Here is something that political analysts always do. When an outsider candidate suddenly overtakes the presumptive presidential nominee, they don’t ask what’s so good about the rebel. They ask what’s so bad about the establishment favorite. It’s deeply unfair. Supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders probably hate it.
Sanders is now ahead of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire and a much stronger second in Iowa. It’s way too early to predict a Sanders nomination — the experts will point out that Clinton is having a bad summer, Vice President Joe Biden isn’t in the race right now and Sanders is about the most visible opponent Clinton has. But this should prompt us to consider Sanders’ strengths. Which are many.
First, he’s not as unacceptably left wing as his “socialist” label implies. Sanders backed stationing the controversial F-35 bomber in Vermont — so he is smart and understands constituency politics. He is not a pacifist and says that he wants “the strongest military in the world.” In the 1990s, he voted for the controversial Clinton crime bill now opposed by the Black Lives Matter movement. In short: He knows how to win elections. Yes, Vermont leans to the left. But it’s still a rural state with pockets of deep conservatism, and it takes cunning for a self-described socialist to end up as one of its senators.
Second, Sanders is tapping into emerging liberal forces. The same Iowa poll that puts Sanders within seven percentage points of Clinton also says that 96% of his supporters like his policies. In particular, he’s doing well among first-time voters, people under 45 and those who use the label “independent.” The pollster behind these results, Ann Selzer, argues: “That’s the Obama coalition. Those are the groups that he put together that surprised Hillary Clinton in 2008.”
They’re motivated by an anti-establishment impulse — a desire to see something new. But while they might have gone for Barack Obama in 2008, they could just as easily be dubbed the “post-Obama coalition” in 2016. These are folks worried about the things that Obama has failed to address and that they fear Clinton won’t touch. Wall Street greed. Stagnating wages. Overpriced college education.
And as the proportion of the electorate that is nonwhite and non-conservative grows, so there emerges a powerful group that has no time for equivocation. It’s the mirror opposite of Trump’s support. Both groups have been raised in a culture of ideological partisanship and can’t stand it when they see their own side selling out for next-to-no reward.
All of which brings us back to Hillary Clinton. This race isn’t all about her, but it is an interesting test of the limits to her political style. Writer Michelle Goldberg makes a good point: Clinton’s entire career has been built on fighting a reputation for radicalism. As wife of the Arkansas governor and as first lady to a president, she had to react against accusations that she was using her husband as a Trojan horse for pinko-feminism. So she would bolt to the right.
That was necessary then, but it looks outdated now. Nowadays the voters want authenticity, and judging by Sanders’ popularity, many feel that their material conditions are bad enough to justify economic liberalism.
Clinton senses that things have changed. Hence, she began the campaign by trying to sell herself as a relatable, practical woman who wanted to help you get ahead. It didn’t work. So now she’s acting as the unbeatable front-runner, telling the Democrats that it’s their patriotic duty to rally around her. The party leadership is even accused of gaming the primary process in her favor by limiting the number of debates. This is Clinton at her controlling worst. Combined with the email scandal it just makes her seem as though the she thinks the rules don’t apply to her.
After all these years, the quest for power is the one constant in Clinton’s career. Goldberg is quite right. A woman who had been prepared to triangulate in any direction in her bid for the White House now appears absent of a fixed political identity.
She’s like the invisible man. Unwrap the bandages of political strategy and underneath there is … air where the populist passion was meant to be.