BERNIE’S PACT WITH BIDEN
Joe Biden notched another crucial victory this week, earning Bernie Sanders’ “fulsome endorsement,” said Ezra Klein in Vox.com. Sanders, who had dropped his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination days earlier, appeared on a livestream with Biden and expressed his support far less grudgingly than he did with Hillary Clinton in 2016. “You want to bring people in,” Sanders told Biden, “even people who disagree with you.” A master of “transactional politics” shaped by years of compromise and dealing in the Senate, Biden has already adapted a signature Sanders proposal—making state college tuitionfree for families earning less than $125,000—and proposed lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 60. He’s also agreed to have his staff and Sanders’ form “joint working groups” to shape party policy on key issues such as climate change, the economy, health care, and immigration. Bernie might be on board, said Chris Cillizza in CNN.com, but several pro-Sanders groups have already declared they won’t endorse Biden, because he won’t embrace Medicare for All. Party leaders are dreading a repeat of 2016, when “dispirited Sanders backers simply decided to stay home on Election Day.”
It’s the rigid extremism of the Sanders movement that cost their hero the nomination, said James Pindell in The Boston Globe. Back in February, Sanders had won the most votes in the first three contests and was on the verge of running away with the nomination, an improbable feat for the 78-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont. Then, “with neck-snapping speed, in fewer than three days,” Biden won South Carolina by a landslide, negotiated endorsements from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and a slew of former competitors, and dominated the Super Tuesday states. Books will be written about that sudden turnaround, but the bottom line is that when Sanders became a front-runner, he still insisted on running as “a protest candidate” rather than trying to unite Democrats behind him. In poll after poll, Democratic voters agreed “they wanted a candidate who could defeat Donald Trump.” With his talk of a socialist revolution, Sanders never convinced older voters, moderate African-Americans, and others outside his movement that he had the best chance of beating Trump.
Sanders lost because he believed “his own bulls---,” said Tim Miller in TheBulwark.com. He and his campaign insisted he would win because he’d inspire “a massive turnout” of disaffected voters and the young progressives in the party’s “Twitter wing.” It didn’t happen, yet Sanders “didn’t budge an inch” from his insurgent positions. When asked about past positive comments he’d made about communist dictators like Fidel Castro, “he couldn’t even bring himself to denounce them without caveat.” Grant him this: Sanders never took the “expedient” stance. “But unflinching steadfastness at the expense of even modest concessions isn’t the path to the presidency.”
The coronavirus pandemic has proved that Sanders was right, said Will Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It’s “hard to bear” seeing him leave the race just as “the cataclysmic economic consequences” of the national lockdown are devastating poor and working-class Americans. Sanders campaigned against the “stunning fragility of the economy” and the inadequacy of employer-provided health insurance, and now millions of Americans are unemployed, uninsured, and lining up on free food lines reminiscent of the Great Depression. Europe’s social democracies—which are ensuring that most workers still get paid—are coping with the economic consequences of the pandemic far more successfully than the U.S.
Even upon dropping out, said Bill Scher in Politico.com, Sanders insisted that “our movement has won the ideological battle.” Really? Sanders points to the fact that ideas he supports—the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage—poll well, but his defeat should hammer home the “big difference between superficial support for abstract concepts and devout support for concrete policies.” Take Sanders’ “free college” proposal: Just 30.5 percent of respondents to a December poll agreed that “the government should make public colleges free for all Americans, regardless of income.”
What will Sanders’ legacy be? asked Dan McLaughlin in National Review.com. It’s possible he will go down in history like Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican who lost the 1964 presidential election but nonetheless transformed his party. This year, Democratic voters rejected Sanders’ “class warfare,” opting instead for Biden, a man who “lives and breathes the old Senate norms of bipartisan centrism.” But defeating Trump will not always be a Democratic Party priority, and the young leftists who supported Sanders with such fervor aren’t going away. It “would be foolish” to think Americans have heard the last of democratic socialism.