https://www.yahoo.com/politics/time-to-take-sanders-seriously-1342599418519606.html?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma
Time to take Sanders seriously
Matt Bai
January 14, 2016
Some polls have Bernie Sanders overtaking Hillary Clinton in Iowa and
opening up a double-digit lead in New Hampshire. (Photo: Carolyn
Kaster/AP)
After I wrote about the twisted codependency of Donald Trump and the
media a few weeks back, some readers got in touch to complain that the
attention paid to Trump had all but obscured the rise of Bernie
Sanders. In an interview with CNN that week, Sanders himself made the
same point, referring to a report that claimed network news shows had
devoted 234 minutes to Trump and only 10 to his campaign. (Yes, 10 –
for the entire year.)
Judging from what’s happening right now in Iowa and New Hampshire,
Sanders and his avid supporters have a legitimate point.
Just as the Democratic primaries were the dominant story in the 2008
cycle, so has the Republican train wreck proved to be the most
compelling storyline this year. But with less than three weeks to go
before the voting starts, Sanders may be just as plausible a nominee
as Trump.
A New York Times/CBS News poll this week showed Sanders, who trailed
Hillary Clinton among Democrats by 20 points a month ago, closing that
gap to 7. But national polls are essentially meaningless; what’s more
impressive are polls that have Sanders overtaking Clinton in Iowa and
opening up a double-digit lead in New Hampshire.
It’s hard to know exactly what we’re looking at here. Is Sanders
making a last, spirited stand before reality crashes down on him? Or
is this the year when the molecular structure of our politics — on
both sides — is about to be smashed apart and scrambled?
History would certainly suggest the former — that Sanders is only the
latest in a long line of leftist insurgents, popular with college kids
and urban idealists, who shake the party’s establishment without ever
really threatening to topple it. The most obvious comparison is to
Howard Dean, who by the end of 2003 was dominating the cycle in terms
of both polling and money, and who went on to win a single primary —
in his own tiny state.
Maybe an even better analogue would be the 2000 Democratic campaign,
which was the first one I covered. The entire party establishment then
was lined up behind the sitting vice president, Al Gore, but by the
end of 1999, the former senator Bill Bradley was still running strong.
Much like Sanders, Bradley ran against the legacy of Clintonian
calculation, disparaging the incrementalism of the ’90s.
Bradley endured a withering assault from Gore and the party’s leaders,
then got whacked in Iowa and edged out in New Hampshire. From that
moment on, he was a dead candidate walking.
Clinton is as flawed a candidate as Gore was, and not terribly trusted
by the electorate; I’ve never assumed she was a lock for the
nomination in the way a lot of my colleagues did. But in Sanders (in
contrast to a younger governor like Martin O’Malley, whose campaign
has foundered), she drew a chief competitor who’s 74, socialist and
scolding. You could argue that no establishment candidate in the last
40 years has gotten luckier than that.
And yet we can all get too hung up on history, and there are reasons
to think that the Democratic primaries in 2016 might not be a replay
of years past.
In 2000, the antiestablishment current in public life had just begun
to assert itself (among the outsiders who threatened to run that year
was Trump himself), and the Internet was a crude new tool for
organizing and raising money.
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Peace Is Doable
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