This is just a quick note for future reference. A few friends shared the Medium piece “On Becoming Anti-Bernie” (PDF) by Robin Alperstein. I only read the first few pages, but that much of it basically reflects my sentiment: I love that Bernie is proving many Americans have a strong desire for strong liberal reforms, but his campaign is less honest than it appears.

Here’s a passage:

In rejecting compromise as a mark of lack of integrity, or worse, corruption, Sanders accomplishes two deeply disingenuous goals: (i) he sets himself apart from his colleagues in Congress as the only one who is allegedly “true” to his “values,” thereby creating the myth that he is morally superior and incorruptible; and (ii) he turns the necessity of compromise — without which literally nothing can get done in Congress — into a negative, very similar to the Tea Party and hardliners on the far right in Congress, thereby allowing him to transform his failure to compromise and thus his failure to have achieved any workable progressive legislation in 25 years into a “virtue” — a testament to his supposed integrity.

Attacking Hillary Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that her husband signed when she was First Lady is intellectually dishonest. This is so on several grounds. First, his attacks omit that he himself voted for that bill; Clinton supporters have had to bring that up. Second, Sanders keeps attacking Hillary for having on one occasion used the term “superpredator”, when she has already apologized for it, said she would not use it today, and has put it in context (which I think makes clear it was not intended as code for race or to apply broadly), and yet he never admits that he used the term “sociopath” in when supporting that same bill, nor has he ever apologized for doing so. Instead, he rips out all context and background for that bill, pins the entirety of its consequences on Hillary (who did not vote for it), and omits his own role in voting for it and the reasons why so many people supported it at the time, including him and the Congressional Black Caucus, despite its warts. So he blames Hillary for the draconian sentencing rules that the GOP insisted on in order to pass the bill, contributing to a false narrative he has constructed that Hillary is not actually a liberal.