Bernie just plain F'd up.

[garybeck]

He never should have accepted the "socialist" label.

his only hope was to wordsmith it and say "i'm not a socialist. i believe in having more social programs"

he had zero chance of teaching the american public what socialism is and convincing them that's what we need. zero chance.

the american people, by and large, operate on labels.

there will never be a socialist president in our country. let me rephrase that. there will never be a president who accepts the "socialist" label

a democratic socialist is still a socialist
just like a blue car is still a car

he didn't have to change any of his ideas
he didn't have to change any of his plans
he only had to get rid of the label.

most democrats, and many republicans, like his ideas and plans. but too many people will simply not vote for a socialist. never. period.

when people started seeing that he was in the lead for the primary, and we were going to put up a socialist against trump, everyone panicked. and rightfully so. it wasn't because of his ideas. it was because of his label. I was/am one of them who had zero confidence that someone who embraced the socialist label would do well in November.

I like his ideas. I think he would make a good president.

But he made a monumental failure in thinking this would not be a problem. there are a good 50% of even democrats who would vote for someone with the exact same ideas as Bernie, but they will NEVER vote for a socialist. partly because they don't want to live in a socialist country (regardless of what that actually means) but also because they correctly saw that a socialist would lose to trump. So people immediately gravitated elsewhere. it wasn't an evil conspiracy in the DNC to get the others to drop out. it was smart and it might have saved us from 4 more years of Trump.

you can say it sucks that people can't see past labels in this country, but that's the way it is. get over it. you need a good label if you want your product to sell. the american people have been taught that socialism is bad ever since they/we were in elementary school. you can't shake that, period.

the nail in the coffin was when he said something positive about castro. that was just plain STUPID, regardless of the facts and nuances. his numbers started to tank that day and that was the end.

here is a quick lesson in labels.

tycoon businessman vs socialist

tycoon businessman vs former vice president, elder statesman, centrist

for millions of people, that's the choice they are making. they don't watch the news, they don't understand nuance, they are not experts in history or civics.

note, the label doesn't necessarily have to be correctly placed. you can an "ice cream" label on a tub of "frozen yogurt" and people will still buy it.

I was surprised that bernie embraced it. I thought he understood the american public better than that, and this all seems obvious to me. it is much easier to just say "i am not a socialist" and dance around that, than to try to educate the country on what socialism is and why it is not the boogy man they think it is. that ain't gonna happen in this lifetime.

I think the attacks on bernie here in DU and elsewhere are unwarranted. He played by the rules and he has good intentions. He does NOT want trump to get reelected and he will not do anything that could help enable that. He recognizes the problems in this country. He loves this country and wants to make things better. I completely disagree with people who are saying he "never passed any laws" or influenced policy. He has had a HUUUGE affect on policy and the direction of the party, and I agree with those affects. He just had a bad strategy and failed to realize the importance of labels, which is perhaps the most important thing.