This Will Keep Happening Until Bernie Sanders Learns
Before the first time protesters with the banner of #BlackLivesMatter interrupted a Bernie Sanders speech, I had written repeatedly that things like this were likely to happen. When it happened in Phoenix at the Netroots Nation conference, I wrote here that Bernie needs to train his troops. But neither the candidate nor too many of his supporters have used any of this as a learning moment, and yet they act all surprised that it happened again today.
Listen up, white progressives and repeat after me: Nobody can win the Democratic nomination for president without significant black and latino support. It is a mathematical impossibility. I know the math. I've studied it. Close readers over the years know how well I know it. Your guy cannot - will not - win until he changes the way both he and his supporters react when a speech is interrupted.
A guy I follow on Twitter put it this way: Remember when Barack Obama had to prove himself to white people? Uh huh? In fact, he even had to prove himself to black voters, who until he won in Iowa supported Hillary Clinton in the polls, and half the Congressional Black Caucus still wouldn't support him. Later he had to prove himself to Hispanics, gay folks, and lots of other kinds of folks. That's the only winning coalition for any Democrat to win the White House. Every candidate has to prove him or herself with all of these demographics, or no White House.
This campaign is not about you getting your "Bernie fan boy experience" uninterrupted at a campaign rally. And you don't get to shout down protesters who want your candidate to lead more with their priorities. You don't get to yell, as one Sanders supporter did in Seattle today, "Tase them!" You don't get to say "Bernie marched with Martin Luther King" or "he has done more for your people than those hecklers ever did."
And you absolutely don't get to do it when just months ago you cheered the LGBT heckler at Obama's White House event, when you cheered every time the white ladies of Code Pink did it, when you whined and complained about Obama for six years not giving you your "hope and change" cookies as you define them.
You know why you don't get that cookie? Because nonwhite Americans saw your dreadful behavior toward Obama all these years. That's a big reason why. Now you need their support, you gotta court it just like Obama once courted you.
Instead too many of you are on Twitter right now whitesplaining and lecturing and talking down to black folks and people of all hues who happen to see this through the lens of the same team. Oh, yeah, that's a real bright idea for winning this campaign. Let's go on Twitter and troll the black people about how they don't understand Bernie.
Bernie handled it badly again today. He left the stage and went shaking hands among the white people in the crowd. He told a reporter that the protesters "don't want to listen to anything." Just like in Phoenix, he ran.
Contrast that with how Martin O'Malley handled the Black Lives Matter protest in Phoenix. He shut up, sat down, listened, listened a lot more, went throughout the conference all damn day seeking to listen to people of color who would talk with him. And since then he has put out the most progressive and detailed policy proposals on controlling police violence, prison and criminal justice reform and related matters. You don't see people protesting at his rallies. They probably will soon enough, but he'll know how to respond, unlike your guy.
And sure, Hillary Clinton doesn't have public rallies. She gives out tickets to her events. Nobody can get near her. But that doesn't mean Black Lives Matter has a double standard. That moment of reckoning with Clinton will come, too, during the course of this campaign. She, in particular, needs to answer for things she's done over the years just like Bernie has to answer for voting against immigration reform and for the 1994 crime bill. That's what candidates have to do in a democracy. It's a lot harder work than calling big rallies and giving long speeches to adoring fans.
Welcome to the NFL, candidates. Wear a cup.
But your guy has been tone deaf from the get-go with this, so the same story repeated itself a second time in Seattle today, and will keep repeating itself until Sanders either gets it right or withers out of the contest. All the white people in America cannot make the man president. You need others on the team to do that.
The reason your guy is having such a hard time is that many of you have alienated black, brown, yellow and red people all these years. Those of you who were in New York's Occupy Wall Street ran the black and hispanic organizers out of there, calling them sell outs for the Democratic party, insisting that you could have "no leaders" to people who build leadership among young people, and through your overall desire to just be in a white college educated ghetto while you tell yourselves you're "not racist." So now Bernie is getting the payback for white progressive disrespect of people of color, including of Barack Obama.
That's all that is going on here. Train each other and your candidate to do it better or he's going to be toast long before the first caucus or primary.
There's still a chance to get it right. Your guy is being offered an opportunity. But if he keeps making the same mistake over and over gain, stick a fork in him.