What Hillary can learn from Bernie

Clinton might be the candidate—but Sanders has won the battle of ideas

by Sam Tanenhaus / June 8, 2016 / Leave a comment

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks on stage after winning the highly contested New York primary on April 19, 2016 in New York City, NY, USA. Clinton, who had enjoyed a large lead over her rival Bernie Sanders only months ago, saw that lead shrink as the Sanders campaign made inroads with younger and more liberal voters. Photo by Dennis Van Tine/ABACAPRESS.COM ©Van Tine Dennis/ABACA USA/PA Images

Likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton ©Van Tine Dennis/ABACA USA/PA Images

Read more: Hillary Clinton—one term wonder?

Elections are virtuous as well as necessary, we’re often told, good for the health of the democracy. How, then, can we explain the curiously corrupting effect vote-seeking has on politicians? Some of it is owed to the presidency itself. “We elect a king every four years,” Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State said during the Civil War, when Lincoln did indeed assume despotic powers.

Presidential aspirants are Caesars in training, treated like mini-gods: the dizzy circuit of prime-time television appearances, the magazine covers, the queuing throngs. You try giving it up.

Just don’t ask Bernie Sanders to do it. After a string of surprising victories, “Bernie” has fallen short. Hillary Clinton has won—15.7m votes so far to Sanders’s 12m, including an impressive win in California, the nation’s most populous state. She has amassed all the “pledge” delegates she needs and has a bonus of 500 free-floating “super delegates” in reserve. Sanders’s job is to salve the party’s wounds as it prepares to meet Donald Trump and the Republicans in November.

Democratic bosses are telling him to pack it in—not this minute but, please, before the national convention (in Philadelphia in late July). After a violent clash at the Nevada state convention, Sanders, instead of rebuking his supporters, blamed the party bosses, and the system they’ve rigged.

Too bad, Clinton supporters reply. Clinton has been there, too. She waged a much closer battle against Barack Obama in 2008 than Sanders has done this year. But she also knew when to quit and when to throw all her support to Obama.

Sanders will too, in all likelihood. But it’s true the two cases are very different. For one thing, he is not a party-line Democrat. On the contrary, he is “the longest-serving independent in congressional history,” as his campaign website points out. Add to this the polls showing Sanders, unlike Clinton, trouncing…

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Comments

Alyson K
June 8, 2016 at 20:37
Thank you Prospect - just perhaps the article could have ended after 'He has won the battle of ideas.' He is also saying that if America doesn't want Trump he should get the Democrat nomination because if he withdraws, his supporters will probably split half to Hillary and half to Trump..... He has a point.
StephenKMackSD
June 10, 2016 at 06:48
It is surprising how much Mr. Tanenhaus' Neo-Liberal equivocations/self-apologetics reminds this reader of David Brooks sociologically garnished chatter. Mr. Brooks defends a sclerotic Conservatism/Neo-Conservatism, Tanenhaus defends an equally sclerotic Neo-Liberalism: and his means of attack against Sen. Sanders is to charge him with the crime of being as '... bracingly ascetic in the manner of the old revolutionaries.' You get it, he's throwback to the Bolsheviks. Now the editors at The Economist, in their war against backbencher and or Left Wing arriviste Jeremy Corbyn, were much more effective propagandists. They illustrated one of their polemics against Corbyn, by re-purposing an old Socialist Realist Painting, from the early Soviet period, a portrait of Lenin addressing the New Men and Women of The Revolution, by superimposing the Union Jack and the head of Corbyn into the image and produced a 'new' image, a 'new' piece of usable anti-Corbyn political propaganda: redolent of Anti-communism's attack on Soviet Socialist Realism as kitsch and the Cult of Personality, as a present political reality in British civic life. Mr. Tanenhaus doesn't have the imagination, the skill, the resources, to execute such a bold act of appropriation/reinvention. So instead we are served a potted history of failed dissidents as object lessons. Sen. Sanders has been corrupted by power, almost? StephenKMackSD
Abigail Meisel
June 13, 2016 at 21:52
Looking forward to reading your column, Sam! My question: Clinton has hopped to the left, but she now has audiences all over the political spectrum. How will she balance winning over Sanders's millennials while also appealing to the sane Republicans (e.g., Laura Bush, who hinted she would vote for Clinton.) I found her rallying cry last Tuesday at the Brooklyn Navy Yard somewhat lackluster. How can she persuade the millennials and the Goldman execs that she is in each of their camps?