By Dave Lindorff
Sen. Elizabeth Warren just had a chance to turn the tide in this rigged Democratic primary season last Tuesday, and she ran away from it.
As most people know, the Democratic Party leadership, decades ago following the primary victory of Sen. George McGovern that gave him the party's 1972 nomination for president despite the opposition of the whole ruling party elite, tried to make such an upstart left candidate impossible in the future by front-running primaries and caucuses in a bunch of deeply conservative Southern states. The idea was to crush any liberal candidate in those states (where no Democrat would stand a chance in the general election), so their funding would dry up and their campaigns would die early in the primary season.
This ugly strategy worked like a charm for decades and it even worked this year to the extent that the Establishment's candidate, Hillary Clinton, was able to win big in those Southern states. But her upstart opponent Bernie Sanders to some extent blunted the effort this year by winning handily in Colorado, Oklahoma, Minnesota and in his home state of Vermont -- four of the five non-Southern states also holding primaries or caucuses on Super Tuesday. Sanders really would have actually defeated the DNC's sabotage efforts though, had he won Massachusetts, a significantly larger state in terms of delegates, instead of just managing to come within 1.5% of doing so -- and without any major endorsers backing him.
Imagine if Warren, the wildly popular senior senator from Massachusetts, in the days or weeks ahead of the primary, had endorsed Sanders, who after all is attacking the same corrupt big banks that Warren built her whole political career by denouncing. There's no way having a popular anti-bankster, feminist senator endorsing Sanders wouldn't have won him at least another 10% of the primary vote in Massachusetts -- enough to have really damaged Clinton. Instead, Clinton was allowed to eke out a narrow victory there by picking up the support of identity-voting women who didn't bother to examine her bogus feminism.
The Sanders campaign can still push forward in future primaries, because unlike prior liberal insurgents who were relying on big donors, his campaign is funded entirely by small donors, and those donors are proving to be resilient and energized, not easily demoralized, by evidence that the game is rigged (in February, the Sanders campaign took in a record $42 million in new small donations, and continues to build its campaign war-chest despite Clinton's wins in the South on Tuesday). But how much better it would have been had he won Massachusetts.
A Warren endorsement would have made all the difference.
Now she stands exposed as a fraud posing as a radical reformer...
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: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3062 [1]