With just one week to go before the Iowa caucuses, the media, even the so-called liberal media, is still having trouble taking Bernie Sanders seriously.
He’s surging in both early primary states, but conventional wisdom-types are still pumping out the same boring lines about how he’s naïve and unelectable.
“No he can’t” is STILL the mainstream media’ default take on Bernie Sanders
“It’s been a nice run,” the thinking goes, “but he’s just not electable. And if even if by some stroke of luck he were elected, he doesn’t understand politics enough to get things done while in the White House.”
That’s basically what The Des Moines Register’s Lynn Hicks said earlier today on Morning Joe when he was asked explain why his paper endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for president.
The Des Moines register has never endorsed Democratic winner of the Iowa caucus, so we should probably take this criticism with a grain of salt.
But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s now the political establishment’s main attack on the Bernie campaign.
And what’s really disturbing is that many so-called liberals are going along with it.
For example, Paul Starr, the co-founder of The American Prospect, one of the country’s leading liberal magazines,
has a piece in Politico Magazine today in which he argues that Bernie Sanders is a flawed candidate because he believes too much that he can change our dysfunctional political system for the better.
Even if Bernie does manage to get elected, people like Paul Starr argue, he won’t get anything done because he’s asking for the moon and our political system is just too broken to handle this kind of actual, real change.
Although it’s not as vicious, this line of thinking is arguably even worse than the “Bernie’s a socialist and that scares people” line of attack.
And that’s because it kills what made, or used to make, the Democratic Party great: its belief in doing what everyone said was impossible.
Just in case you forgot, it was Democrats who won World Wars 1 and 2, it was Democrats who brought us out of the Great Depression, and it was Democrats who took us to the moon, even if a Republican was president when Neil Armstrong stepped on its surface.
