Thread by @AlexandraErin

Well, other people are picking this ad apart for cherrypicking/incomplete context.

Eh. I don't care?

As I've been saying, "politics is allowed in politics."

I'm going to say it suggests that the Sanders campaign is in learning mode after Super Tuesday, which is good.

https://twitter.com/ccadelago/status/1235207816899465216

Saying that those quotes from President Obama don't tell the whole story... nobody's ever telling the whole story, they're telling a story, and as somebody in a bad fanfic I dreamed about once said, “There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story."

A lot of the snarkily sincere takes on Biden's performance vs. Bernie's last night were along the lines of "Guess there's a cost to trashing a popular former president, who knew?"

And today, the Bernie Sanders campaign drops a powerful, well-made ad that plays him up.

I'm very down on the idea, as is prevalent in the vocal Sanders supporters on Twitter dot com, that the solution for a disappointing performance by their guy is that everybody else in the world needs to do better, because he's perfect.

What his campaign needs to do is connect.

They need to connect with people, with voters, on an emotional level. The heart. The gut. And the parts of the mind that aren't embodiments of pure reason. (That is, the entire thing.)

They've been mostly running the platform.

They need to do more to run the person.

What I have been saying these past few days, sometimes with less patience and eloquence than I would like, is that the Bernie campaign needs to appeal to Democratic voters in order to win their votes.

And what I see in this ad is: he understands that. His people understand that.

So this is a good move from Sanders! More like this from Sanders! I'm going to go donate to him the total amount I've given to Warren's campaign. (Which is not much, I'm a disabled crowdfunded artist. But.)

This is part of the answer to the thing I have been talking about as the weakness in his campaign, the thing that makes me fear that his presidency would be disappointing and fuel a backlash that results in a resurgent Republican Party and lasting destruction for progressives.

Bernie being willing to associate himself with the Democratic establishment he's derided, Bernie being willing to try to win over existing party voters instead of trying to overwhelm them... this is a Bernie Sanders I could trust to get things done in Washington.

And to be very clear, I'm not praising him for moral courage or integrity here. This is absolutely devious, underhanded, and shady. It is maybe the most "behaving like a politician" thing Bernie Sanders has done since he launched.

You want him to win, and even better, deliver?

Then he's got to fight like a politician. He's got to work like a politician. He's got to work with politicians.

A principled idealist can have little a politics, as a treat.

I don't think he's doing himself any favors with the Black voters in the Biden camp or those still watching from the sidelines with this chicanery, but I don't see where he had a clear path to winning them.

Bridges are burned now, but they were rickety to begin with.

But if this ad gets wide play, it could soften a lot of people in the Mild Moderate Middle on the image of Bernie as a dangerous divider, which is a bad liability in an election when a lot of people are voting from a place of fear and anxiety.

This ad is targeted at the people who aren't fully engaged, aren't super online, haven't followed the blow by blow of all the feuds and backstage drama.

The actual "low-information voters", people just living their lives and showing up to vote for the person they like best.

And there are a lot of people who vote that way. It's designed to make them like Bernie more, or at least dislike him less. To make him palatable.

I hope he'll keep making more overtures towards them, and that futures ones will be less outright deceptive.

But.

Politics.