Over the weekend, we had Clinton surrogates compare Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney, Joe McCarthy and Stalin.
Those slams went nowhere, so early this week, they’ve unveiled several new lines of attack:
1). Bernie can’t win even though the race isn’t over and Hillary has not yet won.
2). Bernie should never lobby the superdelegates that it’s totally OK that Hillary lobbied.
3). Bernie is selfish and cruel for keeping his campaign money and not giving it to down-ballot Dems.
4). Something something tax returns.
5). A glowing New York Daily News page-one Bernie profile actually showed #BernieSoStooopid.
6). Bernie’s campaign reps say kooky rah-rah stuff: BAAAAD! Hillary’s do? GOOOOOOD!
I mean, we all get it. The result tonight most likely isn’t looking so good for Camp Clinton. And perhaps those internals in New York aren’t quite where they thought they would be either. For these reasons, the Clinton empire has embarked on an all-out “Kitchen Sink” offensive against Bernie.
That’s fine. It’s a campaign. Politicking is politicking.
But when the front-runner continues to stumble and struggle so mightily to put away an elderly democratic socialist from Vermont, one can’t help but wonder what might have been had progressive forces thrown their weight behind the insurgent candidate early on. Or had other dynamic progressive candidates been encouraged to enter the race.
Too late now.
As for the merits of the listed “arguments”, talking points 1-4 can be dismissed out of hand. They are all simple talking points. It’s a pile of inside-baseball technicalities that don’t resonate with voters. But sure, spout them out there as a way to circle the wagons of the political junkie establishment-Democratic centrists around the front-runner (shout-out to Paul K down at the NYT!).
But talking points 5 and 6 deserve a couple seconds of attention each.
After days of positive Bernie publicity in the pages of the liberal tabloid New York Daily News, the Clinton forces far and wide have decided that the page-one interview shows not the scrappy progressive fighter the Daily News, you know, described, but actually #BernieSoooStupid. By and large, they draw this assessment from Bernie’s resistance to several leading questions posed by the reporter, and his outright refusal to back the status-quo Wall Street regulatory regime that has served us so...um….what’s the word...catastrophically? Abysmally? Gonna stick with Bernie there.
Why are the Clinton folks and their media friends so upset over it?
Might it just have something to do with the almost daily series of page-one jabs at Clinton the Daily News has been taking the last week? You don’t say! For example, here is today’s front page:
So let’s just move on to talking point #6. It has become a common tactic for Clinton supporters (as well as the front page writers of Daily Kos) to blow up every utterance of senior Sanders campaign staff into a sort of Outrage O’ The Day. Thus today we get kos’s missive denouncing their rah-rah promise to keep the campaign going to the floor of the convention. Yes, campaign managers and reps say crazy stuff — like threatening to pull out of a promised debate if their opponent does not “tone it down”. But by the magic of the tacit double standard at work here, the Clinton staff’s goofy overstatements are ignored while the Sanders staff’s overstatements are read literally, parsed, and decried as evidence of ambient lunacy, irrationality, or some vague looming darkness.
Nah. It’s a political campaign. The senior staff’s job is to rally the troops and push the envelope. Every campaign does just the same. Sanders’ staff did nothing out of the ordinary here. It’s not even a tempest in a teapot, but more a light breeze in a thimble-ful of fracking water.
Truth be told, Sanders has done and is doing far better than Clinton and most Democratic insiders predicted. They are frustrated by his message, his campaign, and himself, and want him to cut it out.
He has no reason to do so. We have no reason to do so.
We fight on. Every election won and every vote gained gives more power to our movement, both at the convention and in the administration to come.
We won’t quit until the contest is over. Don’t listen to anyone telling you otherwise.
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[UPDATE]: To address a complaint about the title raised in the comments, yes, it’s true that in Kos’s post today he did not order Bernie to quit so much as he excoriated the Sanders campaign for floating theories, at times nonsensical ones, by which they might win a brokered convention. It has been a running theme for kos and other Sanders critics: insisting Bernie and his campaign admit the math for them to win is impossible (or all but impossible?).
Kos has expressed, loudly, his belief that Sanders has no path to victory, and his confusion as to why Sanders chooses to remain in the race. He famously published a column in The Hill on March 22 entitled “It’s Time for Sanders to Bow Out”. Now, the headline may have been the work of an overzealous editor, as it was eventually changed to the more mundane “Is it Game Over for Sanders?” Whatever the reason for the title change was, the URL remains:
thehill.com/opinion/markos-moulitsas/273972-markos-moulitsas-sanders-time-to-bow-out
In short, kos has made it quite clear he is impatient with Sanders continuing his run. He has all but called for Sanders to drop out, and insisted that Sanders is wrong to court superdelegates, float weird convention theories, and do all the other things that Democratic Presidential candidates trying to win the nomination have done for decades.
On the Sanders side, we disagree.