If he beat President Trump, Bernie Sanders would be a year-and-a-half older on Inauguration Day than Ronald Reagan, our oldest president, was on his last day in office. At 78 years old, the Vermont senator is now the same age as the nation’s average male life expectancy, and he’s already suffered from a heart attack, the medical details of which he curiously refuses to disclose.
Just as with Joe Biden, if he were a run-of-the-mill candidate, voters simply would not accept Sanders’s advanced age for the presidency. This is his last shot at the White House, but given his equivocating responses to attacks levied at him by the standard bearers of the Democratic Party, it’s not clear that Sanders realizes this.
On the January debate stage, Elizabeth Warren all but branded him a liar. Sanders let her camp spread the story that he told her a woman couldn’t win the presidency, allowing Warren to sit on her statement for a day, despite his vehement denial that such an exchange ever occurred, and then smear him as a sexist on the debate stage. Rather than point out that Warren, a woman who quite literally appropriated a Native American identity to secure a job at Harvard Law School, has a credibility issue, Sanders simply denied the story without turning it around on her.
That following weekend, Sanders found himself in another bind. Once again, one of his usually execrable supporters smeared Biden, the current Democratic front-runner, as corrupt in a campaign-disseminated op-ed. But rather than turn a blind eye to his supporter’s malfeasance, as he has always done with the anti-Semitism of Linda Sarsour and Ilhan Omar, Sanders bent the knee because the target was Biden. He publicly apologized for the op-ed and reiterated that he didn’t believe Biden to be corrupt in any way. Biden repaid him with an attack ad.
I’ve been fighting to protect — and expand — Social Security for my whole career. Any suggestion otherwise is just flat-out wrong. pic.twitter.com/KWIIJgFqGk
— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) January 22, 2020
The following Tuesday, Hillary Clinton went nuclear on her former foe, rightly blasting the “Bernie Bros,” blaming the septuagenarian socialist not only for their abhorrent and often sexist behavior online, but also for failing to achieve any allies or legislative successes in nearly 30 years on the Hill. Despite Sanders both endorsing and campaigning for Clinton in the 2016 general election, the former first lady declined to promise to do either if he won the Democratic nomination.
“My focus today is on a monumental moment in American history: the impeachment trial of Donald Trump,” Sanders responded in a statement. “Together, we are going to go forward and defeat the most dangerous president in American history.”
Sanders already tried to play nice in 2016. While he still let his supporters run mostly rampant, Sanders crucially declared on the primary debate stage that people were sick of hearing about Hillary’s “damn emails,” the same emails that arguably lost her the general election. Playing nice failed in 2016, and Sanders doesn’t have the backup shots to bet on it working in 2020.
If he wants to win the White House, Sanders better buck up or shut up. He’s never seemed more senile than this past week of allowing himself to be steamrolled. Unlike Biden, who has a cadre of safe states to save him after the four-way showdowns in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders’s entire candidacy rests on a strong showing in both. The Senate impeachment trial will keep him off the campaign trail until then. His last words to supporters before stepping away: “I swear I’m not a sexist,” “Sorry for calling you corrupt,” and “Orange Man Bad.”
