Democratic Primaries

I disagree with only one or two points so let's see if I can make as much sense as you did. You wrote a long post so I hope you don't mind getting one back in return. Sometimes I get a little tired of just throwing out 1-line barbs or jokes and you can't seriously address shit like that. You don't have to read it and my feelings won't be hurt if you don't.

I think Sanders wants Biden to address issues he feels his base needs to hear from Biden's own lips, and I think he wants him to address those issues successfully with persuasive remarks.

Perhaps, but that's a double-edged sword. Not only will Bernie's base hear how Biden addresses them but so will Republicans and they will use that against him in the general election. A day or two ago there was a round-robin discussion on TV which included a fellow whose name I now forget but he was somebody in Dubya's administration. He said what the GOP will be closely listening for is how many concessions Biden will have to give in order to win over Sanders supporters. Too many and Joe will start losing the middle...losing 2 or 3 moderates to pick up 1 on the far left is a losing proposition.

Biden is a liberal...but he is also well-liked and trusted by moderate and even conservative Democrats. And he is acceptable to many Independents...about half of whom identify as moderates, ie, neither left nor right-leaning. If he is mistakenly perceived by some of these folks as being less liberal than he really is than I say great, let's not look a gift horse in the mouth and broadcast too loudly what some of the policies he would pursue while in office would be and risk scaring them off. If Bernie were to force Biden to say "sure, I'm all for AOC's Green New Deal as is...sign me up!" you can be sure the GOP will hammer him with that relentlessly during the GE campaign.

Biden wants to address climate change...he wants more people to have health insurance...he wants to rebuild the middle class. Hell, most if not all of his most ardent supporters want the exact same things. But if he were to just fall in line with BS in order to placate him and pick up a few of his voters then Goppers will just nail Joe with the exact same angle that we Biden boys been hitting Bernie with all this time...just how the hell are you gonna pay for all of this stuff you keep promising everybody? Bernie just armwaves when he gets this question...because he either doesn't know or he does know and realizes a lot of people aren't gonna like the answer so he just plays dumb or deflects. I fail to see how putting Joe into the exact same trap that Bernie's now in will help and not hurt him come the GE. They didn't need to debate in order to hammer out some kind of agreement...they coulda just as easily (and even more easily) gotten together behind closed doors and come to some kind of understanding that Biden will support as many of BS's favorite policies as are realistically doable.

The biggest problem with some (certainly not all) progressives is that they don't seem to be very good at adding up numbers...whether it's how much it's gonna cost to do everything BS is promising or just how many people actually fall into their camp (of which I include myself, BTW). Progressives make up about 40-45% of the Democratic Party which is roughly 33% of the total electorate. On top of that about 23% of Independents identify themselves as "liberal-leaning" and Indies are roughly 40% of the population. Not all of these are full-blown progressives so let's be very generous and say half of these liberal-leaning Indies are progressive which I'm sure is too high. Do the math and you get 15-20% of all voters who are progressives. That sure seems to me to be a relatively small amount of people demanding an awful lot of power. And that's why their "all or nothing" attitude often leads to them getting nothing. They would do well to learn how to compromise like Biden has over the years instead of calling that a "weakness" of Joe's. They would do well to learn a little history and read how the one progressive candidate we've nominated in the last half century got wiped out...and I mean wiped out. And while they were learning a little history they would do just as well to read how one President was able to deliver some of the most progressive advances in our nation since FDR...

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/28/lbj-great-society-josh-zeitz-book-216538

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,841674-1,00.html

LBJ could be rude and he could be crude...but he was a prudent progressive who got a lot more than nothing. Which is what Bernie and his supporters will end up with if they don't stop grabbing for everything. Thomas Jefferson would tell them...

Once, when scolded by an unhappy supporter for not reshaping the country fast enough, Thomas Jefferson offered a well-reasoned rejoinder. "When we reflect how difficult it is to move or to infect the great machine of society," he wrote, "we see the wisdom of Solon's remark that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear."

Apologies for the long post...back to one-liners for me!