Senator Sanders had been on a roll—until tonight. He had been playing a tent revival preacher in which he got himself, and his audiences of the faithful, worked up about the evil that has kept them in chains and from which he intends to free them before going on to use those same chains to whip up on the people who forged them.
“Preach it, Bernie,” his audience shouts—and Bernie preaches it. He believes and so do they. Sanders and his audience feed off each other.
Unfortunately, for Senator Sanders, this style works only when nobody interrupts except to shout, “Preach it, Brother.”
It plainly doesn’t work when people interrupt to demand clarification, amplification, and justification. When the revival preacher is challenged to “prove it,” this spoils the moment and he gets thrown off his stride. The spell is broken.
Still, Bernie had his moments at Tuesday’s Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas.
“On Wall Street, fraud is a business model.”
“Congress doesn’t regulate Wall Street … Wall Street regulates congress.”
But the moments passed and the spell – if one ever existed – was broken.
Sanders has had a very nice run … until tonight. From the early stumbles on guns, through the too-clever answer about Clinton’s e-mails, to the repetition of the Wall Street, millionaires and billionaires, minimum wage, etc. etc. Sanders struck a single, unpleasing, note. Ask him about marijuana and he finds a way to get people angry about the bankers.
Nobody turned off the television looking forward to listening to him saying, in that insistent voice, those same things over and over for four long years.
After tonight, Sanders isn’t going anywhere. In both senses of the phrase.
