The day after endorsing Hillary Clinton for president, Bernie Sanders was asked a question he didn’t welcome. Did he believe Clinton could be trusted to enact a left-wing agenda if elected? Sanders ducked. “Sorry, I’m not going to get into the trusted or not.” The questioner wanted him “to characterize somebody in a way I’m not going to,” Sanders said. “Hillary Clinton is a very, very intelligent person. . . . I’ve known her for 25 years.”
That was a moment—perhaps the first—when Sanders had to confront where he stands with Clinton. It made him uncomfortable. As the Democratic presidential nominee, she has power. If elected on November 8, she would have far more power. All Sanders has is influence—a dwindling amount of it.
Influence alone won’t give him much impact on what Clinton does as nominee or president. When his candidacy threatened her bid for the nomination, Sanders had power. He was able to induce her to move to the left on issue after issue. That power is gone. Getting her to follow through and campaign on leftist issues as the Democratic nominee is beyond his reach.
How much of the Sanders agenda has actually rubbed off on Clinton? We’ll see, but Sanders shouldn’t get his hopes up. She claims the Democratic party hasn’t lurched to the left, a hint she’s eager to tilt to the center. She also has a record as first lady, U.S. senator, and secretary of state that indicates how different from Sanders she might be, despite the Sanders-like noises she emitted in the primaries.
Her embrace of the Sanders agenda now seems to have been more a tease than a commitment. As soon as she became the official nominee last week, one of her closest allies, Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, said he expects her to reverse her decision to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact after the election. For campaign purposes, she had copied the anti-TPP position of Sanders. “I worry that if we don’t do TPP at some point China’s going to break the rules,” McAuliffe said. “But Hillary understands this.”
No doubt she does. And Clinton is clever when it comes to handling such issues. She left herself wiggle room on topics that brought her close to Sanders. He called for a ban on fracking, the innovative method used to recover oil and natural gas in areas where energy resources had seemed all tapped out. Rather than seek a ban, Clinton said she would take regulatory steps to put fracking out of business, eventually.
Also at the urging of Sanders, Clinton said she wants to increase benefits paid by Social Security. “I’ll defend it and I’ll expand it,” she said. Sanders advocated raising the cap on Social Security taxes for those making more than $250,000 a year to pay for expanded benefits. Clinton hasn’t revealed how she’d foot the bill.
On hiking the minimum wage, Clinton hemmed and hawed for months while Sanders gave his demand for a $15-an-hour wage top billing (up from $7.25). She finally came around, part way. Clinton said she would sign a $15-an-hour bill, but didn’t commit to fighting for it in the first place.
By the third night of the Democratic convention, speakers were pointing Clinton toward the center, away from Sanders, his followers, and their agenda. In the New York Post, John Podhoretz wrote that Clinton needed to remove “a Sanders-sized ball-and-chain” from her leg. His delegates caught on quickly to what this meant. They booed.
Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and Barack Obama’s defense secretary, said Hillary Clinton had a plan to stamp out the terrorist threat. “We cannot afford someone who believes America should withdraw from the world, threatens our international treaties, and violates our moral principles,” he said. Panetta may have been aiming at Trump, but Sanders became collateral damage.
“Panetta was trying to speak to the undecided voter with national security concerns,” Podhoretz wrote. Sanders delegates from California, Panetta’s home state, responded with cries of “no more wars, no more wars.” In other words, they heckled.
Nor did the Sanders contingent like what they heard from Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Tim Kaine, Clinton’s running mate. They chanted their dislike of the TPP trade pact. Thanks to McAuliffe, their fears that Clinton might flip back to favoring it are justified.
It may have come as a surprise to Sanders, an independent who joined the Democratic party to run for president, to learn how the party works. It isn’t ruled by convention delegates or elected officials. The bosses are interest groups—unions, environmentalists, feminists, minorities, gays, a large chunk of Wall Street—and the party apparatus.
When the National Education Association endorsed Clinton, it was clear her flirtation with charter schools would come to an end. And it has. The environmental lobby kept her from supporting the Keystone oil pipeline from Canada, though her State Department had determined it would not be harmful to nature. To ensure African Americans were on board, Clinton didn’t risk any friction with Black Lives Matter.
And that gang at the Democratic National Committee bent on undermining the Sanders campaign? They were simply doing their job. In voting for Clinton over Sanders 602-to-48, the superdelegates did what they were created to do: block the nomination of a presidential candidate judged to be unelectable.
Sanders isn’t left with much. He basks in the glory of the Democratic platform, calling it “the most progressive platform” in the party’s history. But a platform has little effect on policy. Sanders has formed a new organization, Our Revolution, as “the next step for his movement.” It’s a small step.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
