Editor’s Note: Back in January 2019, I put out the call for writers to help us cover the Democratic Party’s 2020 primary, since I didn’t think I could do it with so many friends on Facebook on all sides. Julie Slama answered the call, and got things started by profiling the amazingly large and diverse field of candidates.

A Primer on the Democrats Running for President in 2020

Now that the field has been narrowed to one, former Vice President and Senator Joe Biden — with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders announcing his withdrawal in a simple video on Wednesday — I asked her to wrap it up for us. She was not happy about it.

“I don’t have anything positive or polite to say right now,” she told me in a Facebook message. She was a Bernie supporter.

So I said, “Who said it had to be positive? You started the coverage of the Democratic Primary. How do you feel now?”

“I feel like the cause is lost, in a way,” she said. “It’s a shock when you lose — and this is the second blow — the first being Super Tuesday after his amazing start. I thought he could make headway by promoting M4A (Medicare for All) during a freaking PANDEMIC — and he drops out!”

But I kept encouraging her to write something. Thursday she did. See below.

I don’t think Sanders had much of a choice considering the way things played out. It would have been nice to see him go out with a big Moses or Martin Luther King Jr. like speech, as I wrote in a recent column, where he could have said America will one day soon get to the democratic socialism promised land. But how can you campaign with the novel coronavirus gripping the land? It was obvious to me several months ago that he would not be the nominee or get there with us, so to speak.

As awful as this novel coronavirus is right now, I think there is a possible silver lining here, if we seize this teachable moment to figure out how to live differently, as I recently wrote.

There is a Silver Lining in the Coronavirus Crisis Dark Cloud

But with all the talk from Washington about “getting back to normal” and “opening up America again” — and if Trump is able to hang on to half the people and somehow remain in office beyond 2020 — then the despair felt by Bernie supporters right now might become our reality.

I hope not. I don’t know if Democrats can somehow come together now to save us from four more years of this Trump national nightmare. Biden and Bernie have pledged to try. Maybe the Obamas can emerge from the shadows and help now that the primary is a done deal. We will see.

This is the testimony of a Bernie Sanders supporter. We would love to know what you think and we are looking for more contributions from people who are stuck at home and feel like writing, about anything, politics, science or the environment, etc.

By Julie Slama –

DNC diehards will be fist-bumping (from a safe distance, of course) and sharing celebratory conference calls on Zoom today because Bernie Sanders has suspended his presidential campaign.

But to some 30 million uninsured, and at least seven million unemployed Americans, it feels more like the death of a dream.

I shed some tears for that dream yesterday, and again today, as 2020 tastes like dust and defeat.

I have been asked why I trusted this wild haired old Jewish guy with a Brooklyn accent above all the other, perhaps better qualified and more competent politicos out there, and it’s a fair question.

The answer is consistency.

I didn’t think he was the most accomplished legislator. How could he be, when he wasn’t even a lawyer? I didn’t think he was the most sophisticated policy wonk on the Hill, either.

But I did think he genuinely cared about the lot of ordinary people, and his message has never varied in 30 years. I trusted him to gather all the wonks and economists and legal eagles and put them to work for us, the American People, for a change.

I trusted him to give his remaining years trying to make things better for people and the planet.

These days, Congress seems more like an exclusive investors club than a body devoted to serving the public, and the Supreme Court is starting to look like a Young Republicans frat house rather than the august body of impartial and learned constitutional scholars intended by the founders.

The vindictive martinet in the White House is busy creating chaos, served hot with a new dollop of flaming lies in every breath, and who in this morass is looking out for us?

We’ve basically been told that we don’t matter and that our lives and small contributions aren’t important in the greater scheme of things.

The Manifest Destiny of Wall Street must take precedence if our ship of state is to reach a safe harbor, and a few hundred thousand dead grannies is simply the price of doing business.

Bernie offered another point of view.

For a brief, shining moment, it seemed like it might be possible to have a leader who didn’t think the sun rose and set solely on the U.S. dollar.

People started to think that maybe what others around the world take for granted, like a guarantee of health care and perhaps even a living wage, might be possible here, too. Bernie made it seem real.

Bernie didn’t divide us all into two camps of winners and losers.

Bernie wanted us all to be winners.

A worker with guaranteed health coverage is a more courageous worker than one who has to weigh his children’s well-being in the balance when it comes to a strike. A worker with a living wage isn’t as inclined to tug his forelock when he hasn’t seen a raise in half a decade, and might even have a bit put by for a rainy day.

A worker who is participating in the “gig economy,” working a series of temporary jobs with no benefits or security, at least knows that if he gets hit by a bus it won’t include a gig in bankruptcy court.

People’s heads might be held a bit higher.

We might have felt like America was winning for a change – at something that mattered to the people footing the bill.