!
Faster than a speeding bullet! Leaps tall buildings at a bound! Catches Hillary Clinton in California!
Ya gotta love it!
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The photo above is of rural Oregon Bernie supporters parading last fall. Oregon too is waiting to give Bernie a boost, and this group has grown and grown since last fall.
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