On the same night Hillary Clinton had to turn over her private email server to the FBI, she lost her lead in New Hampshire to a self-described socialist (according to one poll, at least).
We have a long way to go before this is a reprise of Clinton’s 2008 swoon, in which she went from heavy favorite for the Democratic nomination to losing to Barack Obama. Bernie Sanders’ repeated run-ins with the Black Lives Matter activists don’t bode well for him getting the kind of minority support it would take for him to seriously threaten Clinton.
But when even friendly outlets have to concede storm clouds are gathering around the Clinton campaign, we can at least say that the coronation is in doubt for the first time. Does this lure Joe Biden into the race, or make a greater number of Democratic movers and shakers consider him as a Plan B in case the Clinton email caper starts to spin out of control?
Past Clinton claims about her email usage habits at the State Department have not withstood scrutiny. The revelation about “top secret” emails at least suggests she was overly lax with sensitive government information. The Clinton campaign’s attempts to portray the former secretary of state as being in control of the situation — “She directed her team to give her email server” — seem almost laughable.
Yet Democrats with memories that stretch back to the 1990s can recall Clinton scandals that seemed ready to engulf Bill and Hillary. The Clintons always survived. In many cases, Republican investigations fizzled and the first couple prevailed in the court of public opinion even as they had to settle in a court of law.
What difference, at this point, does it make? Clinton’s State emails are now outside her control, increasing the odds of some new development. Democrats don’t want to blow the 2016 presidential election. And while most of the Democrats running against Hillary have very little support, with Martin O’Malley the only also-ran who is even running wholeheartedly, the fact that Sanders is doing as well as he is with his obvious limitations ought to at least puncture the conventional wisdom about Hillary’s inevitability.
Sanders deserves to be taken seriously at this point. He is hitting a nerve that Elizabeth Warren’s success in the Democratic Party already showed was raw. He is at the very least the Democrats’ Ron Paul. He has started a discussion about what distinctions there are, if any, between American liberalism circa 2015 and democratic socialism.
The big risk for Sanders, aside from a possible Biden late entry, is peaking too soon. New Hampshire has a long tradition of rewarding insurgent challengers and he has held statewide elected office in neighboring Vermont since the early 1990s. But in the first-in-the-nation primary, there have often been moral victories where the second-place finisher — Eugene McCarthy, Pat Buchanan, yes, even Bill Clinton — have left New Hampshire almost as if they had won.
A lot of this is based on expectations. The expectations game for Sanders is evolving. When he first got into the Democratic race for president, he could have won a moral victory just by keeping the New Hampshire primary close. Now Sanders, who has been hesitant to hit Clinton on personal ethics or transparency for fear of alienating the Democratic masses, may need to actually win plurality of votes to get the desired effect.
All in all, however, not Hillary’s finest hour.
