Pounding Sanders

There’s something undeniably stirring in the mobilization of America’s Responsible Pundit Consensus. This week finds the liberal lectors of said consensus singing, not surprisingly, from a single hymnal entry, the one called “Bernie Sanders Is Not a Serious Presidential Candidate.” The refrain has a few minor variations, but it’s strikingly uniform in broad outline: as a candidate, Sanders is little more than a glorified sloganeer, touting a single issue in the most monotonous way imaginable. His policy portfolio is woefully thin on specifics. He’s ill-informed on foreign policy, and seemingly uninterested in becoming less so. And even if he were somehow to accede to the nation’s highest office, well, the state of real-world politics in Washington is such that none of his sketchy proposals would have the remotest chance of becoming law.


It’s tempting, when faced with the many iterations of this litany, to respond with a simple counter-question: If Sanders’s candidacy represents such a nugatory threat in terms of its policy impact, why bother warning the public against it? After all, an office that claims luminaries such as George W. Bush and Richard Nixon as recent two-term titans could certainly withstand the antics of an aging Vermont hippie who’s (all together now) a self-avowed socialist, railing against the corporate-governance complex from the whitewashed sanctum on Pennsylvania Avenue while two miles away Congress placidly continues upon its appointed course of graft, warmongering, and ritual, empty rejections of Obamacare. If Sanders is a laughable caricature of New England granola worship—Ben and Jerry’s acid-casualty uncle—who isn’t going to get anything done anyway, what’s the harm of electing him president? Did we legitimately expect anything more from statesmen such as Grover Cleveland or Warren Harding?


But of course the whole point of talking down the real-world plausibility of Sanders’s candidacy is that Sanders is looking more like a plausible real-world candidate than ever before. By many accounts, he carried the day in Sunday’s NBC Democratic presidential debate; he’s polling ahead of establishment standard-bearer Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, has nearly caught her in Iowa, and has significantly narrowed the gap between the two campaigns in the latest national poll.

o—to your Word programs, liberal pundits! There’s been a boomlet in Sanders-bashing opinion-making since Sunday’s debate. The inarguable nadir entry is called, of course, “Bernie Sanders doesn’t get how politics works,” a column by Boston Globe writer Michael Cohen that castigates Sanders for—wait for it—his disinterest in policy details, pegged to release of the Sanders single-payer health care plan. Cohen moans that Sanders’s plan was a scant eight pages long (and worse, the Sanders proposal to re-regulate the financial sector was but four). The only problem here is that campaign policy documents are usually kept short, so as to highlight the bullet points of any given proposal for the members of our ADD-afflicted media. Need evidence? Barack Obama’s plan to overhaul American health care—you know, the heroic legislation that it’s now unthinkable to “start over” from, according to Hillary Clinton and her media enthusiasts—was released to the American voting public in 2008, and weighed in, yes, at a mere eight pages of text. You could look it up.

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