MSNBC’s Chris Matthews warned Tuesday afternoon that if the Democratic Party nominates Bernie Sanders for president, he would “lose 49 states” and called for the other candidates to “go after” his socialist ideology.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I hope the candidates who have been telegraphing punches against Sanders are going to deliver them. I hope they actually do what they promised to do. Are they going after him about the bad behavior of Bernie Sanders’ supporters or not? Is this how they do things in Denmark?
This is the preview of coming attractions. He said he can’t control them but I think he’ll be called to account by the other candidates because they have a hesitancy or a fear of going after his ideology, going after his self-declared socialism, or about the doability of all the things he’s going to do and in a Congress that is split right now. Everybody knows half of the U.S. Senate is run by Republicans and run by half Republicans next time and it takes 60 votes to get this through.
Nobody just says the obvious: ‘Bernie, you’re full of it. None of this is going to get passed. You’re going to be a miserable president, frustrated from the first day because you’re not going to get Medicare for All. You’re not going to get free college tuition for public universities. You’re not going to get payoffs of all student loans. None of this is going to happen, and you’re just going to sit there and stew in it,’ So, why don’t they bring that up? I do not understand why they don’t bring that up…
They have to look sat the way Harry Truman did in ’48. He was assailed on the left by the breakaway from Henry Wallace and he said go your way and he Strom Thurman on the right, the segregationist, and he still beat Dewey. In the end you have to go where you believe. Are they centrist Democrats or moderate Democrats and believing in a market system, a safety net, and decent regulation, the kind of government that we’ve had for the modern 20th-21st century, do they believe in that tradition of Kennedy and Roosevelt and Obama, or don’t they? If they want to depart from the whole tradition of the party and go hard left, yeah, but they don’t want to do that.
They’re just pandering to the Bernie people, and you know what pandering gets you? Nothing. They’ve got to get out there and say, ‘I disagree with socialism. I believe in the markets. I think he’s wrong. I think he’ll never get it done, and this country will never go that direction, and, by the way, we’ll lose 49 states.’
And I was there in 1972 at the Democratic convention when the people on the left were dancing in glee. I saw them literally — they were dancing in a circle. They were so happy that they defeated the moderates like Tip O’Neill and Dick Daley and the other 49 states in their glee. So that could happen again. So clearly. That is what I see. It could happen again.
