… has briefing books, a couple of meetings with policy experts, and an abiding aversion to the idea of acting out a debate before it happens. He knows the stakes are high, his staff says. But the candidate, whose New Hampshire polling and fundraising prowess have put a scare into Clinton, is uninterested in going through the motions of typical debate practice.
Senator Sanders is who he is and he believes what he believes. And those beliefs have not changed much, if at all, in forty or fifty years. As I wrote here, a few months back:
The fixed stars on his horizon are economic inequality and the essential unfairness of the political system. His Manichean universe consists—and always has—of Wall Street and the millionaires and billionaires in opposition to the middle class, the poor, and what he likes to call “working people.” American life consists of an unequal and ceaseless struggle, which the bad guys are always winning.
The opposition in this debate, Hillary Clinton, has changed – or obfuscated – her position on just about everything to include, most recently, the big trade deal which, as Jake Tapper reports on CNN she publicly pushed 45 times, but now opposes.
Still, Sanders has indicated that he:
… won’t attack Clinton personally, but instead identify where their positions differ — on foreign policy for example — and try to leave the impression with viewers of the substantive differences between the party’s two front runners.
Here’s a substantive difference: One of them takes a position and sticks with it. The other tests the political winds … and goes whichever way they blow.
