Sanders tries to clean up after his supporters.

     "We have hundreds of employees. . . and people sometimes say things that they shouldn’t."

Bernie Sanders wants to make nice with Democrats. His movement does not.

Bernie Sanders is scrambling to fix a problem. His campaign is being hurt less by his own mistakes than by the behavior of his supporters in his movement. His movement has set a tone.

Yesterday, Sanders made news minimizing instructions his campaign was giving to campaign volunteers, advice that told volunteers how to undercut other candidates. He responded to news of the instruction sheet by saying Elizabeth Warren is a "very good friend" and they have "worked together in the Senate for years." In the future, he said, "no one is going to trash Elizabeth Warren."

Today, he is denying reports that he had told Warren that a woman could not be elected president. "It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn't win." 

There is a context for this. Bernie is politic. His supporters are not. Leftist political conversation is awash with worry about the uncompromising, Bernie-or-bust comments of his supporters. Sanders himself does not do harsh criticism of fellow Democrats, but he gives space for his supporters to do it. His campaign advisory begins with differentiating himself from the "Democratic Establishment. He says they favor "safe bet" candidates of the status quo, who then lose.

It then goes on to say that Biden's problem is that he fails to excite people and that young people won't turn out. 

Buttigieg, it reads, won't win the support of African Americans or young people. 

Warren's problem, it reads is that the "people who support her are highly-educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what. She is bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party. We need to turn out disaffected working-class voters if we're going to defeat Trump."

Regarding Klobuchar

My own view is that these descriptions are both mild and factually correct in their description of their current polling weaknesses. 

So why the problem?

Warren's response had traction because the Sanders movement gives credibility to the idea that Bernie's supporters are zealots and nasty about it. “I was disappointed to hear that Bernie is sending his volunteers out to trash me," she said.

That is unfair. He doesn't send them out to trash her--they do it eagerly and on their own. They are advocates. Bernie or else. Take no prisoners. 

Regarding Biden

Klobuchar is a "racist," a "fraud," a "corporate sellout."

Buttigieg is "racist," "a corporate shill".

Warren is "faking it," "weak," "corporate," a "fraud," and formerly a "Republican!"

Crush our revolution

Many Bernie Sanders supporters engage politics as a tight group making itself tighter, with members pushing themselves toward higher degrees of purity, a process familiar in religious and revolutionary movements. In American Protestantism it led toward schism and sectarianism. In France, Russia, and China it led to purges and executions. 

Warren

It should be expected in a campaign that its leader calls a "political revolution." But it has consequences.

 It confounds the Sanders effort to expand his coalition. Trade union people--his natural base--are condemned for wanting to keep their negotiated health care. Boomer moderates are told they are wolves in sheep clothing, dreaded "centrists."

There is a body of Democrats who want change but are thoroughly exhausted by all the political drama. Bernies activist core says that without drama, there is no change. They may be right, but it is an unwelcome--and unwelcoming--message to people who were happy with Obama and are looking for a political home.

Democrats fuck us over

Bernie Sanders created a movement. He is the center of it and its inspiration. He does not control the message of his movement, but he is stuck with it and damaged by it, if he seeks the support of voters wavering between candidates within the current group of candidates.

But the Sanders case statement is that he does not need moderates, or a coalition. He will win, his supporters hope, by bringing entirely new voters into the mix. 

Don't need Democrats or Republicans

A screen shot of the campaign advisory: