Let’s review some of the attack lines that will be used against Bernie by his more dedicated Democratic partisan detractors.
Bernie Sanders announced Tuesday that he will run for president. This should not come as a shock, considering the wheels have been in motion for such an announcement since he ended his previous campaign four years ago.
In a sense, the campaign never ended. Immediately upon his (tepid, but notable) endorsement of Hillary Clinton last time around, activists began planning for this day.
In that spirit, let’s review some of the attack lines that will be used against Bernie by his more dedicated Democratic partisan detractors, many of whom are in a state of blithering rage right now.
Fixation on the inborn sex or racial characteristics of presidential candidates tends to be especially pronounced among operatives and elite media, who purport to be representing the views of the entire populace, but are generally just trying to superimpose their weird ideology on everyone else. Actual polling data shows that Bernie is highly popular among black Democrats—second only to Joe Biden, who helped advance the agenda of the first black president for eight years.
If you dig deeper into the data, you’ll find that the Democratic-leaning demographic most hostile to Bernie is white voters with a college degree, among whom he is far-and-away the least popular candidate. So while affluent Bernie-hating liberal pundits try to pretend that they are speaking on behalf of all blacks, Hispanics, and so on when they denigrate him, just understand the actual data contradict their arrogant pretensions.
Also, from the standpoint of raw political tactics, the fact that there will be multiple nonwhite candidates in the race this time (with the likely addition of Barack Obama’s trusty vice presidential sidekick) means that the black vote in particular will be a lot more diffuse than 2016, meaning Bernie only has to peel off a relatively small portion in order to ensure viability. (Another under-covered statistic that you won’t hear much in the media discussion: Sen. Kamala Harris is currently viewed more favorably by white Democrats than by black Democrats.)
On the age question: it’s the one factor that at least isn’t entirely confabulated by his opponents. There are objective measures of cognitive decline associated with age, and Bernie will have to demonstrate that he maintains the ability to function as a presidential candidate at full capacity. A big advantage in this area, however, is the comparison with Trump. You’d be hard-pressed to argue that Trump, at 72, is physically and mentally adept, while Sanders, at 77, is not.
For instance: Trump is technically obese, takes little or no exercise, and (according to his own aides and confidants) does not read beyond short bullet points. Sanders has none of these traits. He’s also just one year older than Biden. So while the age issue might be salient in a vacuum, the comparison it invites with other major 2020 figures lessens the impact.
As predicted all along by left-leaning skeptics of the “Russian interference” narrative, Democrats’ tireless obsession with bolstering this farce will boomerang on Bernie. There will be allegations that he received illicit assistance from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda apparatus in 2016.
The evidence for this will be virtually nil: there were some ridiculous Facebook memes, such as the one that portrayed a muscular, rainbow-colored cartoon Bernie wearing a Speedo. But the specifics won’t particularly matter, because any association with Russia, regardless of how vague or unsupportable, will be used as a political attack given the current paranoid climate within the Democratic-aligned media and electoral coalition.
Bernie is partly to blame for this, having validated some of the flimsier elements of the narrative, a strategy that is looking progressively foolish in hindsight.
