Bernie Sanders Has a Secret Weapon, and the Media Elites Just Don’t Get It
http://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-has-a-secret-weapon-and-the-media-elites-just-dont-get-it/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

Bernie Sanders’s secret weapon is hiding in plain sight. It was there for everyone to see throughout the Democratic presidential debate Tuesday night, but we aren’t hearing about it in the post-debate coverage. Apparently it is invisible to the TV talking heads, headline writers, pundits, campaign reporters, and other media types who decide these things.

The media elites are fixated on a single question only: Who won? The American media’s tendency to cover politics like a sporting event dates back decades, of course, but it seems to grow more entrenched and absurd with each passing election. Thus the presidential election is covered like a horse race, presidential debates like boxing matches. Who landed the best punches? Who avoided them? Hence most news stories after Tuesday night’s debate carried headlines along the lines of “Hillary Triumphs After Attacking Sanders’s Gun Record.”

What actual voters think about Tuesday’s debate, however, might be quite different. Michael Tomasky, the political columnist at the Daily Beast, seems to be the only mainstream commentator who broke from the herd to make this point. Citing the results of two separate focus groups whose opinions had not been influenced by the media’s post-mortem declarations, Tomasky wrote, “There’s reason to believe that people watching at home didn’t share the media’s overwhelming verdict” that “Clinton crushed it.” On the contrary, both focus groups thought Sanders had won.

Leaving aside the simplistic focus on who won or lost, Sanders clearly appealed to many people Tuesday night, and his secret weapon helps explain why. That secret weapon is the gift of plain speech. This gift is less about the content of Sanders’s remarks, though that matters, than it is about the way he delivers them—he uses the kind of language ordinary people use themselves and speaks with a passion that makes it clear he genuinely believes what he’s saying.