True, Bernie's Chances Are Very Slim, but His Strong Campaign Has Shown Hillary to Be a Less Than Stellar Candidate
The following first appeared on Salon.com.
Early last week, leading figures in Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign hosted a conference call with political reporters to push the narrative that they still saw a tenuous “path to victory” over Hillary Clinton in the contest for the Democratic nomination. There was nothing so extraordinary in that: Losing candidates, like baseball teams who are 10 games back at the All-Star break, often claim they have a secret plan to win. (I’m looking at you, Marco Rubio.) It struck me, however, that this ritual exercise shone some light through the cloud of existential doubt enveloping the bizarre alternate universe of the 2016 campaign, and that it resembled the old Soviet-era joke about communism and capitalism: Everything the Sanders team had to say about their candidate’s strength was false; everything they said about their opponent’s weakness was true.
In the wake of Sanders’ big wins in the Alaska, Hawaii and Washington caucuses last weekend, campaign manager Jeff Weaver argued that the Vermont senator had recaptured the momentum and was on course to overcome Clinton’s large lead in pledged delegates. Strategist Tad Devine asserted that Clinton’s delegate advantage has been whittled down to about 240 (the Guardian’s published count currently puts it at 263). Factor in the hundreds of unelected party apparatchiks known as superdelegates, who overwhelmingly support Clinton, and her lead is closer to 700. Devine hinted that some superdelegates are beginning to wobble in the face of Sanders’ superior poll numbers against Donald Trump, but declined to provide specifics.
Clinton’s victories in several large states on March 15—when she realized a net gain of 104 pledged delegates, 68 of them in Florida alone—struck most people in the political and media castes as tolling the final bell on Sanders’ realistic chances to win the nomination. But Bernie has been pronounced dead several times before and risen from the tomb, and Devine, a veteran Democratic operative who goes back to Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign in 1980 (which can’t be a happy memory), has acquired the reputation of a necromancer in the occult operations of the 2016 campaign. So when he assured us that we had once again failed to perceive the true meaning of events, we listened attentively, suspending our disbelief as best we could.
Whether Devine’s fanciful campaign narrative—which he was handsomely paid to construct, let us remember—has any merit is not the part that interests me. But I suppose it’s worth spinning out a little. In his telling, March 15 will soon have a much different meaning, as the “high-water mark” of the Clinton campaign, the apex of her delegate lead and the turning point that preceded the last and most unlikely of Bernie Sanders’ unlikely comebacks. Here’s how the story goes: Clinton’s victories over Sanders almost don’t count, because they have largely come in states where Sanders lacked the resources and opportunity to compete with her on level terms. Where he’s had those things, he has done extremely well, and in the battleground states just ahead, her aura of inevitability will melt away like a papier-mâché tiger in the rain.
This hypothesis or prophetic vision or whatever it is has been much debated and dissected over the last few days. It’s fair to say that by the normal standards of political insider-baseball, its plausibility is near zero. Devine is blatantly cherry-picking favorable data and ignoring the other kind: The Sanders campaign sure looked like it was competing in Nevada and South Carolina and Massachusetts and Ohio and Illinois, and lost them all. (A different result in three of those five states, let’s say, and the entire complexion of the Democratic campaign is different today.) As Devine admitted during the call, Sanders would have to win most of the remaining states on the primary calendar to overtake Clinton, and essentially all the big ones. If he fails to win Wisconsin next week, and New York on April 19, and then Maryland and Pennsylvania a week after that, future conference calls of this type will become increasingly challenging, and may require a SanterÃa priest and the sacrifice of live poultry.
But as I say, Devine’s patently absurd claims about what is likely to happen are not the important part. First of all, “likely to happen” and “patently absurd” have not proven to be useful standards this year, when the aforementioned norms of political discourse have collapsed. One reason the thought-leaders of media groupthink listened so eagerly to Devine’s Gandalfian pronouncements is that we’ve been wrong about damn near everything in 2016—wrong about Sanders, wrong about Trump, wrong about the enduring power of the “Republican establishment” and wrong about the stability of the two-party system. Who is to say we’re not wrong this time too? Who can imagine what new frontiers of wrongness lie ahead?
But there’s more going on beneath the Democratic endgame than just widespread cognitive dissonance and epistemological uncertainty, although those are powerful forces that have turned American politics in 2016 into a delusional realm halfway between a dream state and a meth high. In all likelihood, Devine is doing what people like him always do: He’s playing out a losing hand to the best of his ability, he’s positioning himself for future employers and he’s pursuing a tactical short game aimed at the Clinton-Sanders peace treaty that lies in the not-too-distant future.
