that's what I'm saying, they didn't hold Bernie as a champion of the left or a champion of anything at all. Even his shitlib ass was railroaded into malignment and shuffled as hard as possible into the sidelines and obscurity by the democrats and democrat-libs, and all their corporate media and astroturfed social media; and where he did manage to break through the wall of censorship and denialism through ground-up grassroots movements lifting him up in spite of the Democrats not at all with their participation

they censured him and demonized him and his supporters, not even on real terms but as "unrealistic," as "crazy," as "misogynist," as 'anti-american,' as 'envious' as 'spiteful,' as a 'spoiler' setting out to deliberately 'undermine' and 'sabotage' Hillary, and all sorts of other lies and gibberish, and all kinds of mud-slinging and slanders, that they continued both toward Bernie and toward his supporters after Hillary lost and never really stopped.

They never held him up as anything to hide anything because he and his supporters, weren't ever treated with respect or sincerity as a real political force worth engaging or treating with dignity

he and his supporters were only ever treated as an unfortunate and shameful abberation of politics and an enemy by the entire democrat and political and media landscape. You're misremembering how that actually played out. They never held up Bernie as anything even neutral let alone positive, and tried their hardest to actively ignore him and pretend he didn't exist, and where he was lifted up by the grassroots movement into the news and primaries he was actively pushed down by the democrats and democrat libs as not worth attention or respect or listening to.

Walz is a fundamentally different phenomenon, and is closer to what you're describing that they're trying to pretend he's progressive when he's not. They never did that for Bernie. Them lifting Bernie up as "attracting left wing politics into reinforcing bourgeois parliamentarism" was the compromise that his supporters were elevating him for, but instead the democrats and democrat-liberals actively engaged in hostilities and sabotage against him and against those workers lifting him up for that purpose

the complete opposite of what you're saying happened. And because they refused that compromise, and did so with such hostility and disdain for working people, it actively made a shit ton of real communists rather than diffusing them into social-democrat liberalism mascquerading as left politics like you're suggesting. A huge portion of his supporters immediately turned on him as an opportunist and capitulator because of how he folded to the democrats shameless assault against even his liberal compromise self and took to radical politics. I was involved in activist work in the middle of this all happening and watched it.

It would have have been more intelligent for the ruling class to do what you're saying they did but they didn't do that they did the opposite and it's the reason so many of his supporters are far far left of him now, including a huge portion of previous Bernie supporters now calling themselves anarchists, marxists, and communists, and openly advocating for revolutionary politics, where before they called themselves "liberal" or "democratic socialist" and were pushing for Bernie to do reformism. Walz isn't going to appeal to any left anything because that ship sailed with Bernie. Bernie was the compromise for the ruling class to do what you're saying they did which they didn't. They're trying to do this shiny keys nonsense now, but it's way too little way too late, for a candidate who's way farther right than even Bernie's center-left liberal imperialist self no less.