Bernie Takes on Establishment, Media in Election Post Mortem

     Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin - Progressives note that 

     Hillary Clinton lost the state and others with similar 
     demographics to Donald Trump.

Bernie Sanders has been making the rounds in the media with the release of his book, Our Revolution.  Most of the interviews have been about what you would expect.  They ask if he thought he would have beaten Trump among other Trump related questions.  Inevitably they get around to the question of why Hillary lost the election.

Bernie always figures out a way to fit in all the issues that working families are concerned about in every answer.  He also manages to mention how the media never talks about those issues.  A good time is usually had by all.

However, when CBS's Nora O'Donnell asked Bernie if he is any to blame for Hillary losing, Bernie couldn't hold in his contempt for the question and the whole idea of establishment entitlement.

Unless the Democratic Party and their media sycophants stop playing the blame game, they are going to be doomed to repeat this election every four years.  The political climate is changing and Donald Trump tuned into it and ran away with the electoral college.  In the meantime, Hillary and the establishment Dems are blaming FBI Director, James Comey, or  Bernie Sanders, or even the African-American community for not getting to the polls.  The most recent scapegoat is the electoral college - a system that has been around since the inception of the Constitution. Until there is some ownership within the party, they are going to be left behind or will have another party splinter away from them as Robert Reich suggested according to The Hill.

This whole episode reminded me of a time when I used to coach Little League. One year, my team finished the regular season undefeated beating the overwhelming favorite of the league twice.  In the championship game of the playoffs, we had to play them again.  In that game, there were a number of bad calls favoring our opponent and we came up short.

After the game, as I gathered the team to address them, the parents came out of the woodwork exclaiming "We wuz robbed!"  They encouraged the boys with statements like, "You really won this game; the umpires just stole it from you," and similar messages.  I put a stop to it and told my row of 30 tear filled eyes that I was proud of them and that I loved them.  However, I made one point very clear:  "You can't go through life blaming someone else for your defeats and disappointments. Sure, the umpires had an effect on the game, but what could WE have done to change the outcome?  What could we have done to take away the power of any bad call?"  I talked about the few errors that we made and the number of times we swung at bad pitches.  I finished my speech with, "I want you to go through your life knowing that you have the power to win or lose. Concentrate on what you can control and not the things that you can't."

Going forward, this is the same message the Democratic Party must learn. Otherwise, they will take the same tack, make the same mistakes, and only hope that it works out.  But most importantly, they have to understand what those mistakes are. Many now are agreeing with Sanders that the party has to change its focus. If show that they care about the people, the people will care about the party's agenda - because it will be THE PEOPLE'S agenda.

As Sanders told Wolf Blitzer on CNN, “There are millions of families in this country where people are working two or three jobs, where people can’t afford childcare, they can’t afford to send their kids to college, they’ve seen their jobs go to China or Mexico. They’re hurting."

He went on to say that the Democrats have become “more concerned about raising money from wealthy individuals than they have been about bringing working people into the party and taking on the billionaire class, taking on Wall Street, the drug companies or the insurance companies,”

Donald Trump was able to tap into that angst.  The Democrats didn't. And as they sit in the dugout crying about their defeat, they better be prepared to do things differently from now on.