St. Stein Speaks! Why, Oh, Why, Isn’t Bernie Sanders As Stupid About Politics As I Am? Edition

Dr. Jill Stein is re-extending an invitation:

Jill Stein, who is expected to be endorsed at the party’s August convention in Houston, told Guardian US that “overwhelming” numbers of Sanders supporters are flocking to the Greens rather than Hillary Clinton.

OVERWHELMING! Sure.

Stein insisted that her presidential bid has a viable “near term goal” of reaching 15% in national polling, which would enable her to stand alongside presumptive nominees Clinton and Donald Trump in televised election debates.

That word “viable” I do not think etc. But let’s say that it was. My question: under what scenario does Donald Trump not become president if a hypothetical Green candidate (who, to be Scrupulously Fair, Stein seems to realize is not her) got anything like 15% of the vote? I should want the left to split its vote in an election involving one of the largest gaps between the parties in American history why?

But in a potentially destabilising move for the Democratic party, and an exciting one for Sanders’ supporters, the Green party candidate said she was willing to stand aside for Sanders.

This is simultaneously pathetic and so presumptuous as to be vaguely creepy, like a high school boy declaring that he would be happy to ditch his prom date if Margot Robbie would agree to go with him.

“I’ve invited Bernie to sit down explore collaboration – everything is on the table,” she said. “If he saw that you can’t have a revolutionary campaign in a counter-revolutionary party, he’d be welcomed to the Green party. He could lead the ticket and build a political movement,” she said.

And here’s the rub. “Clearly, the passage of the Democratic Party’s most progressive platform in decades, along with the substantial leftward shift of the Democratic Party’s caucus, has convinced Bernie Sanders that the only way to effect political change is through third-party vanity campaigns that are either pointless onanism or actively destructive.”

Comparing Sanders to Nader and Stein really is instructive. Sanders has had, as both a legislator and a presidential candidate, a real, material impact on the Democratic Party, while Nader and Stein have not. If using 2016 of all years to send the message that you can only effect change from outside the party seems insane, it’s because it is. But it’s also perfectly consistent: this theory of political changes has no actual history of working and the idea that parties only change based third party threats is obviously absurd if you have even a cursory knowledge of American political history, so what’s one more data point to ignore?

And I guarantee a small faction of Sanders dead-enders will discover that the only really important issues are the issues where Sanders didn’t win the platform fight, and that the unprecedented fact that the runner-up was not permitted to write the entire party platform but merely influenced it just shows the extraordinary perfidy of the Democrat Party, which after all RIGGED its primary campaign so that its nomination went to the candidate with the most voters and pledged delegates.