(Editor’s note: “Bernie Briefing” is a weekly campaign-season look at how Vermont U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is playing in the national media.)
[W]onder how Bernie Sanders can hit so many Sunday news shows the same morning?
Perhaps look-alike Larry David is helping him after all.
Just hours after Sanders appeared alongside the comedian on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” (the Vermont senator often jokes that David doubles for him on the campaign trail), the Democratic presidential candidate appeared on three Sunday morning public affairs programs to talk about his near-tie in last week’s Iowa caucuses and his chances in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sanders was questioned about his lack of foreign policy experience compared with his Democratic rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“It is obviously an enormously important part of what being a president is about,” he said. “But it is not just experience that matters. It is judgment. And I think that we have the judgment.”
Sanders noted that, unlike Clinton, he opposed the nation’s wars in the Persian Gulf in 1991 and 2003.
Moving on to CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sanders was asked about his recent statement that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud.”
“It’s not an accident that we end up paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. It’s not an accident that there is not one Republican candidate who is prepared to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and help transform our energy system to deal with climate change,” he said. “It ain’t nuanced. Big money controls what goes on in Washington.”
And concluding on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Sanders faced the same questions — and gave the same answers.
“I think that’s a media narrative that goes around and around and around,” he added. “I don’t accept that media narrative.”
The CBS news show also promoted its network coverage of Sunday night’s Super Bowl, which may have been the only weekend program Sanders wasn’t attached to, if a recent New York Times story headlined “Jane Sanders Knows Politics, and How to Soften Husband’s Image” is accurate.
“We were watching the Super Bowl, and he turned it off at halftime!” Jane Sanders’ daughter Carina Driscoll told the Times of a past game. “What American does that?”
In other news:
— The Des Moines Register may be reporting “Iowa Democrats reviewing some caucus precinct results,” but New York magazine deems the seemingly close vote no contest in its headline, “Bernie Sanders Won Iowa Because the Media Says He Did.”
“By producing an effective tie, Iowa Democrats gave journalists the opportunity to choose the narrative they wanted,” notes reporter Eric Levitz, who goes on to offer examples ranging from the Guardian’s “Iowa Proved Bernie Sanders Can Win” to the New Yorker’s “Bernie Sanders Just Changed the Democratic Party.”
— The Washington Post’s analysis on “How Sanders Caught Fire In Iowa And Turned The Clinton Coronation Into A Real Race” starts by rewinding to March, when 36-year-old Vermont native Robby Mook — Hillary Clinton’s then yet-to-be-announced manager of her yet-to-be-launched presidential campaign — confided something to the presumed Democratic front-runner.
“Bernie Sanders is going to be a real contender if he gets in,” Mook told his candidate. “I’ve seen this guy in action.”
— Politico has hired professional political gambler Paul Krishnamurty to report on the presidential primaries and “where the smart money is moving.” His take on the Democratic contest:
“I’m giving New Hampshire to Bernie, and South Carolina to Clinton — in fact, the odds are so one-sided in those states that there’s little money to be made. But Nevada (caucusing Feb. 20) is a true mix of voters, the first interesting test. Originally, Nevada was talked about as a Clinton firewall, but maybe not anymore. Nevada is also much more representative of the Democratic base than all-white Iowa and all-white New Hampshire. If Bernie has momentum to make a challenge there, or even win it, then we could have a race on our hands.”
— And Sunday’s New York Times front page is topped by the headline “Sanders Was Slow to Accept V.A. Problems,” which reports the senator, while heading his chamber’s Veterans Affairs Committee, initially considered complaints about problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs to be “a play by conservatives to weaken one of the country’s largest social welfare institutions.”
“Mr. Sanders’s chairmanship of the committee, his most notable leadership post in the Senate, has become a go-to credential in his upstart quest to win the Democratic nomination for president,” reporters Steve Eder and Dave Philipps write. “But a review of his record in the job also shows that in a moment of crisis, his deep-seated faith in the fundamental goodness of government blinded him, at least at first, to a dangerous breakdown in the one corner of it he was supposed to police.”
That said, the Times article ends with Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain noting Sanders has a stronger record on veterans than Clinton: “He and I had many disagreements,” McCain is quoted, “but we were able to come together, finally, after very spirited discussions.”