(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.)
[O]n Nov. 14, nearly three months before the first presidential caucus, CNN offered the headline “How Bernie Sanders Has Already Won.”
“By building a movement around the issues of inequality, the plight of the embattled middle class and the outsized influence of Wall Street,” commentator David Axelrod wrote, “Sanders has pushed (Hillary) Clinton to shed her caution and embrace these economic issues, albeit with a slightly more moderate pitch, as a centerpiece of her campaign.”
“Bernie Sanders, with his fiery passion and appeal to the better angels of our nature,” commentator Christian Chiakulas wrote, “has awakened something among the disenchanted members of the youngest voting generation that will endure long after this presidential primary season.”
On Feb. 1, nearly three hours before the first presidential caucus, Slate offered the headline “What Bernie Sanders Has Already Won.”
“In the same way that Jesse Jackson opened the door to politicians like Barack Obama,” correspondent Jamelle Bouie wrote, “Sanders may do the same for ‘democratic socialists.’ Like the veterans of George McGovern or Howard Dean, the veterans of Bernie Sanders will change and shape the Democratic Party.”
Then, after wins March 22 in Idaho and Utah, March 26 in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington, April 5 in Wisconsin and April 9 in Wyoming, Sanders lost April 19 in New York and Tuesday in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
The national headlines have never been the same. Take The Washington Post’s “Bernie Sanders Knows He’s Going to Lose. Here’s How You Can Tell.”
“Sanders’s current vow — to fight until California — does not necessarily mean his campaign won’t continue beyond that point to try to lure super-delegates to ditch Clinton and support him instead,” reporter Greg Sargent writes. “But there are other signs the Sanders campaign is shifting its focus from such a last-ditch effort to win the nomination to an effort to extract policy concessions from expected nominee Clinton.”
Or consider Politico’s “Bernie’s Failed Revolution.”
“For all his success at the polls,” contributor Bill Scher writes, “Sanders’ ideologically pure campaign foundered on the predictable shoals of policy specifics and political feasibility, obstacles that a progressive populist movement will need to overcome to truly succeed.”
Or read The New York Times’ “Bernie Sanders’s Legacy.”
“At this point, Bernie Sanders is the figurehead of a living idea and a zombie campaign,” columnist Charles M. Blow writes. “He has gone from leading a revolution to leading a wake.”
The campaign is cutting staff and ad spending after fundraising dropped from $44 million in March to $25.8 million in April, Politico reported Sunday. But one aspiring first lady isn’t giving up, as seen in the companion story “Jane Sanders Predicts Epic Bernie Comeback.”
“You remember in mid-March after a string of losses, the media wrote his political obituary and we came back to win eight in a row,” she said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “So we’re expecting to do the same here.”
She also presented the press with a second eye-popping headline: “Jane Sanders to FBI: Get On With Clinton Email Probe.”
“We want to let it go through without politicizing it, and then we’ll find out what the situation is, and that’s how we still feel,” Politico quoted her as telling the Fox Business Network before adding with a laugh, “I mean, it would be nice if the FBI moved it along.”
As for the candidate, the Vermonter who last week surpassed Republican front-runner Donald Trump for the most Sunday television news show appearances of the 2016 campaign — his four gave him a total of 75 appearances — was on only one program this week.
“It’s an uphill fight, I admit it,” he said on “Face the Nation.” “I believe that it is good for American democracy when we have a vigorous debate on the issues.”
Not that Sanders is lacking for attention. Appearing at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he found himself the subject of a few jokes.
Said President Barack Obama: “We’ve got the bright new face of the Democratic Party here tonight, Mr. Bernie Sanders. Bernie, you look like a million bucks. Or, to put in terms you’ll understand, you look like 37,000 donations of $27 each.”
And comedian Larry Wilmore: “Senator recently had a hernia operation. His doctors say it’s his own fault for trying to lift the hopes of the disenfranchised.”
Sanders laughed at both. As he’s learning, you win some, you lose some.
