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No, Bernie Sanders shouldn’t have attacked Hillary Clinton harder
Blog discussing today's NYT article and the furore around it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/04/04/no-bernie-sanders-shouldnt-have-attacked-hillary-clinton-harder/
The idea that Sanders might have done better in the delegate count if he’d attacked her email arrangement misses a crucial point about Sanders’s decision not to do that. It wasn’t just about a desire by Sanders to preserve the moral high ground, though that was part of it. It was also key to what made his campaign what it was early on, when it gained momentum. When Sanders shouted at a debate last fall that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” the reason it elicited such rousing applause — and became such an important moment for Democrats — was not simply that he’d given a fellow Dem a pass. It was that he was declaring our political system — and our political media — to be hopelessly mired in trivia, rendering it borderline pathologically unable to grapple with the major challenges facing our country.
Given how crucial that broader story-line has been to Sanders’s candidacy — that our political system and media are dithering while the middle class, our democracy, and our planet are facing quasi-existential threats from creeping oligarchy and climate change — it might have been difficult for him to prosecute a case against Clinton’s email arrangement. For many Dems the media obsession with it had already become a symbol of the dysfunctional, frivolous Beltway political culture Sanders is running against.
The idea that Sanders didn’t attack Clinton hard enough over her Wall Street speeches also deserves some skepticism. The Sanders campaign aired an ad implicitly hitting Clinton over the speeches as early as the end of January, before the very first voting in the Iowa caucuses. What’s more, Sanders’s criticism of Clinton over Wall Street money has long been problematic for him, too, because it shed light back on to a tension within his own candidacy. Sanders has offered up a critique of our broader system as corrupt and in thrall to big money interests, which has had the salutary effect of forcing the topic squarely on to the Democratic agenda. But his campaign has sometimes seemed to equivocate on whether it wants to be seen implying that Clinton herself is bought and paid for, or at least that her policy positions are the direct result of donations to her campaign. One charitable interpretation is that Sanders has been uncomfortable with this latter implication, but that he and his campaign have at times succumbed to the temptation to indulge in it, because, after all, he’s trying to defeat her.
Given how crucial that broader story-line has been to Sanders’s candidacy — that our political system and media are dithering while the middle class, our democracy, and our planet are facing quasi-existential threats from creeping oligarchy and climate change — it might have been difficult for him to prosecute a case against Clinton’s email arrangement. For many Dems the media obsession with it had already become a symbol of the dysfunctional, frivolous Beltway political culture Sanders is running against.
The idea that Sanders didn’t attack Clinton hard enough over her Wall Street speeches also deserves some skepticism. The Sanders campaign aired an ad implicitly hitting Clinton over the speeches as early as the end of January, before the very first voting in the Iowa caucuses. What’s more, Sanders’s criticism of Clinton over Wall Street money has long been problematic for him, too, because it shed light back on to a tension within his own candidacy. Sanders has offered up a critique of our broader system as corrupt and in thrall to big money interests, which has had the salutary effect of forcing the topic squarely on to the Democratic agenda. But his campaign has sometimes seemed to equivocate on whether it wants to be seen implying that Clinton herself is bought and paid for, or at least that her policy positions are the direct result of donations to her campaign. One charitable interpretation is that Sanders has been uncomfortable with this latter implication, but that he and his campaign have at times succumbed to the temptation to indulge in it, because, after all, he’s trying to defeat her.
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