Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is both a millionaire and a socialist, a presidential hopeful who swears he’ll make the rich pay their “fair share” but who couldn’t avoid getting kicked off of a commune for laziness. He wants to nationalize one-fifth of the economy, abolish private health insurance, and enact a “Medicare For all” bill that fewer than four in ten Americans support. He’s a radical who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, and he’s built an entire career on the taxpayer dime without ever creating a single job.
All that, and he’s not even close to being the least likable figure in the Democratic Party.
The wounds of 2016 still run deep, and just like President Trump, Sanders still has the privilege of running against the Clinton machine and their corrupt cronies. The New York Times is out with a spectacle of a story detailing the divide between the Sanders camp and Clinton surrogates at the Center for American Progress. It inadvertently makes the strongest case for Sanders that he could possibly make during the coming primary: he’s running as much against his own party’s establishment as he is against the opposition party.
BACKSTORY: In 2008, @NeeraTanden set up what she thought would be an easy interview for @HillaryClinton with @Faiz Shakir, then editor of @ThinkProgress.
But Faiz asked about the Iraq War.
Later, Neera punched him & asked “Who the f— do you think you are?”https://t.co/EAl4rpwZiI— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) April 16, 2019
Tanden corrected the Times’ witness account by asserting, “I didn’t slug him, I pushed him.” Nice.
Given that the Times literally interviewed Tanden’s mother for the piece, but not Shakir, who now runs Sanders’ presidential campaign, it’s clear that the paper is sympathetic to the Clinton camp. Tanden is permitted multiple defenses for her insufferable bullying of Sanders followers, the media, and pretty much anyone she feels like lashing out at on Twitter in a given day. For example:
neera, you’re responding to a graduate student on twitter at 1:40 am. spare me the bullshit. you are affected.
— hannah gais (@hannahgais) March 1, 2019
But whatever the intention, the Times just handed Sanders a gift — a 1,000 word reminder that even if you hate his ideas, he fought a corrupt Democratic establishment in earnest. That’s got to be worth something.
Although Bernie’s building a ruthless official war machine, the myth of the “Bernie Bros” couldn’t be more malicious and false. As annoyingly pedantic as die-hard Sanders supports may be online, they engage in half the amount of harassment and conspiracy mongering that the worst Clinton cronies do. Hillary needed the “Bernie Bro” narrative to survive the 2016 primary and brush over her own horrific record on justice for women, but this time around, it seems unlikely to stick.
And Democrats are scared. Just like Republicans were of Trump.
Trump ran on the promise that he wouldn’t touch entitlements, and in promising tax cuts alongside massive spending projects, effectively swore to spike the deficit. This is not a conservative stance, but at least it’s the honest one. It’s exactly what the Republican Party spent the last decade doing — Trump just had the gall to say the quiet part out loud. Voters were tired of being lied to and ignored by the Republican Party, so they turned to Trump. It’s hard to see how Bernie couldn’t rally the same reactionary support if he survives the dangerous terrain of early primary states.
Hillary Clinton may have been the only candidate in America who could possibly lose the presidency to a non-incumbent Donald Trump. She was certainly the worst candidate in modern American politics, and she’d be wise to sit this election out, lest she wants to hand it to her foes. And if the continued groveling by her cronies is any indication, the Clinton legacy itself may continue to provide fodder against the Democratic establishment.
