The front-runner for the Democratic nomination is beset by scandal, trailing (some) Republicans in general-election polling, and at risk of losing to her socialist rival in the earliest two states. That same socialist rival is arguably technically further to the left than Donald Trump is to the right, he has higher polling averages than Trump, he’s been drawing Trump-like crowds ever since he first declared his candidacy - and he’s raising money hand over fist.
Yet the Democratic campaign has attracted none of the “This Is Chaos!” coverage that’s attended the Republican primary season, none of the garmentrending among pundits and political insiders, none of the talk about civil wars and permanent schisms and a party that may never be the same. This has annoyed some anti-Trump conservatives, especially the sort that think it’s just a ratings obsessed media that’s keeping his campaign so high aloft.
But there are good reasons the Bernie Sanders insurgency has earned about a tenth of the media coverage of the Trumperd?mmerung: No matter how high the Vermont senator rises in the polls, there’s still a sense that he’s in a friendly family squabble, not a bloody political street fight - and one that at some level, he appears to neither expect nor really want to win.
That’s certainly the sense that a lot of liberals seem to have, which is why so much left-of-center commentary on the Bernie-Hillary battle has emphasized the positive, stressing how wonderful it is for the party to have this kind of argument, how healthy it might be that Hillary Clinton faces a strong challenge as she tunes up for the general election, how grateful progressives should be to Sanders for nobly tugging the party to the left. And it’s also the sense that Sanders himself has conveyed, most notably when he declined to hammer Clinton on her email troubles in the first Democratic debate.
For much of the campaign, he’s seemed acutely aware of his crusade’s likely limitations - aware that Hillary is regarded very warmly by her party even if independents are more skeptical, awarethat most of his voters will be not only willing but eager to vote for her in November, and aware that if his campaign seems more anti-Hillary than it is high-minded, he could lose the very thing that many liberals like about him.
“Mudslinging is not part of the campaign strategy that Sanders and his advisers have crafted,” David Corn wrote last summer for Mother Jones, previewing the Vermont senator’s White House run. Indeed, in their ideal campaign, one longtime Sanders adviser suggested, “there won’t even be one speck of dust directly tossed at Clinton.” That strategy fits with Sanders’s track record in Vermont, where he’s long eschewed negative advertising. But it also fits with a candidate who doesn’t honestly expect to win, and doesn’t want tocompromise his purity and popularity in pursuit of a chimera.
But can Sanders sustain that high-mindedness if it suddenly seems as if victory, not just adulation, might be within his grasp? And can he sustain it if - as seems to be happening already - his rising poll numbers (or even an Iowa victory) inspire the Clinton campaign toturn sustained fire on him? The reality is that an insurgent campaign that actually wants to beat Hillary Clinton would need to exploit vulnerabilities besides her insufficient zeal for a single-payer health care plan. It would need to go after her, instead, at the intersection of policy and character? by linking the Bernie-Hillary difference on financial reform to the sordidness of the Clinton Foundation’s global fund-raising, for instance, or by tying her recklessness with State Department emails to the fecklessness of the Libya intervention, and then linking that intervention to the issue that helped cost her the Democratic nomination in 2008, her Iraq-era hawkishness.
And such a line of attack would need to show some real passion, of the sort that infuses Sanders’s denunciations of Wall Streeters, billionaires and the 1 percent. By contrast, here’s how he critiqued Hillary on foreign policy in the last Democratic debate: Look, the secretary is right. This is a terribly complicated issue. There are no simple solutions. But where we have a disagreement is that I think if you look at the history of regime changes, you go back to Mossaddegh in Iran, you go back to Salvador Allende who we overthrew in Chile, you go back to overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, you go back to where we are today in Syria with a dictator named Assad.
The truth is it is relatively easy for a powerful nation like America to overthrow a dictator but it is very hard to predict the unintended consequences and the turmoil and the instability that follows after you overthrow that dictator.
So I think Secretary Clinton and I have a fundamental disagreement. I’m not quite the fan of regime change that I believe she is. Again, this style is why so many liberals like Sanders: the Obama-esque nods to complexity, the historical call-outs to Allende and Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, the “I’m not quite the fan” understatement of his critique.
But it’s not a style that actually clarifies the stakes. For that, you would need to say something pithier, like:L ook, as a senator Hillary Clinton cast a reckless vote for the Iraq war, which cost thousands of American lives and led directly to the rise of ISIS.
As secretary of state she treated national security cavalierly, exposing classified information to our enemies, and also led us into a second disaster in Libya ? where ISIS now has a stronghold as well. Why would you trust this woman to handle Syria, or Ukraine, or any other crisis? The record is clear: A vote for Hillary is a vote for recklessness and hawkishness, for Dick Cheney’s secrecy and George W. Bush’s interventionist folly, for disasters that no liberal should support.
Would Democratic primary voters actually want to hear this message? I’ve long been skeptical, given how accustomed the left has become to dismissing Clinton scandals as small beer and papering over the larger Libya fiasco amid snickers at the right’s Benghazi obsessions.
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