(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.)
[B]ernie Sanders may have lost last week’s New York primary, but the candidate is finding the press happy to direct him on what The New York Times calls his “trickier, narrower road.”
“Hillary Clinton’s crushing 58-42 win over Bernie Sanders in New York puts the nomination firmly within her grasp, and raises some tough questions about what’s next for the Vermont Senator,” The Washington Post writes in “Bernie Sanders on the Brink,” just one of countless variations of the same story being reported by seemingly every national news outlet.
New York magazine offers perhaps the most provocative headline with its “Bernie Sanders Has Lost the Primary and It’s Making Him A Little Crazy.”
“The campaign is propounding all sorts of weird, quasi-mathematical approaches to the question of delegate math,” New York commentator Jonathan Chait writes. “Sanders’s denunciations of the primary system as rigged have merged with his descriptions of the economy and the political system as rigged. In combination with his attacks on Clinton for succoring Wall Street — which are exaggerated but not entirely imagined — Sanders has conjoined Clinton and the Democratic Party apparatus to the shadow.”
Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Clinton supporter, diagnoses all this as a case of “candidate-itis, which we all who have run for office have had at one time or another,” in a Washington Post story headlined “After New York Comes the Question: What Does Bernie Want?” “You get the feedback from the crowds and you really think you’re going to win.”
Few in the media think that will happen, as Clinton is outpolling Sanders in the five states to vote Tuesday: Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
“As he ponders what to do, Sanders might want to consider what happened in 1968, when Eugene McCarthy — the democratic insurgent of his time — failed to rally behind establishment figure Vice President Hubert Humphrey,” Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer writes in a Politico piece titled “What Bernie Sanders Should Learn from Eugene McCarthy.” “The parallels are significant: McCarthy had the support of a young, progressive, angry base, while Humphrey appealed to the party elites and older voters who preferred the status quo — and the two did not get along.”
This doesn’t mean everyone wants to bench Sanders. Actor George Clooney, who just hosted a $33,400-per-person Clinton fundraiser, says he hopes the Vermonter “stays in for the entire election.”
“Here’s my suggestion: Don’t end your campaign, re-frame it,” Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen adds in “An Open Letter to Bernie Sanders.” “Rather than talking about Hillary Clinton’s speech transcripts like you did in Pennsylvania, and rather than boasting about how you don’t have a Super PAC and your opponent does, focus on the issues that got you into this race in the first place. Keep talking about inequality, reforming campaign finance, and making the rich pay their fair share, but shift the focus away from Clinton.”
Television’s Sunday news shows also have reason to want Sanders to stay: The candidate just surpassed Republican front-runner Donald Trump for the most program appearances of the 2016 campaign, according to USA Today.
Sanders was interviewed on four broadcasts this weekend — ABC’s “This Week,” CBS’ “Face the Nation,” CNN’s “State of the Union” and NBC’s “Meet the Press” — giving him a record 75 appearances.
“I’m not going to tell you that it’s easy,” he told CNN of his chances of winning. “The idea that we should not vigorously contest this election when the largest state in the United States of America, California, has not yet voted? Nine other states will not have voted after Tuesday. Of course we’re going to give the people in every state in this country the right to determine who they want to see president of the United States, what kind of agenda they want.”
