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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

Funny how people just get a rough impression of things and then "go with it".

Her view of Sanders' 2020 bid was that people like herself were a big part of it--even 80 year old Nepalese grandmas were Sanders boosters, after all!

I think what really happened is that Democratic insiders, both in the media and the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring. Why did they engage in this evil plot? Not because they dislike Sanders so much, as because he would have been hopeless in the General.

I don't know. But if you want to study the question, you can see something happen similar right now with a very different politician, RFK jr. The average impression of the guy is "kook" but he's pretty sensible. (I mean, in terms of issues, he's shit, but that's completely irrelevant.)

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I don't think the author made any crazy claims about Bernie. He did have a diverse coalition that was maligned as Bernie bros. He also didn't have the election stolen in sc or super tuesday, he simply wasn't that popular and could only get wins when 6 moderate candidates were splitting the vote. RFK is an entirely different phenomenon.

> he simply wasn't that popular

I think she's reasonably questioning to what degree that lack of popularity was constructed by the media hammering certain narratives (like the Bernie Bros narrative) that were later shown to be mostly false.

The point of her article is that narratives in the online world can be generated by a tiny number of people, but can then seem to represent a majority view, come to shape the majority view and create self-fulfilling prophecies.

I was responding to:

>...the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring....

I don't disagree that the mainstream media may have hurt him(though I'm not convinced they did). I'm mainly disagreeing that anything bad happened during the primary process with sc and super tuesday.

A tangential "sigh" idea: are we ever going to see an American president younger than 70, or has the age of gerontocracy truly arrived?

In a two-party system, massive clout accrues to people who are in the game for the longest time. Offices, lobbyists, donors, name recognition. Prior to the advances of the modern medicine, natural aging would push back against this trend. But now we are seeing ever more old people in positions of power.

It is somewhat better in Europe (Sunak and Macron are relatively young, so is Zelensky), but America seems to be very susceptible to that - not just in politics, in business, too (the average age of Fortune 500 CEOs increased a lot since 2000).

John Adams lived to 90, Sam Adams to 81, Ben Franklin to 84, John Jay to 83, Thomas Jefferson to 83, James Madison to 85. Some of their lives could definitely have been extended, but I think people generally misunderstand human longevity. The peaks of ages have not really changed much at all, and a reasonable chunk of people who made it past childhood/birth (where there were indeed extremely high mortality rates), would make it there. For instance Hippocrates, of the Hippocratic Oath, lived to beyond 90, back in 400BC.

Something else has changed.

He could only get wins when all of the other candidates didn't collude with each other. Those 6 candidates were election stuffing to take focus off of Bernie, to the point that almost all of them pretended to be for single-payer health care. Pretending to support single-payer is literally the only reason that Harris made the national stage. The only reason Buttigieg entered the picture is because he was a nobody that was put up in the same way to split the liberal-left vote for DNC chair from Keith Ellison.

The idea that Bernie's loss is because he "wasn't that popular" withers under the fact that Biden won the election. Biden wasn't even popular among Democratic Party insiders, they just 1) had no leverage to make him stop his campaign, and 2) their preferred candidates like Harris and Buttigieg were far more repulsive to the public than Biden.

The fairness of voting, auctions, etc. wither under collusion.

This is conspiratorial thinking. Here is an alternative: people that want to win adopt popular positions. Then when a candidate drops out their supporters go to the next most similar candidate. Not that complicated. The primaries were vicious, with people like Harris accusing Biden of being a segregationist. They were not pretending to run for president.

The reason Biden wasn't popular among insiders is that they didn't think he could win. People like Obama specifically declined to endorse anyone until the winner was clear so that he wouldn't bias the outcomes and hurt their chances in the general. They fell in line when they saw Biden win the primaries.

Bernie losing could be explained by him simply not being popular. Trump was in a similar position, but trashed the Republican primaries because he was genuinely popular.

> This is conspiratorial thinking.

If you think the idea that politicians were colluding with each other (or cooperating for a more neutral word) is conspiratorial then you should just be disqualified from this conversation.

The difference is that their behavior is proper and makes sense, not an effort to steal attention from Bernie. I'll repeat again, the candidates were absolutely not burning through money, time, and political capital for a pretend presidential run to take attention away from Sanders. They were different flavors of moderate to appeal to the largely moderate base. Even if Sanders was entitled to more attention(he's wasn't), there is no reason to think Amy Klobachar or Cory Booker voters would go for Bernie over Biden when their policies are closer to Biden.

No people really did not like Bernie that much. He was making a lot of promises that he did not have the political capital or chops to deliver on; and a lot of people saw through it.

Not to mention that his cohort of rabid online supporters were as insufferable as those supporting the orange man; thus giving his campaign a similar kool aid drinking cult vibe.

As far as the talk about other candidates forming a coalition against him … that whole line of argument is pretty laughable. This is politics. Success in politics is achieved by building coalitions among constituencies and their representatives to advance policy.

If Bernie were such an effective politician then why was he unable to get someone else to stay in the primary to split the establishment vote?

> , he simply wasn't that popular and could only get wins when 6 moderate candidates were splitting the vote.

Listen to how ridiculous this sounds. He was so “unpopular“ that the moderates needed to circle the wagons against him in order to make him lose.

I don't see how that is ridiculous. Are you suggesting that if it was Bernie vs Biden from day 1 that Bernie would have won? Bernie never polled well enough for that, so you're suggesting a wildly different counter factual.

If those are the numbers then I can't argue against them.

> The average impression of the guy is "kook" but he's pretty sensible. (I mean, in terms of issues, he's shit, but that's completely irrelevant.)

No. Very much no. We're hiring a politician, not a counselor. His policies are the only thing that's relevant.

sure, who cares about temperament or character? Anyone who parrots the right talking points is fine

Temperament and character matter, I'll give you that. But "talking points" and "policy" are miles apart.

Take a look at the video he made about his recent trip to the border.

The guy seems damn classy to me.

> I think what really happened is that Democratic insiders, both in the media and the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring. Why did they engage in this evil plot? Not because they dislike Sanders so much, as because he would have been hopeless in the General.

This narrative (not good for the General) is of course their preferred one. But I am not inclined to take them on their word when they chose to smear him with a “red herring” (your words) in the first place.

The 2016 election was when people started complaining about Populism, and both Trump and Sanders were populists in rhetoric, although very different in their substance. But the Dems would still have us believe that a non-populist, completely Establishment candidate (Clinton) was what the Dems needed for the General.

The more likely explanation is that the Dems would rather lose rather than run with a social democratic candidate.

>The more likely explanation is that the Dems would rather lose rather than run with a social democratic candidate.

Their behavior does suggest this. It's why they're propping up an octogenarian who is one "senior moment" away from handing the presidency to the other party.

"Electability" was a ruse in 2016 and 2020 that they no longer need to keep up.

RFK has been branded a “kook” because of his anti-vaccine activism and because of outlandish statements like COVID may have been engineered to spare Jews. That’s pretty much the definition of kookiness.

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