Write-In Bernie Sanders For U.S. President

Eric Zuesse

After the first U.S. Presidential nominees’ debate, which occurred on September 29th, it is clear that America’s two mainstream political Parties failed disastrously to provide the nation’s voters with adequate options for the U.S. Presidency. Trump is a proven failure in every key respect, and Biden showed himself not even qualified for the office — maybe even less competent than his opponent is, and having no sense or awareness of how dire the nation’s condition has become (not only since January 20th of 2017, but ever since January 20th of 2001). We’re clearly in deep trouble, and the signs now are for even worse yet to come, regardless of whether the next President would be Biden, or Trump. If it will be Trump, he would likely be even more indebted to the far right than he has been. If it would be Biden, then he would be merely a face fronting for his biggest campaign donors, such as, perhaps, the top owners of Lockheed Martin.

Biden knows that his mental faculties are failing fast; and, so, even as early as 11 December 2019, Ryan Lizza headlined at Politico, “Biden signals to aides that he would serve only a single term”, and he reported that:

While the option of making a public pledge [to serve only one term] remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.

According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024.

Apparently, Kamala Harris is now running for President — not only  for Vice President — against the incumbent Trump;  and her ‘boss’, Biden, isn’t discouraging her extraordinary behavior in this regard; he is instead assisting it. Here are some recent signs of this remarkable fact:

A Biden-Harris campaign video was recently recorded, on September 12th, and published on the 15th, in which Kamala Harris says:

“A Harris Administration together with Joe Biden as the President of the United States, the Biden-Harris Administration, will have access, provide access, to one hundred billion dollars in loans and investments for minority business-owners.”

This statement was widely interpreted, among the surprisingly few news-media that reported it, to have been merely a flub by her, nothing that’s really remarkable. However, a campaign video which was published later the same day, had Joe Biden himself, reading from a teleprompter, and saying:

“A Harris-Biden administration is going to relaunch that effort and keep pushing further to make it easier for military spouses and veterans to find meaningful careers to ensure teachers know how to support military children in their classrooms and to improve support for caregivers and survivors so much more than we do now.”

The indications seem fairly clear that if Americans vote for Joe Biden to become the President, then not only will he not serve a second term, but he might not even serve much (or perhaps even any) of his first term. Why would this be so? Why is not Biden himself publicly disowning what Harris had said on September 12th, instead of himself saying essentially the same thing (as he immediately did)?

Furthermore: did his debate-performance on September 29th give him encouragement to be anything other than  a stand-in for his choice of Kamala Harris to be the next U.S. President? As he looks at a video of that performance, what would he think of it? If he wouldn’t be extremely depressed to look at it, then would his mental powers be even worse than one might otherwise consider them to be — simply oblivious to reality? He didn’t do even as well as Trump (which was also poor).

Harris had quit the Democratic Party Presidential primaries back on 3 December 2019, well before the first primary, in Iowa. CNBC bannered “Kamala Harris drops out of presidential race after plummeting from top tier of Democratic candidates”. Although she  had received campaign donations from 17 billionaires, while Biden had received them from only 13, she scored poorly in the polls, and knew, even before the end of 2019, that there was no way she’d be able to win the 2020 nomination. She now stands a very good likelihood of becoming the next U.S. President, despite that fact.

The only contender in the Democratic Party Presidential primaries who was a serious possibility to win the nomination, other than Biden, was Bernie Sanders, who received campaign donations from zero billionaires, none of them at all, but was nonetheless able to become the leading candidate after the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, until the South Carolina primary on 29 February 2020, and Biden’s subsequent sweeps of all of the Old Dixie states on Super Tuesday, 3 March 2020. Sanders quit on April 8th.

No third-party U.S. Presidential nominee stands any chance, at all, of getting even as much as 3% of the votes by Election Day; even Ralph Nader, in the year 2000, didn’t — he received only 2.74%, and came nowhere near to winning even a single state.

Sanders has the biggest U.S. national political following of any candidate who failed to win a major-Party’s Presidential nomination, and he is the only individual in the United States whose name is — in and of itself — a big enough political brand to stand a chance of winning the U.S. Presidency as a merely write-in candidate if a national movement will organize itself (even without any authorization from him) to encourage American voters to write his name in on a write-in line of their Presidential ballot.

If the numbers of voters, who write his name in, exceed the numbers of voters who vote for either of the two major-Party nominees, then, he could become the U.S. President. If not, then at least a message could be sent out, thereby, to the existing two Parties, making clear that, finally, a substantial proportion of the American electorate are rejecting them and believe that the U.S. has become so severely on the wrong track as to require now a very radical change of direction.

Ron Paul was another “movement” U.S. Presidential candidate who never received a major-Party Presidential nomination, but he never had scored in the pre-election polling as being a serious contender to win his Party’s nomination. Sanders did.

The DNC (Democratic National Committee) knew, even back in May 2016, that Sanders would actually be stronger than Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, but they nonetheless rigged the results for Hillary against Sanders (and sometimes even blatantly) because their billionaires are more important to them than their voters are. And the same happened with Biden against Sanders in 2020. Sanders is now committed to endorsing Biden, probably as part of a deal which would make him a major cabinet secretary if Biden wins. But that is beside the point here. A write-in is a decision by the individual voter, not by anyone else.

Americans have now seen what the U.S. Presidential debates are, and will be like: a contest between two individuals, both of whom are disastrously incapable of serving the nation adequately in that office.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for President as a cripple and became elected largely because the public didn’t know it. He is considered by most historians to have been the 2nd-greatest of all American Presidents. The problems are very different with regard to both Trump and Biden. Both men are manifestly incompetent to serve in that office. Would Kamala Harris be any better? The wrong man won the 2020 Democratic nomination, because the DNC is corrupt. Now is the time for each individual voter to make his or her own U.S. Presidential decision, on his or her own, and without any Party-guidance (because that’s so profoundly corrupt, in each of the two Parties).

I shall write-in the name “Bernie Sanders” on the Presidential line of my ballot, and I hereby invite as many American voters as possible to do the same thing — not only as a protest of conscience, but because I recognize — especially after the September 29th debate — that my country has gone so far off onto the wrong path as to require now only such drastic action by each individual U.S. voter, including me. I am no longer part of a Party — I am only an American, now.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.