By Yves Smith. This article was first published on Naked Capitalism.

On every conceivable front, the Democrats double downing down on the strategy that led them to hemorrhage losses in representation, meaning power, at every level of government. In keeping, more and more voters are leaving the party.

The latest repeat of a failed strategy is to try to smear Sanders in a cack-handed effort to win over his base. This is as likely to succeed as calling Trump voters “deplorables” did.

The reality is that the Democratic party leders have no strategy. Instead, they are taking the playbook of a mad scientist in a kitschy horror movie, frantically spinning dials and flipping switches as his invention has gone out of control. His control, needless to say.

The Democrats’ actions made clear they were fixated on the Federal government patronage and revolving door goodies that control of the Executive branch conferred. Beyond the state-that-is-almost-a-country of California, the lucre isn’t large enough for them to deviate from their stance of being party of the 10% and trying to hold onto their traditional base by being marginally less God-awful than Republicans. Reader johnnygl flagged this section of a Washington Post story on how the post-election strategy of Russiaphobia plus Trump bashing plus yet more identity politics isn’t working with voters:

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Let’s put this more bluntly: even with Trump turning out, whether by virtue of capture, inclination or not caring, backing solidly Republican positions, with his impulsive foreign policy shows of manhood as an added huge negative, Democrats are becoming more and more immune to lesser-evilism. The party has tried to fool voters too many times with hope and change and other pro-worker cant while delivering the goods only to their wealthy patrons. The defectors aren’t coming back until the party starts to deliver for them.

The Unity campaign is revealing how desperately the Democrats are clinging to their self-delusion. They seem to believe that they can kick Sanders and his voters and yet still get them to turn out at the polls for them. By contrast, Sanders, who knows what moves his base isn’t him personally but his policies, has only upside from participating in this charade. He gets a platform to keep selling his message, while the Democrats kid themselves that they can peel away his supporters without making concessions.

One proof that the operatives recognize the Unity campaign is backfiring is the upsurge in attacks on Sanders via the most loyal Democratic party mouthpieces, the Washington Post and the New York Times. With the election proving that the establishment media doesn’t have much sway with great swathes of the public, these hit pieces are tantamount to throwing water balloons at Sanders from the Acela: they may make gratifying splashes but they don’t do real damage. But they demonstrate yet again how committed the party remains to losing if winning requires giving more to ordinary citizens.

The first smear masquerading as reporting, Bernie Sanders’s strange behavior, ran last week in the Washington Post. It was so obtuse, presumably by design, that I remarked then: “This is either a candidate for ‘Most clueless political piece every written,’ as in ‘What about ‘power struggle’ don’t you understand?’ or Democratic party authoritarianism in action. The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.”

The article, by Aaron Blake, is intellectually dishonest from the get-go. This is its first paragraph:

Really? Sanders launched a Unity Tour and Perez and the Democratic Party establishment decided to come along? This sort of “unity” charade is a Democratic party fixture.

Let us not forget why this exercise is even seen as necessary. The Democrats are trying to win over Sanders voters who correctly saw the selection of Perez as DNC head over Sanders’ pick Keith Ellison as a big fat middle finger to them. This “Unity Tour” is the 2017 analogy of the many efforts to “reintroduce” Hillary Clinton to voters, as if after decades of overexposure, they were somehow in the dark as to what she was about. They presume that if Perez hits the road with Sanders, they’ll come to like the new DNC, even though it is just the same as the old DNC.

The benefit to Sanders is that this is so patently foolish is that all he has to do is play along. He gets to go around the US and keep pitching his preferred policies.

But as Perez is getting boos at virtually ever whistlestop, someone must be at fault! And it can’t possibly be that the Democrats are trying to get the dogs to eat dog food that they’ve already rejected. No, it must be Sanders’ doing. The article proceeds from the straw man that it is Sanders’ job to create Democratic party unity, when the onus is on the party to find a way to reach his voters.

Put it another way: the Post, presumably reflecting the views of the Democratic elite, sees voters as chattel. They actually seem to believe that Sanders is like an old Tammany hall boss, or a union leader, who can deliver a block on his say so. So look at the things the Post views as offenses:

The big hissy fit, however, that Sanders hadn’t endorsed Ossoff yet, stating yet another obvious fact that Democrats don’t want the children to hear: “Some Democrats are progressive, and some Democrats are not,” and saying he didn’t know enough either way to decide.

Sanders did relent and endorse Ossoff. While purists are unhappy over that move, the reality is that his support will make perilous little difference either way in an affluent district in the South. And as reader Marina Bart pointed out in comments, the tisk-tiskers are missing the real play:

The effort to beat Sanders into line became more obviously two-faced with another hack job, this one in the New York Times, At a ‘Unity’ Stop in Nebraska, Democrats Find Anything But.

The cause celebre is that Sanders has backed a young progressive, Heath Mello, who is running for mayor of Omaha. Per the fixation of the Democrats with the top of the ticket, since when have they cared about a mayoral campaign, particularly in flyover?

Mello’s offense is that he is being depicted as anti-abortion. But that is a trumped up charge. Mello is Catholic. He’s adopted the formula that many Catholic campaigners have so as not to offend fellow Catholics who might be inclined to vote for him: to say he’s personally pro-life but politically supports abortion rights.

So what is his sin that has gotten the attack dogs after him, when anyone with an operating brain cell knows the real issue is his economic positions? This is apparently the only real dirt:

Let us contrast that with the actions of Democratic party vice presidential nominee, Tim Kaine, who also took the position that he is personally pro-life but politically supports the right to abortionsper Politico:

And proving how captured groups will go to bat for Team Dem, the validators for the attack on Mello and Sanders are the heads of the American Federation of Teachers and the pro-abortion group NARAL. But did either of them object to Tim Kaine’s clearly dodgy record? From the same Politico story quoted above:

Oh, and what about the sainted Obama, who doesn’t have the vexing problem of having been raised Catholic? Or the Clintons?

In fact. both are official backers of the policy devised by Richard Nixon: of having abortions be legal but keeping them scarce by not having the government pay for them. That of course is not problem to the affluent 10% that is the Democratic party’s true base. The Hyde Amendment, the legislative embodiment of the “no Federal funding of abortions except to save the mother’s life or in cases of incest or rape, became law in 1976. The law was made more restrictive in the 1980s. The only change under the Clinton Administration was to allow for Medicaid to cover abortions for rape and incest.

Recall that Hillary Clinton said that in 2008 abortions should be “safe, legal and rare, and by rare, I mean rare.” categories that are not mutually compatible. And that is consistent with an earlier statement, reflecting her Methodist roots, that she saw abortion as “morally wrong”.

From an Atlantic story in 2016:

Needless to say, that resulted in Clinton in having a “nuanced” position on abortion that might look a tad too equivocal. Again from the Atlantic:

And Obama, the 11th dimensional chess player whose religion has never seemed to impinge on his politics? Obama issued Executive Order 13535, which extended the Hyde Amendment to Obamacare.

But you’d never know that reading the howls of the loyal camp followers, like Lauren Rankin in Allure, who followed close on the heels of the New York Times hit piece with Bernie Sanders’ Actions Show He Values Votes More Than Women. It apparently does not occur to her that a $15 hour minimum wage and other worker protections will give women a much greater ability to get abortions because more women who are now middle or lower income would be able to pay for them themselves.

And this is yet another demonstration of the Democrats embracing failure. Women’s fashion magazines were virtually ordering their readers to support Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Similarly, a female friend described Alternet’s pre-election editorial stance as “How to have better orgasms while voting for Clinton.”

Yet recent polls show that female tribalism didn’t work very well. Sanders has more support among women than men. It appears that women are more acutely aware of the precariousness of their financial position that fashion magazine writers and editors are.

In other words, the attacks on Mello and Sanders are rank hypocrisy. If you are card-carrying neoliberal, you are permitted to have “nuanced” positions on abortion. Bona fide progressives need not apply.

But as much as the mainstream media and orthodox Democrats try to have it both ways, savage Sanders yet win over his base, the more they will prove that he should proceed apace with his bottoms-up takeover campaign.