Sen. Bernie Sanders is the 2020 Democratic primary front-runner.
The Democratic Establishment is in a full-blown panic over the likelihood that he will be the 2020 nominee. Longtime party strategists argue that the Vermont lawmaker is too extreme, too radical, and too polarizing to defeat President Trump in the general election.
By sheer coincidence, the corporate press, which generally has a hands-off policy for covering left-wing lawmakers, is interested suddenly in vetting Sanders. The same journalists who have given him a free pass up to now are suddenly taking a long, uncomfortable look at the man who has been running for president since 2016 and who has been serving 30 years in Congress.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper, for example, asked Sanders this weekend about the senator’s long-held respect for Fidel Castro. Sanders responded by arguing that the brutal dictator was not all that bad because he implemented a “massive” literacy program.
Later, CNN senior political analyst John Avlon also brought up Sanders’s praise for dictators, highlighting the senator’s troubling history of defending known authoritarian strongmen, including Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.
NBC News itself went for a twofer, warning of Sanders’s electoral liabilities while also accusing Republicans of exploiting them for political gain.
“If Sen. Sanders wins the nomination, some Democrats worry President Trump will hammer him on his long-buried words in defense of governments in Nicaragua, Cuba, and the USSR,” it reported this weekend.
“Long-buried?” By whom, exactly?
Then, there are those recent damaging news reports about Sanders’s past, including an article by the Atlantic exploring the little-known history of the senator’s attempt in 2011 to run in a primary against President Barack Obama. The Washington Post also published an unflattering news report last week titled “Bernie Sanders briefed by U.S. officials that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign.” Both stories came out the week of the Nevada caucuses, which Sanders was expected to win and did.
Why are members of the press just now highlighting these things about the senator, including his historic praise for communist dictators? Could it be because Democratic leaders are in panic mode? The press is not used to asking awkward questions of lawmakers on the Left, but as the Democratic Establishment goes, so goes the corporate media.
Enjoy it while it lasts. The news media’s concern over Sanders’s shortcomings will last exactly as long as it does for Democratic leadership — which means it will last exactly up to the moment the senator wins the nomination and not a moment later.
