Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is at Liberty University today, part of his swing through Virginia that will take him to Charlottesville and Manassas before exiting for points elsewhere. It’s a smart tour for him to make, particularly as the Clinton campaign continues to stumble into a netherworld of denial and panic over the email server in the closet.
Bernie’s rise has some on the right upset. Why isn’t he getting the same word-for-word coverage Mrs. Clinton does whenever she ventures forth?
It seems newsworthy that in the run-up to a pivotal election, a presidential candidate is not only actively campaigning against the record of a sitting president of the same party, but gathering auspiciously large crowds by doing so. Of course, if the media were to report on the fiery John Reed–inspired rhetoric Sanders is blasting out to his zombie hordes at sold-out arenas, the carefully crafted Hollywood script of Barack Obama’s successful presidency would come tumbling down.
Not really. Sanders hasn’t changed his stripes on the trail and he, like every other Democratic candidate for the White House, will not criticize the incumbent.
Mr. Obama may be anathema on the right, but he still has a deep reservoir of good will among Democrats. Criticizing him, calling hm a corporate shill, a sell out…yeah, that’s not going to work for any Democrat.
What does work — for Bernie, Donald and a parade of outsider candidates going back to the founding of the Republic — is campaigning against the nefarious forces out to get you:
Sanders needs to sell a hopeless dystopian future. But the threat, of course, cannot be the economically devastating policies of Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, or the Democratic party in the deteriorating inner cities of Detroit, New Orleans, Baltimore, New York, D.C., Chicago, Oakland, and well, all of California. Rather it’s some corporate bogeyman against which the people must rise up: The faceless evil of Walmart, Wall Street, and any other wall Sanders finds himself yelling at. That’s a much more convenient narrative for media to sell the millions of crestfallen baristas wondering what happened to their Hope and Change.
What’s the word for all this again? Right: populism. And it’s sweeping the world:
Mr Corbyn’s remarkable victory places him firmly in a populist, leftist movement that is on the rise in many parts of the world, rejecting austerity, railing against inequality, willing to take on capitalist excess.
Syriza, Greece’s radical governing party, said Mr Corbyn’s triumph sent “a message of hope to the people of Europe”, while Spain’s anti-austerity Podemos party said simply: “We salute and support him.”
The 66-year-old Labour leader has also tapped into another powerful force: the distrust of mainstream politicians who presided over the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath. Mr Corbyn has harnessed the power of the outsider.
There are echoes of the success of Donald Trump in the early stages of the race for the US Republican presidential nomination and — a more obvious comparison — the support gained by the maverick Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.
“At a time of mass income and wealth inequality throughout the world, I am delighted to see that the British Labour party has elected Jeremy Corbyn as its new leader,” Mr Sanders told the Huffington Post.
Bernie and others are riding a wave. It may take them all the way in, or it may dash them on a reef. The conventional wisdom believes he will not be the Democratic nominee. Either Hillary pulls it together and sweeps to the victory that seemed assured as recently as March, or a Joe Biden type rides to the rescue (don’t look for Biden to saddle-up).
There’s reason behind the CW — Clinton still holds a big advantage among African-Americans over Sanders and everyone else. That helps her enormously in the South and hardly at all in places like Iowa and New Hampshire.
Where she’s hurting is among Democratic men. There’s already talk of a gender gap on the Democratic side, and it helps explain why she is making an explicit appeal to women in her TV ads — shore up those numbers, and she will win this thing yet.
Bernie and the “brogressives,” then, are not a genuine electoral threat. For now. Their numbers just aren’t enough to topple Clinton once the race moves beyond Iowa and New Hampshire.
If Clinton’s margins with women and African-Americans crack, then we can take Sanders seriously and parse his every word for meaning within meaning.
Until then, dudebro…chill and watch “Ted” again because it’s totally hilarious.
And for the curious, here’s Bernie’s remarks in full. He brought a cheering section with him…
