(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.)
[A] week ago, viewers of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” watched actors playing Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton literally waltz out of the studio in the season finale, onetime foes seemingly best friends forever.
Who knew Sanders himself would try to pick up the dance with a new partner and program just days later?
“It’s not over! It’s not over till I say it’s over!” comedian Larry David’s Sanders told SNL cast member Kate McKinnon’s Clinton, who reassured her challenger: “I promise I’m going to have a very special role for you in my administration. How would you like to be — wait for it — the senator from Vermont?”
Then came ABC’s late-night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” On Wednesday, its host greeted guest Donald Trump with a question he said Sanders had sent him: “Hillary Clinton backed out of an agreement to debate me in California before the June 7 primary. Are you prepared to debate the major issues facing our largest state and the country before the California primary?”
“Yes, I am,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee responded, “if we can raise $10 million or $15 million for charity.”
On Thursday, Sanders appeared on Kimmel’s show to offer thanks.
“You made it possible for us to have a very interesting debate about two guys who look at the world very, very differently,” the Vermonter said.
On Friday, Trump changed his mind.
“Now that I am the presumptive Republican nominee, it seems inappropriate that I would debate the second place finisher,” he said in a statement. “As much as I want to debate Bernie Sanders — and it would be an easy payday — I will wait to debate the first place finisher in the Democratic Party, probably crooked Hillary Clinton, or whoever it may be.”
The end result? The national press is divided, with New York magazine’s most-read story this weekend optimistically opining that “Bernie Sanders’s ‘Scorched Earth’ Strategy Seems to Be Working,” while The New York Times more pessimistically says “Bernie Sanders Makes a Campaign Mark. Now, Can He Make a Legacy?”
Some publications can’t decide. Politico, on one hand, is reporting “DNC Agrees to Give Sanders Greater Influence Over Party Platform” and “Newly Powerful Sanders Flexes Senate Muscles.”
“Whatever point he comes back to the Senate,” writer Seung Min Kim notes in the latter story, “Sanders is poised to be more powerful than ever, backed by more than 2 million Twitter followers and millions more admirers nationwide who’ll be looking to him to help set the progressive agenda.”
On the other hand, Politico also is reporting “Bernie Loses His Halo” and “Sanders Angers Democrats With Trump Debate Ploy.”
“The tense relations between Sanders and fellow members of the Senate Democratic Caucus,” Kim and colleague Burgess Everett note in the latter story, “raises questions as to what his interactions will be like once he returns to the Senate. Asked during a brief interview this week at the Capitol when her husband would return to the Senate, Jane Sanders responded, ‘After the 8th.’ But she quickly backtracked and said, ‘I don’t know.’”
Voters will cast ballots June 4 in the Virgin Islands, June 5 in Puerto Rico, and June 7 in California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota, all in advance of the Democratic National Convention on July 25-28 in Philadelphia.
Sanders, appearing Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and NBC’s “Meet the Press,” hasn’t given up on debating Trump.
“Donald Trump said he wanted to go forward, then he changed his mind, said no, then he changed his mind and said yes, then he changed his mind and said no,” Sanders told CBS. “Maybe we’ll get a call in five minutes where he’ll say yes again. I think that is who Donald Trump is, and I think the American people should be very concerned about somebody who keeps changing his mind not only on this debate, but on virtually every issue he’s been asked about.”
The Vermonter also hasn’t given up on campaigning through the final primary June 14 in the District of Columbia — if only to keep television viewers happy. As The Washington Post reports: “Bernie Sanders Will Stay in the Presidential Race So That Larry David Can Keep Pretending to Be Bernie Sanders.”
