You Can Count On The Establishment To Sabotage Bernie's Campaign... Obviously, The Status Quo Serves Their Interests

I did a recent survey of Blue America-endorsed candidates. Most of them have told me they would be happy with either Bernie or Elizabeth Warren. Some preferred Elizabeth and some preferred Bernie but no one said anything about backing Status Quo Joe, Mayo Pete or Kamala. One, Kim Williams-- formerly a diplomat during Obama's time in office and now a professor at UC Merced-- is the progressive alternative to Central Valley Blue Dog incumbent Jim Costa (and another conservative opposing him). She told me she had been leaning towards Elizabeth Warren and as she followed the presidential primary more closely came to the conclusion that Bernie is the better choice.

"Like Rep. Omar, I was in Elizabeth Warren’s camp. Anyone who’s ever heard me speak knows that I spend a great deal of time talking about policy. We simply can’t fix the many problems my district faces without bold and detailed plans. But we also need a heart, and we have to show up. And that’s what Bernie Sanders has done here. The three counties in my district are often referred to as the forgotten California. It’s the poorest district in this wealthy state, and one of the poorest districts in this nation, which probably explains why few presidential candidates make their way here. Bernie is the only candidate to have prioritized and invested in the Central Valley. Bernie has not only had the political courage to go against the media and the moneyed interests that have hurt so many working Americans long before anyone else, he has shown a genuine affection for so many forgotten people that are tired of Democrats who only care about them on election years. In his words and deeds, he has shown up, and that gives me the confidence to know he’ll show up in every way that counts as president."

Over the weekend, Time Magazine reporter Lissandra Villa was traveling with Bernie in Iowa. Time is no longer as huge and influential as it was when it had the biggest circulation of any weekly in the world but it's still more important than a ham sandwich. When I was a divisional present at Warner Bros., Time was an integral part of first Time Warner and then AOL Time Warner, always very much a part of the Establishment. When the AOL empire collapsed and Warner shattered into pieces-- the record division being acquired by Russian oligarch Леонид Валентинович Блаватник (Leonid Valentinovich Blavatnik)-- Time wound up in the hands of the Koch Brothers through and acquisition by the Meredith Corporation of Iowa. Last year Mededith sold Time to Marc Benioff (whose hometown Señor Trumpanzee was slandering on Twitter Saturday morning).

Marc Benioff has a magazine

Benioff is a billionaire San Francisco establishment Democrat, who regularly gives tens of thousands of dollars to help prop up the rotten conservative party hierarchy with massive contributions to the DCCC, DSCC and DNC. I found over $750,000 in contributions to those 3 organizations over the last few years. Benioff also donated $50,000 to Ready for Hillary. He tends to give his political money to conservative Democrats-- New Dems and Blue Dogs and their PACs-- and to "moderate" Republicans. So far this year, Benioff and his wife Lynne have made about two dozen contributions to candidates-- each one a max contribution ($2,800):

• February 7- Mark Kelly (D-AZ) x 2
• February 7- Kamala Harris (D-CA) x 2
• February 7- Cory Booker (D-NJ)
• March 2- Jay Inslee (D-WA) x 4
• May 17- Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) x 2
• May 17- Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) x 2
• May 21- Elise Stefanik (R-NY)- $5,600
• May 22- Will Hurd (R-TX) x 4
• May 24- John Katko (R-NY) x 2
• June 30- Elise Stefanik (R-NY) x 2

His company's PAC, which he finances, seems to have given a couple of hundred thousand dollars in small amounts this year-- as little as $78 to John Lewis, for example-- with the big money going overwhelmingly to conservatives of both parties. The biggest single contribution went to Mayo Pete, $29,411. His favorite Republican were the same ones he gave to personally-- McCarthy, Katko, Fitzpatrick, Hurd, Stefanik... In short, the owner of Time is a major donor to the centrist establishment. This weekend, his magazine admitted how undeniably strong Bernie's campaign looks... adding, but can he grown his base? Villa wrote that "in many ways, despite taking time off to rest, [Bernie has] managed to convert the last month into one of the most successful in his 2020 Democratic presidential campaign so far. He’s still polling in the top three, he’s shown he’s one of the strongest fundraisers in the field and he’s got the backing of the likes of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, two of the most recognizable progressive politicians in the nation. But one of the questions hovering over his campaign is whether he can grow his base of support, enough not only to win the nomination, but also to beat President Donald Trump."

Billionaires of every political stripe-- like Marc and Lynne Benioff-- will do whatever it takes to prevent that from happening. His magazine:

In 2016, Sanders performed very well in Iowa, defying expectations when Hillary Clinton just barely beat him. In many ways, it was his competitive run overall that helped pave the way not just for his own candidacy, but for a collectively more progressive field of candidates happy to take up the mantle he turned mainstream. Part of the challenge for Sanders now is keeping the coalition he had in 2016 — and expanding it. That’s a hard feat for any candidate in a still-wide primary field, but possibly especially so for someone who is no longer a fresh face.

“It’s hard to capture the same kind of energy two times in a row,” said Tim Gannon, a former Democratic candidate for Iowa Secretary of Agriculture, of Sanders. “The dynamics are so much different. He’s not as much the insurgent because he ran last time and proved that he was popular and a lot of his ideas were popular, especially among Democrats, so instead of running after a person who was very much the front runner, he’s among … the hunted this time around, and I think that there are candidates who have eaten into some of the support that he enjoyed last time.”

Sanders’s campaign manager has recognized the need for additional voters, telling the Wall Street Journal this week that for a Sanders victory, “he needs a mass mobilization of people who have not voted before.” In a note to Sanders supporters on Friday, the campaign’s Iowa state director Misty Rebik said they had already “collected more commitments to caucus for Bernie Sanders than we had on January 1, 2016.”

This week, Sanders returned to Iowa for an “End Corporate Greed” tour through the state, accompanied by his wife, Jane. In the last several days, he’s also been rolling out local endorsements in multiple states, and he has planned travel to Detroit to appear alongside Rep. Rashida Tlaib (another member of the so-called freshman “Squad” in Congress) with a performance by Jack White, and several other scheduled rallies, including one with Omar. At events in Iowa this week, he often brought up the Ocasio-Cortez endorsement as well. It remains to be seen whether buzz created by such high-profile endorsements will have any effect on voters weighing him as a potential candidate to support.

“I think he’s got a good line of support behind him, and I think he can grow it. That was actually, if I had a chance, I want to know from him … how he plans on maybe trying to get [Republicans] to come over and vote Democratic,” said Eva Garcia, 64, a Waterloo resident who drove an hour to Toledo, Iowa, for a Sanders town hall on Friday. Though Garcia said she caucused for Sanders when he first ran for President, she said she was “maybe” open to supporting someone else.

For many of his backers, it’s Sanders’s decades-long commitment to a message that they point to as his strength and the reason they like him. Some of them also point to it as a reason for picking him over his progressive counterpart, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a close friend and Senate colleague.

“Elizabeth Warren is a neat person in a lot of ways, but she is not Bernie Sanders. Bernie’s got the track record … he’s been consistent all the way through,” said Patrick Bosold, 70, a Fairfield resident wearing a baseball tee with a young Sanders on it that he picked up at a recent campaign event hosted in Iowa’s Field of Dreams. On Friday Bosold volunteered with the Sanders campaign for a press conference in Newton, Iowa, held at a Maytag complex, where Sanders said “it goes without saying” he would support whomever became the Democratic nominee, even it it was not him. (“I hope it’s me,” Sanders added.)

Sanders himself at events often notes how long he’s been singing the same song. Asked at a League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) event on Thursday night in Des Moines how he distinguished himself from other candidates (in a question specific to Latino voters), Sanders relied exclusively on that argument.

“What distinguishes my candidacy from the others is that I have been fighting for the working families of this country for many, many decades. I have walked on picket lines, probably more picket lines over the years than all of my competitors have collectively,” Sanders told an approving crowd, where some supporters sat wearing “Unidos Con Bernie” T-shirts.

After facing criticism in his first run for not reaching out to minorities enough and having a largely white team, the campaign has this time undertaken steps to address both in an attempt to shore up further support. But it will be voters from every corner of the Democratic party that he will have to convince to back him.

“To convince me to vote for someone else, other than Mayor Pete [Buttigieg], would be kind of hard,” said Nancy Sund, 70, a Toledo resident who attended Sanders’s town hall there on Friday. Sund said she supported Clinton in 2016, but after hearing so much about Sanders in the last election cycle, she said she wanted to see for herself whether he could be the right candidate for her.

“I was impressed,” Sund said of Sanders after the town hall. “I don’t know if it was enough to change my mind. It’s early yet.”

Rebecca Parson, the progressive candidate challenging head New Dei Derek Kilmer in Washington state explained how she came to back Bernie. She sounds very much like the other candidates have have come to the same conclusion. "I am backing Bernie because he's the best choice for the working class. He's been saying the same things for decades, even when it was inconvenient, because he believes them. Unlike all other presidential candidates, Bernie supports federal rent control (as a renter myself, this is massive); supports true, single-payer, non-wishy washy M4A; wants to cancel ALL student debt; and can actually beat Trump. And unlike all other candidates, his theory of change is one that will result in a true transformation of this country instead of surface-level reforms. Bernie's theory of change is the 'inside-outside strategy,' and unlike Obama, he won't abandon the grassroots when he's in the White House. For all these reasons and more, I endorse and support Bernie all the way."