Bernie Sanders has lost Jewish areas in previous contests. But New York has the largest Jewish voting base in the country. So naturally Bernie Sanders decided to use it to bash Israel. Again and again.
For the third time in under a week, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has exaggerated the number of civilians killed in Israel’s 50-day conflict with terror-group Hamas in Gaza in the summer of 2014.
Confronted in an interview by CNN‘s Jake Tapper on Sunday morning, Sanders defended his earlier inflated figure of “over 10,000 innocent people” killed in Gaza as an inaccurate recollection in the course of a conversation with The New York Daily News that was quickly corrected after an on-the-spot Google search.
So Bernie Sanders is terrible, but even terrible politicians usually have some sort of plan. Even before all this, Bernie Sanders was only getting 29% of the Jewish vote. Every time he opens his liehole, his share goes down.
Assuming that Bernie Sanders is a rational actor (I know, it may be reaching to assume he's rational) he has written off most Jewish voters except the hard core anti-Israel crowd. Meanwhile his campaign is touting Muslim support. That doesn't seem like a great plan, but then again, Bernie Sanders was never going to do well with Jewish voters anyway. So his strategy is do well with the left instead.
Angering Jews burnishes his progressive credentials and keeps the cash flowing. And that seems to be the whole plan for his campaign.
The constant misstatements of casualties have a Manchurian Candidate air to them (nobody's talking about whether Israel killed innocent people in Gaza, they're talking about how many innocent people Israel killed in Gaza) and may be downright deliberate trolling. After all not even Bernie Sanders could be this ridiculously incompetent. (Or could he?)
But Bernie Sanders was never going to win New York. He tends to do well in white states and worse in diverse states. That hasn't always held up, but New York has far too many black people. So he's trying to score progressive points instead. Attacking Jews can double as progressive cred. Even/especially when a person of Jewish ethnic origin does it.