Why Sanders’ Win Is Good for ClintonThe socialist senator has been a saving grace for the Clinton campaign. Best to keep him around as long as possible.
By Howard Gutman
2/10/2016
Clintonworld is shaken up. Dismayed by a small victory in Iowa and a big loss in New Hampshire—the campaign is reportedly making big changes to deal with Bernie Sanders, who is, they fear, siphoning support from Hillary Clinton’s flagging campaign.
That’s one way to think about Sanders. Here’s another: If Sanders hadn’t existed, Clinton should have paid big money to invent him.
This campaign season, the socialist senator has been a gift to Clinton. He’s pumped a huge amount of oxygen into a race that could easily have been starved for attention. And even more importantly, he’s made sure that the biggest story in the race isn’t Clinton’s own background. Clinton fans might lament her 22-point loss to him in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. But taking a hit in New Hampshire is a small price to pay to keep so useful an opponent around as long as necessary.
For a long time, it seemed that Hillary Clinton's main opponent was going to be Hillary Clinton. Upon completing her tenure as secretary of state, boasting sky-high approval ratings and name recognition, Clinton seemed a lock for her party’s presidential nomination. No relevant Democrat was willing to challenge her. For all his media-trained to-run or not-to-run angst, Joe Biden learned years ago how to read polls and knew his current gig as vice president was also his last hurrah. Virginia Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and every other potentially serious Democrat knew better than to waste political capital going against Clinton in 2016.
Clinton therefore faced the prospect of hanging around playing solitaire until the summer of 2016 while the Republican traveling circus, offering far more than three rings of entertainment, mesmerized the press and the American public. At her nervous-giggle best, Clinton has never been the life of the party; as a solo act, Clinton would have America changing the channel. July 2016, when Clinton’s race against a GOP nominee would officially begin, would have been awfully late for the plodding Clinton to try to sprint from a flat-footed start into America’s fondness.
And, as it turned out, the risk that she’d be unable to attract meaningful media attention was not even close to Clinton’s biggest problem: In July, last year, a serious challenger—Emailgate—emerged.
Even more than a primary opponent, Emailgate would never fight fair. With no one understanding the State Department’s two different, totally separate email systems—the normal, unprotected (whether using the State Department’s server or Hillary’s home server) one relying on unprotected BlackBerries and desktops to which anyone could and did send any material at any time and the hard-to-access, rarely used, laptop accessible-only protected one that would stamp emails “Classified”—Emailgate could assume whatever size and grotesque features a journalist or Republican chose to ascribe to it. Absent a real primary contest to draw some attention and with Clinton alone in the public eye, Emailgate threatened to appear and undermine every Clinton rally, interview and media hit as her campaign went on.
What Clinton oh-so desperately needed was a rival just credible enough to stir up the grass roots, generate enough excitement for the debates at least to go forward, and attract early wind in the first two march-to-their-own-beat states of Iowa and New Hampshire. A rival who could then use those gusts and the media’s and public’s longing for a close race to sputter through the process toward the summer as long as stubbornly possible, all the while diverting some attention from the emails in the room.
No one too serious, mind you. And certainly no one who could pull off an upset.
Martin O’Malley? Too Dennis-the-Menace milquetoast to get the job done. Jim Webb? Lincoln Chaffee? Wrong party.
Bernie Sanders: Come on down. Please be careful not to trip on your way; Ms. Clinton needs you to go as far as you can toward Philadelphia.
You might have thought him an unlikely challenger: True, he is 74 years old and a socialist who openly proclaims that he is not so much running for president as starting a revolution. True, he likely could not have launched a political career in any city other than Burlington nor progressed in any state other than Vermont.
But, after all, more than 40 percent of the Democrats in Iowa claim to be socialists, and New Hampshire borders Vermont. The young, for their part, don’t know enough history to realize that Sanders has always been considered an asterisk in American politics. He is, moreover, a nice man and brings his own bundle of excitement wherever he goes.
Sanders is, in short, the perfect partner to convert Clinton’s lethargic game of solitaire into a spirited game of rummy. And while Sanders is not strong enough to divert all attention from Emailgate, he does make many voters focus from time to time on “the race” and “the issues” that the next president will have to deal with.
So far, this has all been playing out perfectly for Clinton. Had she scored a major victory in Iowa, or had she made a comeback to win New Hampshire, Sanders’ money might very well have dried up. Clinton would be on her own again, looking for a red queen to put on a black king and debating daily and publicly her prior choice in mobile phones.
But Sanders came through. The virtual tie in the Iowa primary and his big win in New Hampshire will let Sanders go on, even as the race turns to states that believe socialists merit exorcism. A good result for Sanders. And thus an even better one for Clinton.
