There are 17,915,053 registered voters in California — the most ever for a primary election.
And this Tuesday, other states, including the extremely populous New Jersey, may be voting as well, but California is the big prize. I'm sure the various televised trips to In-N-Out on 24-hour news provided you with the hint it’s all about the Golden state as far as the candidates are concerned.
With a surge from environmentalists and those who distrust the Clintons’ coziness with big business, Bernie Sanders is hoping against hope for a strong showing in California, which would prove that he could carry the general election’s most valuable prize and lend credence to his insistence that he is a more viable November candidate than Hillary.
On the Republican side, there’s a growing sense of resignation. They’ve chosen the left hand path, cast their lot with a $60,000 hair implant with recycled trout lips attached, and begun to think, “Hey, maybe scapegoating an ethnic group for the sake of our own self-esteem is a good idea after all. I seem to remember reading a book where it worked for a few people last century.”
California makes no difference to them, no matter how many votes Arnold Schwarzenegger manages to cast for John Kasich.
But on the Democratic side, more volatile with conflict by the minute, the only question that matters is: What will Bernie do? We don’t know what his plan is if he wins, we don’t know what his plan is if he loses. We only know that he’s one of the few people left in America unwilling to capitulate to another pattern of government by big business lobbies, and he comes with a veritable army of supporters who are poised to scatter like nails from a bomb the minute their savior drops out of the race.
Some will defect to the Trump side for reasons that are completely baffling to me. Some will grit their teeth and vote for Hillary. Others will write Bernie in. I’ll probably vote for Dr. Jill Stein, both because I really want there to be a woman president and because I really want her to have never worked for Goldman Sachs, endorsed Henry Kissinger, or campaigned for Barry Goldwater. But that’s for another article.
According to The New York Times, despite the fact that Clinton is only 28 delegates below the threshold for the nomination, Bernie Sanders has vowed yet again to take his campaign to the floor of the democratic national convention, where he hopes his legions of Bernie-ites can swing the party from the bottom up. Clinton will in all likelihood declare victory today, but will it be complete? No. She will have won the most important battle, but Sanders and his zealous spartan ban will scramble to their Thermopylae and make one last stand, because Bernie-ites, like their hero, are enamored of a tradition of old socialism for which agitation is a matter of life or death. They’ll be certain that come November, they come home with their placards or on them, just as the Leonidas and his band said about their shields.
