By Dave Lindorff
Bernie Sanders’ brash campaign to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president took a “Yu-u-u-u-ge” hit on Tuesday, not only losing big as expected in Florida and North Carolina, but also in Ohio, and narrowly losing too in Illinois and Missouri.
But the good news is that at a big rally in Phoenix, Arizona, held (but blacked out by the corporate media) on the night of the ballot counting in those elections in a state that will be holding its Democratic primary next Tuesday,Sanders announced [1] that his now incredibly long-shot campaign for the nomination will continue.
Sanders, early in his campaign, had said that at the end of the day, if Hillary Clinton were to win the nomination, he would support her.
But the reality is that by not conceding at this point in the campaign, with two and a half months of primaries still to go, including in such big states as California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Sanders will continue (as he did in Phoenix) to shame and embarrass his opponent Clinton, calling out her reliance on millions of dollars in corrupt and corrupting campaign contributions from Wall Street banks and hedge funds, military contractors, pharmaceutical companies and oil companies.
He will continue to denounce the job-killing trade agreements, from NAFTA to the latest one, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (sic) currently being pushed by President Obama, and promoted by Clinton while she was Secretary of State.
He will continue to call for a country that uses diplomacy, not war, as its default foreign policy approach.
And he will continue to denounce the corrupt and racist justice system and the militarized policing in the US that have together made this country the incarceration capital of the world, and a nation that is more of a domestic war zone than a civilized society.
In continuing his campaign in this manner, Sanders will be undermining Clinton, particularly among the key portions of the electorate that are normally the most supportive of Democratic candidates -- progressives, young people, African Americans and Latinos, and working-class people of all colors.
I don’t know what Sanders will ultimately decide to do when the Democratic Convention is over and when, as appears all but inevitable, barring a surprise indictment, Hillary Clinton becomes the party’s presidential nominee. Maybe he’ll refuse to endorse her. I hope he decides to do that. But even if he were to endorse her, given all that he has said, and given the corrupt and dirty way she has campaigned against him with her lies and misrepresentations, I suspect the endorsement won’t be offered with any enthusiasm…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the collectively-run, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3080 [2]