Bernie Sanders Leaves the Democratic Party

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Bernie Sanders Leaves the Democratic Party
By Emily Zanotti | 5:41 pm, July 27, 2016
http://heatst.com/politics/bernie-sanders-leaves-the-democratic-party/

  "The nomination was barely sealed up at the Democratic National
   Convention before Bernie Sanders, who had campaigned against Hillary
   Clinton for the party's nod, went back to being an Independent.
   
   Sanders, who considers himself, officially, an Independent in Congress
   because his views lean further left than the Democratic party's
   platform, caucuses with Democrats. But until declaring an intention to
   run for the presidency in 2015, he had rarely, if ever, identified as a
   member of the Democratic Party (he's been in politics since 1979).
   
   And now, despite pleading with his base to support Hillary, even though
   they're concerned that she's too moderate, Sanders will return to
   Vermont and to his seat in the Senate, and he'll do it with no official
   party affiliation.
   
      Bernie Sanders tells @bpolitics breakfast w/reporters he'll return
      to the Senate as an Independent, not a Dem: 'I was elected as an
      Ind.'
          — Susan Page (@SusanPage) July 26, 2016
      https://twitter.com/SusanPage/status/757917246903771136
   
   Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was forced to resign as Chairwoman of the
   DNC after leaked emails revealed she'd tried to keep Sanders from
   challenging Clinton for the party's nomination, might even be
   vindicated—sort of.
   
   Sanders has struggled all along with whether to call himself a
   Democrat, even ducking the question of his party affiliation, raised by
   local Vermont media, just days after he declared. He later tried to
   reinforce that he was, indeed, a Democrat. But Sanders certainly wasn't
   a party player—and that's exactly the concern Wasserman Schultz voiced
   in the Wikileaks document dump.
   
      In an April 24 email she received with an article describing the
      ways Sanders felt the DNC was undermining his campaign, she wrote
      back, "Spoken like someone who has never been a member of the
      Democratic Party and has no understanding of what we do."
   
   If Wasserman Schultz's job was to ensure that a Democrat got the
   Democratic party nomination, then she might have been doing her job
   correctly (even if Bernie's supporters would disagree).
   
   There's the additional complication, of course, that Wasserman Schultz
   was a vocal Clinton supporter, a Clinton surrogate and is now a senior
   adviser to the campaign, as she's been officially booted from her DNC
   duties. But if anyone is vindicating her position, it's Sanders,
   dumping the Democratic party as soon as it was no longer useful.
   
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