It comes down to this: Crazy Sen. Bernie Sanders is running for the Democratic nomination against Hillary Clinton because no other Democrat would stick his/her/its neck out. Clinton has been dubbed "Hillary the Inevitable" by some, and the gullible Democrats believe it. Of course, Crazy Bernie is not really a Democrat; he is a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist. There was a day when a Democratic Socialist was too outre for the Democratic Party. Back then, a Democratic Socialist would have had to run on a third-party ticket, or perhaps even a fourth-party ticket. Now, of course, the Democratic Party has moved so far to the left that Bernie can claim he speaks for the party's base.
That makes him a pretty potent adversary for Clinton. One wonders, what would happen if Crazy Bernie had gone beyond a democratic socialist stance? What if he had declared himself a Communist? Would the Democratic voting base still be with him? After all, he did "honeymoon" in the Soviet Union in 1988 after visiting Nicaragua in 1985. Maybe an aspiring Democratic candidate will run as a Communist the next time around.
As I said, this year there was really no one else to challenge Hillary the Inevitable. Oh, there was Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland. Yet he had no natural constituency, even though today's Democratic Party is large enough for him to have had a chance. For a while it looked like he would run as a nudist, but there are simply not enough nudists in the Democratic Party at this point. Maybe he would have been a stronger candidate if he had run as a vegetarian or a vegetarian nudist, but he had been photographed eating meat too often to do so. My guess is he ate raw meat -- he is that kind of he-man guy.
At any rate, O'Malley couldn't attract enough of the zany constituencies that compose the modern Democratic Party. Perhaps he'll have a chance to win the next Democratic nomination if the party expands before then -- say, for instance, if the topic of men and women who want to use the opposite sex's public toilets becomes sufficiently politicized. But for now, the oddballs of the party have cast their lot with Crazy Bernie or Hillary the Inevitable.
It looks to me like Hillary is going to win this battle of the titans. It's not that Bernie's stance is too extreme for party loyalists. In fact, I doubt many Democrats really appreciate what a Democrat Socialist is. But the few who have thought about it think of oil-rich Norway, not impoverished Greece or Spain or Africa.
The reason that Bernie is going to lose is that he really is a wooly-headed dreamer. He believes much of what the Democratic hierarchy believes. He believes that it is unthinkable to probe Hillary's scandal-plagued past and -- come to think of it -- her scandal-plagued present. For Bernie to question Hillary's scandals and misconduct is to go over to the Dark Side: to become a Republican. He will fall down in defeat hollering at Wall Street and the banks, but not saying a word about her shabby history.
Thus, when he debated Hillary last week, he shouted his mantra against these legendary institutions. He questioned her judgment for accepting millions of dollars from them and voting for the war in Iraq. But the rest of her record remained out of bounds. He never mentioned her dreadful record as secretary of state, with regard to Vladimir Putin, Syria, Libya and the Benghazi incident (when she told her daughter one thing and told the American people a brazen lie).
Nor did Bernie say anything about her lying under oath, or her long career of deceiving the public and obstructing justice. She is the only person ever to pursue the presidency while under investigation by the FBI, but Bernie did not utter a peep about that. What about the classified documents found on her personal server? What about the alleged co-mingling of her State Department work with Clinton Foundation-related material? And what about the years she served as her husband's enabler, while he allegedly harassed women and allegedly raped one woman? These women are still out there. Why can't Bernie help them in one of these vaunted debates? Is he anti-woman?
Well, if Bernie will not raise these questions, my guess is the Republicans will shortly. Donald Trump already has. What's more, the FBI may finish its work soon. Will the truth catch up with Hillary?