[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFlh66pf3L0[/youtube]
Full transcript of the speech is here.
I was excited to see how Bernie Sanders would pull off the biggest speech of his career.
I think the beginning was strong. He acknowledged our disappointment, and said that he was disappointed, too. He acknowledged an unprecedented 8 million contributions at $27 a piece. He acknowledged that his campaign showed that you can run a campaign without a Super Pac. He acknowledged that the spirit of the campaign, #notmeus, was about issues for all America, not just one person. He said that he would have preferred for it to go differently, as many of us would have. In front of hundreds of crying millenials in the stands who thought he was our future, and millions more off-camera, he got down in the ditches and felt the pain and the hurt and the disappointment with us.
He acknowledged that we have shed tears at his speeches and millions of us who were locked out at the parties Clinton threw for millionaires gave what we had for someone who truly cared about working people.
And then he made the case. Concrete reforms that his campaign had made to Democratic Party platforms. Because a lot of us are cynical. A lot of us think, after putting our heart and soul in a campaign, many of us for the first time ever, because we thought we were doing something revolutionary…that the issues don’t matter. That now we’re expected to blindly follow someone who is antithetical to our values, and what we did before didn’t matter one positive iota. At least, that’s what many jeering Clinton supporters say in my feed.
Unlike most Clinton supporters I’ve heard from, Sanders recognized that his supporters were, largely, not in it for him, personally, but for the principles he represented, and that they thought those principles failed with his inability to get elected. And he showed how voting for Clinton was moving those principles forward, as opposed to merely saying, “Vote for Clinton because she’s not as bad as Trump.” What’s more important, he understood that the best way to get his supporters to act was to validate the fact that the principles they fought so hard for WERE important — that the next step is based on fighting for those principles, long after Sanders is dead and gone.
The revolution continues. Sanders got a lot of it right. Clinton is just another step for it, but it’s not about Sanders. It’s not about Clinton. It’s about working hard for the policies that are best for the American people. It’s not about resigning to cynicism, but fighting for hope.
It’s not about a political candidate. It’s about us.
The revolution continues.
P.S. I have a Patreon, if you want to help me do what I do.
[Image via Disney/ABC Television Group under CCL 2.0]