“Bernie Sanders Isn’t Electable, And Here’s Why”: Revolution On Hold, Politicians Think Of Their Own Necks First
The blunt truth: I just can’t see Bernie Sanders winning a general election. Three months ago, I thought it might be possible, maybe. But watching the campaign unfold as it has, and given some time to ponder how circumstances might play themselves out, I’ve become less convinced that he could beat any of the Republicans. He’d probably have the best shot against Ted Cruz. But in that case, as we now know, Mike Bloomberg would get in, and I think he’d be formidable, but I don’t want to get into why here. That’s another column, if indeed it ever needs to be written.
This column is about Sanders’s chances, which I think are virtually nil for two reasons.
Reason one: He’s not an enrolled Democrat. Understand that I say this not as a judgment on him, but as a description of what would surely become, were he the nominee, a deep, practical liability. Let me explain.
That he’s not an enrolled Democrat doesn’t matter, obviously, to his fans. I’m sure it doesn’t matter to most rank-and-file Democrats. It doesn’t matter to me. But you’d better believe it matters to Democratic office holders and party officials—members of Congress, state legislators, governors, mayors, national committee members, and state committee members across the country. These people are Democrats, and they’re Democrats for a reason. It’s important to them.
A party’s nominee, to these people, needs to lead the party—he or she needs to be the country’s No. 1 Democrat. Sanders has never been a Democrat, which is fine, it’s served him well. But even as he made the decision to seek the presidency as a Democrat, he doesn’t seem to have made any effort to act like he cares about the party he wants to lead.
Politico in early January published an interesting news story comparing Clinton’s and Sanders’s fundraising operations. Clinton raised more than $100 million in 2015, and Sanders $73 million. But here was the key thing: In addition to that $100 million Clinton bagged for herself, she raised an additional $18 million for Democrats around the country.
The Sanders figure? Zero.
There’s a lot I don’t know about life. But I know this: Democratic office holders keep tabs on that sort of thing. Now maybe some of them didn’t want Bernie Sanders at their fundraisers, but that wouldn’t have prevented the Sanders operation from writing checks to progressive Democrats all over the country as a kind of down payment, which apparently did not happen. Also, Sanders could just say at any time, “You know what? I’m a Democrat now.” He cannot, technically, enroll as one, because Vermont has open, non-party registration. He could however simply say it, but he hasn’t. He caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, but that’s just because any senator has to choose one side or the other.
Partly as a result of this, and for other reasons, Sanders has very little Democratic support. He has one Democratic member of Congress, Keith Ellison of Minnesota (out of 232); and, according to the relevant Wikipedia page, just 115 Democratic state legislators across the country. Actually, that’s not across 50 states; it’s across only 14 states. Of the 115, 94 are from New England: Maine 37, Vermont 29, New Hampshire 19, Connecticut five, Massachusetts four. The Vermont number of 29 is particularly interesting, because the Vermont General Assembly (which includes both houses) has 103 Democrats, meaning that Sanders doesn’t have even one-third of the Democrats in his own state.
Maybe 115 sounds like a quasi-respectable figure to you. But there are 3,175 Democratic state legislators in America (.pdf). So 115 is nothing. And again, the vast majority come from states right in his neighborhood. Where are the others from? According to this list, to take stock of some large states and key swing states, there’s one from Ohio; zero from Florida; zero from Virginia; zero from Colorado; zero from New Mexico; one from Nevada; two from New York; one from Illinois; and from California, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, zero, zero, and zero.
Now, my argument is not that endorsements matter that much. Rather, the important part is the likely consequence of this lack of support. Say it’s late spring, and somehow or another, Sanders is charging toward the nomination. He’ll pick up some more Democratic endorsers, in safe liberal districts in states that he won. But here’s what’s going to happen. Every one of those roughly 3,200 elected officials is going to conduct a poll of his or her district to ascertain whether association with Sanders helps or hurts. It’s my guess that for a lot of them—and I would say the substantial majority of them—the answer is going to be “hurts.”
And even if that’s not the case, these legislators will sound out, as they inevitably do, their top donors, and their districts’ major employers. How many Sanders enthusiasts are going to be found among those two groups? These legislators will keep their distance from Sanders. They won’t do the things that party people normally do for their nominee—go out and make speeches, share voter information, give tips about the district that only they know, and so on.
This will vary from district to district and state to state, but the sum and substance will likely be, if I’m right, that in a number of important jurisdictions, the message of the state and local Democratic candidates and party infrastructures to Sanders will be: You’re on your own, pal. Politicians think of their own necks first, and they’re fearful of the unknown and are overly cautious on matters like this anyway.
So that’s the first reason: Having never been a Democrat, and having even not given them any of his money in this past year, Sanders just isn’t going to get much help from Democrats. The Democratic Party hasn’t nominated someone who wasn’t an enrolled member of the party since, I believe, 1872, when it chose newspaperman Horace Greeley (I’m still checking on Gen. Winfield Scott, 1880, but even if it was he, that’s a long time ago).
Now, the second reason. I think Sanders is uniquely vulnerable to scorching foreign-policy attacks. Scorching. He’d be subject to stinging attacks on domestic policy, too, but on domestic policy, I’d imagine he can hold his own. On economics and health policy and monetary policy, whatever you think of his proposals, he clearly knows the nuts and bolts.
On foreign policy, that’s not so clear at all. It’s not his lefty past here that I’m mainly talking about, although you’d better believe that Republicans would make sure every voter in America knew about that, and they’d lie about its extent to boot. But even putting that to the side, the issue is his apparent lack of interest over all these years in foreign policy. The world is in a pretty parlous state right now, so I’d bet foreign policy will matter more in this election than it usually does, even without a Big Event in October. One factor that greatly benefited Bill Clinton in 1992 is that the Cold War had ended and foreign policy was low on voters’ radar screens. Sanders won’t be so lucky. I could write the ad myself, and it would be crushing, but I don’t want to give them ideas. Rest assured, they’ll think of them on their own.
And now, here’s where my first and second reasons relate to each other. If a nominee has strong backing from his party, when those attacks come, the other folks will have his back. If he doesn’t, they won’t. Mind you it is not my intent here to scold Sanders, even though many readers will take it that way. My intent is just to describe what I think would be the reality. When the right started savaging Sanders over foreign policy (and over socialism too, of course), the bulk of the support systems that are usually there for a candidate under attack won’t be.
Now, since I know this column is going to face plenty of rebuttal, let me spend two paragraphs pre-butting myself. It’s possible that if Sanders won the nomination, local Democrats would by and large just say “OK, he’s our guy,” and they’d get behind him. I don’t think so, for reasons stated above, but I concede that it’s possible, with so much at stake. And he still would have the support of the unions, who these days do most of the get-out-the-vote legwork. So it’s possible that a lack of support from Democratic candidates in swing (and other) states won’t be that severe and won’t mean as much as I suspect it will mean.
On foreign policy, we see from his debates with Clinton what Sanders’s reply will be: I opposed the Iraq War, and I was right. And second, I support Barack Obama’s foreign policy, so I’ll just do more of that. Who knows, that might be enough. My suspicion is that it will not be. It certainly won’t be against Donald Trump, who also opposed the war in Iraq, making that issue a wash between the two of them. But I suspect that as a general election campaign progresses, Sanders will have a harder and harder time leaning on a decision he made 14 years ago, even though it was the right one.
So that leads to my first stipulation. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before, and I’ll be wrong again. Despite what some of you are going to say on Twitter and elsewhere, I don’t presume to know everything.
Stipulation No. 2: Though I admire Hillary Clinton, my argument doesn’t have anything to do with her. It’s not a brief for Clinton. She has a number of flaws. She lacks the natural pol’s exuberant charisma, she has made errors of strategic judgment in her career that make me wonder how effective she’d be at negotiating with Republicans (or Israelis and Palestinians), and though I don’t think she’s corrupt, this stonewalling reflex of hers is just terrible, and it’s kind of shocking after all these years that she can’t see how poorly it has served her.
And she comes with risk. As I wrote Monday, I doubt she’ll be indicted over the email business. But something short of that could still prove politically problematic: an FBI report that gives Republicans enough grist to grind through the attack-ad mill this fall, say.
So what I’ve written here doesn’t have to do with her. Joe Biden could be the mainstream candidate, or John Kerry, or Joe Manchin, or Claire McCaskill, or a Democratic governor, or anybody, and I’m certain I’d still think the same thing.
My feeling that Sanders could win a general election was never strong, based on the usual stuff, i.e., 74-year-old socialist from Vermont. But recently I’ve been reflecting on these two matters, his lack of affiliation with the party whose standard he wants to bear, and his unique vulnerability to attack on foreign policy at a time when those issues are much more in the forefront of voters’ minds than usual. As I’ve written before, current general election head-to-head polling is meaningless, since conservatives haven’t yet spent a dollar attacking him. If he’s the nominee, they’re going to spend at least five hundred million of them doing that. And some Democrats, more likely a lot of Democrats, are going to run away from him. I can’t see how that ends well.
UPDATE: A first reader reminds me that Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona has also endorsed Sanders. A second reader corrects that the Democratic nominee of 1880 was Gen. Winfield Hancock. Winfield Scott was the Whig Party nominee of 1852.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 27, 2016
“Sanders’s Story Provides A Comforting Fable”: What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics
At the recent Democratic town hall, moderator Chris Cuomo presented Bernie Sanders with what has been a common complaint about his presidential campaign: Sanders’s relentless focus on income inequality, in this campaign and through his career, raises the question of whether he is prepared to address the full spectrum of issues faced by a president. But there is a deeper problem with Sanders’s vision of American politics. It is not just that he has trouble talking about issues other than the redistribution of income; it’s that he has trouble conceptualizing those issues in any other terms. His rigidly economistic frame of mind prevents Sanders from seeing the world as it is.
The phrase Sanders invokes constantly, and which distinguishes him from Hillary Clinton and other Democrats not merely in degree but also in kind, is “political revolution.” The political revolution is the secret sauce. When presented with any concrete obstacles that would stand between him and his desired policy outcomes, Sanders brings up the revolution, which will transform the world he inhabits into the one he desires. One questioner at the town hall asked how Sanders proposes to pass his left-wing economic program, given “the likelihood that Republicans will win control over at least one house of Congress.” This poses a massive obstacle, given the twin facts of a map that requires Democrats to win Republican-leaning districts in order to gain a majority and polarization so deep that almost all voters now choose the same party up and down the ballot. How to get around these obstacles? Sanders again brought up (this time, without using the term) the revolution:
In my view, you have a Congress today that is much more worried about protecting the interest of the wealthy and the powerful and making sure they get campaign contributions from the wealthy and the powerful.
If we are serious about rebuilding the American middle class, if we are serious about providing paid family and medical leave to all of our people, if we are serious about ending the disgrace of having so many of our children live in poverty, the real way to do it is to have millions of Americans finally stand up and say, enough is enough, for people to get engaged in the political process, to finally demand that Washington represent all of us, not just a handful of very wealthy people.
Note that Sanders, asked about Republican opposition to his proposals, defined that opposition as “protecting the interest of the wealthy and the powerful.” It is certainly true that fealty to the interests of the rich heavily colors Republican policy. But Sanders is not merely presenting corruption as one factor. It is the entirety of it. Likewise, Sanders has difficulty imagining any reason other than corruption to explain disagreements by fellow Democrats, which he relentlessly attributes to the nefarious influence of corporate wealth. One does not have to dismiss the political power of massed wealth to acknowledge that other things influence the conclusions drawn by Americans who don’t share Sanders’s full diagnosis.
In reality, people have organic reasons to vote Republican. Some of them care more about social issues or foreign policy than economics. Sanders would embrace many concepts — “socialism,” big government in the abstract, and middle-class tax increases — that register badly with the public. People are very reluctant to give up their health insurance, even if it is true that Sanders could give them something better.
What’s more, the interests of the wealthy do not cut as cleanly as Sanders indicates. It’s true that business and the rich tend to oppose parts of his program like higher taxes on the rich, more generous social insurance, and tougher regulation of finance. But the Obama administration’s stimulus encountered intense Republican opposition even though it did not pose a threat to any business interests. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce even endorsed the stimulus, which profited business both directly (by pumping billions into contracts for projects like infrastructure) and indirectly (by goosing public demand for its members’ products). That did not stop 100 percent of House Republicans from opposing it. Nor did the unified opposition of the business lobby dissuade Republicans from holding the debt ceiling hostage in 2011, or persuade them to pass immigration reform in 2013. Sanders currently proposes a massive infrastructure program, which would make lots of money for the construction industry. Clearly, subservience to big business only goes so far in explaining Republican behavior.
The depiction of conservatism as a mere cover for greed is a habit Sanders indulges over and over. Donald Trump’s appeal, in Sanders’s telling, has nothing to do with xenophobia or nationalism: “They’re angry because they’re working longer hours for lower wages, they’re angry because their jobs have left this country and gone to China or other low-wage countries, they’re angry because they can’t afford to send their kids to college so they can’t retire with dignity.” Sanders does not explain why this economic security has manifested itself almost entirely among white voters when minorities are suffering the same conditions. He simply assumes Trump has converted economic frustration into a series of pseudo-concerns, and rather than deal with those beliefs, Sanders proposes instead to convert them back into their original form: “I think for his working-class and middle-class supporters, I think we can make the case that if we really want to address the issues that people are concerned about … we need policies that bring us together that take on the greed of Wall Street, the greed of corporate America, and create a middle class that works for all of us rather than an economy that works just for a few.”
It is not only Republican voters whose ideas Sanders refuses to grapple with. Here he is in the previous debate explaining Republican climate-science denial: “It is amazing to me, and I think we’ll have agreement on this up here, that we have a major party, called the Republican Party, that is so owned by the fossil-fuel industry and their campaign contributions that they don’t even have the courage, the decency to listen to the scientists.” It is surely true that fossil-fuel contributions have encouraged the spread of climate-science denial. But the doctrine also appeals philosophically to conservatives. It expresses their disdain for liberal elites, and, more important, it justifies opposition to government action. Psychologists and social scientists have poured years of study into identifying the causes of climate-science denial. One does not need to harbor even the slightest whiff of sympathy for climate-science denial to grasp that its causes run deeper than a cash transaction with Big Oil. Figures like George Will and Charles Krauthammer dismiss climate science because it is a way to maintain order within their mental world. Many other conservatives have social or professional reasons to believe, or at least to say, that Will and Krauthammer are serious intellectuals rather than loons spouting transparently preposterous conspiracy theories. There are deep tribal influences at work that cannot be reduced to economic self-interest.
Sanders’s story provides a comforting fable for his party. Not only are Democrats not hemmed in by the Republican hold on Congress, but they don’t even need to do the laborious work of persuading the political center to come to their side. They need only to rise up and break the grip of moneyed interests on the political system.
There are many reasons to doubt Sanders’s promise that he can transform American politics. Perhaps the most fundamental is that he does not actually understand how it works.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 27, 2016
“Plutocrats And Prejudice”: The Base Isn’t Taking Guidance The Way It Used To
Every time you think that our political discourse can’t get any worse, it does. The Republican primary fight has devolved into a race to the bottom, achieving something you might have thought impossible: making George W. Bush look like a beacon of tolerance and statesmanship. But where is all the nastiness coming from?
Well, there’s debate about that — and it’s a debate that is at the heart of the Democratic contest.
Like many people, I’ve described the competition between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as an argument between competing theories of change, which it is. But underlying that argument is a deeper dispute about what’s wrong with America, what brought us to the state we’re in.
To oversimplify a bit — but only, I think, a bit — the Sanders view is that money is the root of all evil. Or more specifically, the corrupting influence of big money, of the 1 percent and the corporate elite, is the overarching source of the political ugliness we see all around us.
The Clinton view, on the other hand, seems to be that money is the root of some evil, maybe a lot of evil, but it isn’t the whole story. Instead, racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice are powerful forces in their own right. This may not seem like a very big difference — both candidates oppose prejudice, both want to reduce economic inequality. But it matters for political strategy.
As you might guess, I’m on the many-evils side of this debate. Oligarchy is a very real issue, and I was writing about the damaging rise of the 1 percent back when many of today’s Sanders supporters were in elementary school. But it’s important to understand how America’s oligarchs got so powerful.
For they didn’t get there just by buying influence (which is not to deny that there’s a lot of influence-buying out there). Crucially, the rise of the American hard right was the rise of a coalition, an alliance between an elite seeking low taxes and deregulation and a base of voters motivated by fears of social change and, above all, by hostility toward you-know-who.
Yes, there was a concerted, successful effort by billionaires to push America to the right. That’s not conspiracy theorizing; it’s just history, documented at length in Jane Mayer’s eye-opening new book “Dark Money.” But that effort wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as it has without the political aftermath of the Civil Rights Act, and the resulting flip of Southern white voters to the G.O.P.
Until recently you could argue that whatever the motivations of conservative voters, the oligarchs remained firmly in control. Racial dog whistles, demagogy on abortion and so on would be rolled out during election years, then put back into storage while the Republican Party focused on its real business of enabling shadow banking and cutting top tax rates.
But in this age of Trump, not so much. The 1 percent has no problems with immigration that brings in cheap labor; it doesn’t want a confrontation over Planned Parenthood; but the base isn’t taking guidance the way it used to.
In any case, however, the question for progressives is what all of this says about political strategy.
If the ugliness in American politics is all, or almost all, about the influence of big money, then working-class voters who support the right are victims of false consciousness. And it might — might — be possible for a candidate preaching economic populism to break through this false consciousness, thereby achieving a revolutionary restructuring of the political landscape, by making a sufficiently strong case that he’s on their side. Some activists go further and call on Democrats to stop talking about social issues other than income inequality, although Mr. Sanders hasn’t gone there.
On the other hand, if the divisions in American politics aren’t just about money, if they reflect deep-seated prejudices that progressives simply can’t appease, such visions of radical change are naïve. And I believe that they are.
That doesn’t say that movement toward progressive goals is impossible — America is becoming both more diverse and more tolerant over time. Look, for example, at how quickly opposition to gay marriage has gone from a reliable vote-getter for the right to a Republican liability.
But there’s still a lot of real prejudice out there, and probably enough so that political revolution from the left is off the table. Instead, it’s going to be a hard slog at best.
Is this an unacceptably downbeat vision? Not to my eyes. After all, one reason the right has gone so berserk is that the Obama years have in fact been marked by significant if incomplete progressive victories, on health policy, taxes, financial reform and the environment. And isn’t there something noble, even inspiring, about fighting the good fight, year after year, and gradually making things better?
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 29, 2016
“Every Group Has Its ‘Other'”: Here We Go Again, Trash-Talking The Working Class
Bear with me, please, as I start this column with a brief story about my two grandmothers who lived in trailer homes.
They lived in Ashtabula County, which is tucked into the northeast corner of Ohio, an hour east of Cleveland. If ever you’ve travelled a good distance along U.S. 90, you likely passed our county’s handful of exits on your way to somewhere else.
For all of my childhood, this was home, and I was seldom happier than when I had time alone with my maternal great-grandmother, Ada, who raised my mother from the age of 8. In the late ’60s, after her husband died, Ada sold her house and 20 acres to move into a trailer home a couple of miles down the road. It was closer to her church, her second home.
I spent weeks at a time in the summers with her, freed from the responsibilities of the oldest child always on duty. She taught me how to cook, garden and quilt. Every Sunday after church, rain or shine, we walked to the cemetery to tend my great-grandfather’s grave and say a prayer of gratitude for the time we’d had with him. We had our evening rituals, too. She believed a steaming cup of tea at sunset was a great way to settle the mind for the big thoughts that show up only under the night sky.
My maternal grandmother, Vivian, lost custody of my mother when she was 8 and spent the rest of her life trying to make it up to her and taking care of my uncle, who had a mental disability. His name was Francis, and she never spent a day away from him until he died from complications of diabetes in his late 50s.
Grandma Vivian was the first person I knew to buy an aluminum Christmas tree. What a sight for my siblings and me. My mother stood behind us and whispered orders to close our mouths and stop acting like we’d just seen a ghost.
This was the grandma with the trunk full of antique dresses and hats for us to play with whenever we visited. When my mother wasn’t around, Grandma often served me a cup of coffee loaded with milk and sugar — a grown-up reward for “being so responsible.” When her house in Ashtabula County became too run down to be safe, my grandmother closed it up and lived in a trailer on the back lot until Alzheimer’s robbed her of the ability to take care of herself.
I wanted you to know a little bit about my grandmothers so that you might better understand my outrage over a Cleveland Plain Dealer writer’s reaction to Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump for president:
“Thanks to Trump, the entire Palin clan is now back in the spotlight they so crave. Come July, Republican National Convention organizers should house the whole dysfunctional family at a trailer park in Ashtabula.”
This is surely not the first time a pundit has cast the Palins as “trailer park folks” — which is code, of course, for “white trash.” We are hearing these phrases more frequently as pundits try to make sense of Donald Trump’s soaring poll numbers.
In her book “Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America,” sociologist Diana Kendall describes how in 2008 then-“Late Show” host David Letterman “maintained a night-after-night monologue about Sarah Palin and why she is white trash.” He was joined, she writes, by “print media, television and Web blogs … full of descriptions of Sarah Palin’s trailer park lifestyle.”
Much closer to home, since Donald Trump’s charade of a candidacy caught fire, I have heard many fellow liberals freely toss around the terms “white trash” and “trailer trash.” These are people who would never dream of telling a racist joke, but they think nothing of ridiculing those of lesser economic means.
Every group has its “other.” For too many white intellectuals, it’s the working class.
Neither of my grandmothers had much money, ever, but they contributed so much to the lives of the people they loved. They were both storytellers who helped me understand the long-ago sacrifices of people I would never know but who live on in the blue of my eyes and the ambitions of my heart. They are why I’ve devoted a number of columns and stories over the years to people who live in trailer parks.
Just this week, I was remembering Marjie Scuvotti, a 24-year-old mother of four. I interviewed her in 2002, on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. She talked to me in her home in a trailer park as she painted her 6-year-old son Issac’s face red, white and blue for a parade celebrating first responders.
“You’re my American-flag boy,” Marjie whispered in his ear. She couldn’t have been a prouder mother.
This campaign year has barely begun, and it promises to be a long one. Regardless of which partisan lens we look through, we will see some voters who confound us.
Mocking them will never bring us closer to understanding them, but it will surely reveal us, and we will not benefit from the exposure.
By: Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist and Professional-in-Residence at Kent State University’s School of journalism; Featured Post, The National Memo, January 28, 2016
“Four Years Of Peace, Love, And Single-Payer Health Care?”: In That Old Volkswagen Bus With Bernie, Rolling Toward 1972
Unpack your old tie-dyed T-shirts, roll yourself a fat doobie, and warm up the ancient VW bus. We’re going to do Woodstock and the 1972 presidential election all over again. And this time, the hippies are going to win! Four years of peace, love, and single-payer health care.
But do take care to clear the path for Bernie Sanders. Because if he steps in something the dog left behind, he’s going to blame Wall Street and start yelling and waving his arms around.
And you know how much that upsets Republican congressmen who are otherwise so eager to oblige his plans to soak the rich and give everybody free college, free health care, free bubble-up and rainbow stew—as the old Merle Haggard song had it.
OK, so I’m being a smart-aleck. I was moved to satire by a couple of moments from last week’s Democratic and Republican presidential debates. First, Sen. Sanders, boasting about a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll that shows him beating Donald Trump by 15 points—54 to 39. Hillary Clinton tops Trump only 51-41.
Both would be huge landslides. In 1972, Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern 61-38. The Democrat won only Massachusetts.
The part Sanders left out and that Hillary was also wise enough to leave unmentioned is that the same poll shows her leading him 59 to 34 percent in the Democratic primary contest nationally. Twenty-five points.
She’d have to be a fool to take that to the bank, although it does demonstrate why a lot of the horse-race commentary has the narrative upside down. See, unless Bernie manages to prevail in the Iowa caucuses, his campaign pretty much goes on life support. A New Englander nearly always wins in New Hampshire, and rarely goes anywhere after that.
Almost needless to say, all polls are individually suspect. Moreover, the national media give far more play to surveys depicting a close contest; they’re better for journalists’ careers.
That would be true even if you didn’t know that bringing Hillary Clinton down has been an obsessive quest in Washington and New York newsrooms for twenty-four years.
During most of which time it’s been “Bernie who?” That Vermont socialist who’s all the time yelling? That guy?
Yeah, him. The guy with the Brooklyn accent and the Wacky Prof look who says “billionaire” the way some people say “Ebola.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The same guy Ohio Gov. John Kasich boldly predicted would lose all 50 states if Democrats were foolish enough to nominate him. Actually, I’m confident Sanders would carry Vermont and probably Massachusetts against any Republican nominee. But New Hampshire and Maine could be out of reach.
Even against Trump? Well theoretical matchups mean next to nothing this far out. And I suspect that Bernie’s big advantage–hard for politically active readers to believe—is that most voters know almost nothing about him except that he’s neither Hillary nor The Donald.
I also suspect that a Trump vs. Sanders matchup would bring a serious third-party challenge. Let the GOP attack machine get to work on Sanders and I’m guessing we’d soon learn that there’s no great yearning among the electorate for socialism—democratic or not.
Did you know, for example, that Sanders took a honeymoon trip to the Soviet Union in 1988? George Will does.
Does that make him disloyal? Of course not, merely a bit of a crank. As Sanders loyalists are quick to remind you, President Reagan went to Moscow to negotiate nuclear arms reductions with Gorbachev that same year.
As a personal matter, I got my fill of Marxist faculty lounge lizards back in that tie-dyed, VW bus era. Disagree with them, and you’re an immoral sellout. That gets old really fast.
Writing in The Washington Monthly, David Atkins does a brave job of trying to explain away a Gallup poll showing that while 38 percent of Americans say they’d never vote for a Muslim president, and 40 percent wouldn’t support an atheist, fully 50 percent said no socialists need apply.
Can Bernie persuade them otherwise? I don’t see how. Most Americans don’t actually hate the rich, and his despairing portrait of contemporary American life doesn’t square with most people’s experience.
“Against these liabilities,” observes Jonathan Chait, “Sanders offers the left-wing version of a hoary political fantasy: that a more pure candidate can rally the People into a righteous uprising that would unsettle the conventional laws of politics.”
Meanwhile, not only has Sanders presented no realistic political scenario for enacting his vaunted reforms, serious observers also question their substance.
Writes liberal MVP Paul Krugman:
“To be harsh but accurate: the Sanders health plan looks a little bit like a standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up.”
During the last Democratic debate, Bernie accused Hillary of failing to take his candidacy seriously. Fair enough. But has he?
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 20, 2016
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