Heading into the final months of the presidential primaries, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her team seem to be increasingly fed up with the Sanders campaign, which has remained competitive since the first votes were cast in Iowa, and continues to dog Clinton from the left. Early last week, Clinton’s chief strategist Joel Benenson remarked that if Sanders wanted another debate, he would have to “tone down” his “very negative” campaign, which — as I discussed in a previous article — is an absurd allegation, considering the Clinton camp has held a virtual monopoly on negative campaigning....

On Thursday, Clinton herself vented about the Sanders campaign at a rally in New York, and when confronted by a Greenpeace activist about her financial ties to the fossil fuel industry, she replied testily: “I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying about me. I’m sick of it.”

Of course, no one is lying about Clinton, who employs a number of bundlers registered as lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry — as Greenpeace documents here — and in an issued response, Greenpeace Democracy Campaign Director Molly Dorozenski said the following:
“Secretary Clinton is conflating Greenpeace with the Sanders campaign, but we are an independent organization, and our research team has assessed the contributions to all Presidential candidates. We have not and will not endorse candidates. Earlier this year, we asked both Secretary Clinton and Senator Sanders to sign our pledge to #fixdemocracy, and while Sanders signed, Clinton did not. We intend to continue to challenge all candidates to listen to the people, not their biggest donors.”

While the Clinton campaign is obviously “sick” of dealing with Sanders, and would love nothing more than to focus on Donald Trump and fundraising — without having to fret over criticisms about where the money is coming from — it is not so much Sanders, but the left, that has frustrated Clinton and Clinton supporters. When confronted by the Greenpeace activist, Clinton automatically assumed that she was a Sanders supporter with purely partisan intentions, not an environmentalist who is genuinely concerned about Clinton’s big money connections. Clinton and other Democratic centrists seem to have concluded that anyone who criticizes her from the left must simply be a Sanders hack.