Make no mistake: without Bernie Sanders on the ticket as the VP candidate, Clinton and the Democrats will probably go down in flames. With him, Trump loses badly. On the other hand, what a great VP he would be, because as President of the Senate, he would be able to advance a great progressive agenda.

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When I first read the inevitable, that Bernie Sanders had endorsed Clinton in New Hampshire, one of his strongest states, I went into mourning. The mourning period lasted for about 12 minutes. Even the Washington Post said it sounded like he was continuing the fight.

The pundits may speculate endlessly about this new development, but I must go on record right here and now to say that I don't see a way Clinton can win without Bernie Sanders as her running mate. As repulsive as that has sounded in the past, this might be an inexorable truth, which may become clear to Clinton as time goes on, especially as her credibility woes and legal baggage increase.

Sanders' June speech was titled "The Political Revolution Continues." This one in New Hampshire was more conciliatory: "This campaign is about the needs of the American people and addressing the very serious crises that we face," he added, with Clinton nodding at his side. "And there is no doubt in my mind that, as we head into November, Hillary Clinton is far and away the best candidate to do that."

There is no one other than Sanders that has the ideological pull, the candidate's charisma, and the devoted followers, who might mourn and/or gag for 12 minutes like I did, and then move on to the Real Politik and realize that as President of the Senate, one of the major functions of the Vice President, Bernie's ability to further advance his plans and reforms would make a quantum leap from platform planks to actual legislation.

I am a member of some 800 Facebook Bernie Groups, some of which are virulently anti-Hillary. I will spare you the names of the groups, but suffice it to say that if he is not on the ticket, a lot of them will go for Jill Stein, or will write Bernie's name in. On the other hand, such a ticket would pick up most of the Sanders supporters, I would surmise, about 80-85% thereof.

He didn't convince me today to vote for Hillary Clinton, not at all. I have devoted months and thousands of hours to researching and writing about election rigging, vote "flipping," and, what I know the most about, the voter purges in New York State. I wrote a petition on Moveon. Org that almost 7000 people signed, asking the Attorney General of New York, Eric Schneiderman, to go to Federal Court to get an order for a new primary for New York. That was ignored, as were the hundreds of letters to the crusading US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, asking the same thing. As a last resort, we turned to Bernie's campaign lawyer, Brad Deutsch, sending him several hundred emails from many still devoted to the apparently naïve concept that elections should be honest and clean, and those, too, I regret to say, were ignored. We had held out, hoping that either before the convention or at the convention, these grave concerns would be aired, but that is not going to happen, I am sad to say, not by the victim of these stolen elections, anyway, Bernie Sanders himself. Maybe that is what it really boils down to for Bernie: how to help the American people to whom he is so deeply devoted, the voiceless, the poor, and even a few of the disenfranchised, by putting aside personal ambition and going for the greater good.

Maybe even the Republicans and Trump himself will allow all of those rigged primaries to be swept under the rug. Maybe even the Right Wing Radio Talk show hosts will ignore them in toto. Maybe I and those 7000 signers of the moveon.org petition were just too naïve and too hopeful that something as unprecedented as a Federal court order for a state primary to be entirely redone, with monitors and safeguards, as if New York had become a Third World nation, could actually happen.

We will have to learn to be silent, but cannot forget what happened, nor should we ever forget this hijacked election that proved so important in the scheme of things. It is like the Emperor's New Clothes, or perhaps more like the DNC ushering all of the lemmings to jump off the cliff.

If Bernie Sanders is not to be the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, it will be a long drop for all of those lemmings, and we will have 4 or 8 years of Donald Trump. Not only would Hillary lose, but it would be the end of the Democratic Party for decades.

On the other hand, if Bernie were the VP candidate, there would be a coattails effect and many of the Bernie Congressional Candidates would pull through to victory.

I am not a soothsayer, nor an apparatchik, nor a defeatist trying to make the best of a defeat. I know enough about the Senate that I can accurately predict that Sanders would make a brilliant and very active Vice President of the United States. Clinton is a smart woman, and may in due course recognize that her election depends on Bernie Sanders being on the ticket.

If she hasn't by now, her counselors should tell her, and certainly this message should show up in thousands of letters to the editor all over the United States, as the Battle of the Editorial page continues.

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Brief History of the US Vice President

Vice Presidents who Became President

John Adams, elected president in 1796, lost reelection in 1800

Thomas Jefferson, elected president in 1800, won reelection in 1804

Martin Van Buren, elected president in 1836, lost reelection in 1840

John Tyler, became president in 1841 when William Henry Harrison died in office, did not seek election in 1844

Millard Fillmore, became president in 1850 when Zachary Taylor died in office, did not seek election in 1852, lost election in 1856

Andrew Johnson, became president in 1865 when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in office, did not seek election in 1868

Chester A. Arthur, became president in 1881 when James A. Garfield was assassinated in office, did not seek election in 1884

Theodore Roosevelt, became president in 1901 when William McKinley was assassinated in office, elected in 1904, did not seek reelection in 1908, lost election in 1912

Calvin Coolidge, became president in 1923 when Warren G. Harding died in office, elected in 1924, did not seek reelection in 1928

Harry S. Truman, became president in 1945 when Franklin D. Roosevelt died in office, elected in 1948, did not seek reelection in 1952

Lyndon B. Johnson, became president in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in office, elected in 1964, dropped reelection bid in 1968

Richard Nixon, elected president in 1968, won reelection in 1972

Gerald Ford, became president in 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned from office, lost election in 1976

George H. W. Bush, elected president in 1988, lost reelection in 1992

Of the nine vice presidents who ascended to the presidency after their predecessor's death or resignation, only 4 were subsequently elected in their own right: Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman, and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Only 3 vice presidents have been elected president once, and then defeated in reelection: John Adams, Martin Van Buren, and George H.W. Bush.

Only 2 vice presidents have ever been elected and reelected president: Thomas Jefferson and Richard Nixon (only Jefferson served two full terms).

Richard Nixon is the only one on this list who was not serving as vice president when he was elected.

Gerald Ford was the only vice president who became president by ascension, secured his party's nomination, and then lost in the general election.

Vice presidents who later served in other offices:

John C. Calhoun, US Senator and US Secretary of State

Richard M. Johnson, Kentucky House of Representatives

John Tyler, Provisional Confederate States Congress

George M. Dallas, US Ambassador to Great Britain

John C. Breckinridge, US Senator and Confederate States Secretary of War

Hannibal Hamlin, US Senator and US Ambassador to Spain

Andrew Johnson, US Senator

Levi P. Morton, Governor of New York

Thomas R. Marshall, United States Coal Commission

Charles G. Dawes, US Ambassador to Great Britain, Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation

Henry Wallace, US Secretary of Commerce

Alben W. Barkley, US Senator

Hubert H. Humphrey, US Senator

Walter F. Mondale, US Ambassador to Japan

(Article changed on July 13, 2016 at 10:02)

(Article changed on July 13, 2016 at 10:51)

Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev