[F]or a few reasons, Monday looms as a big day for the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders.
First, he is scheduled to release the tax returns he has been reluctant to discuss for almost four years. Then he has to gird himself for the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy and inconsistency when those returns reveal that he is quite a wealthy fellow.
All while he and his top advisors try to adjust to his unaccustomed stature as the front-runner in the contest for the Democratic nomination.
Or perhaps the co-front-runner. Sanders has raised far more money than any other announced candidate, and is doing better in the polls than all his competitors.
But those polls show him second to the not-yet-announced Joe Biden, still leading despite having suffered a dreadful fortnight of criticism which he handled very badly.
The criticism centered on his long-time habit of pressing the flesh. An old-fashioned pol, Biden grabs forearms and rubs shoulders, in ways that some women have found intrusive. In response, Biden released an awkward video message and made a few ill-advised wisecracks. All month, the complaints of these women and the clumsiness of Biden’s reaction have been displayed on the news, scrutinized on the cable television gabfests, and opined about on the blogosphere.
All of which apparently did not lay a glove on Biden, who remains ahead of Sanders in two recent nationwide polls as well as in the most recent surveys in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Maybe the gulf between the chatterers and the voters is even bigger than most people thought.
A polling analysis in the New York Times last week concluded that “the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.” Those who Tweet, said the Times story (based on data compiled by the Hidden Tribes Project) are more likely than most Democratic voters to be white, self-identified liberals who follow the latest political gossip.
There’s nothing new about the idea that members of the “political community” – candidates, consultants, contributors, and commentators – are largely talking to each other. If anything, the rise of social media widened the gap between this community and the rest of the world. Now that everyone can be a commentator, all who wish to be commentators comment, whether or not anyone is paying attention.
At least it does not seem that many rank-and-file Democrats were paying much attention to the beating Biden took on television and online. Democrats know who Biden is and like him. He remains, for the nonce, the real front-runner.
But the ‘for-the-nonce’ part is crucial here. It isn’t only that it’s early. It’s also that Joe Biden just isn’t a very good candidate.
He tried for the 1988 presidential nomination and ended up embarrassing himself, quitting the race in September of 1987. He didn’t do much better in 2008, getting less than one percent of the delegates in the Iowa precinct caucuses. He dropped out the next day.
In theory, a candidate can get better. But they almost never do. Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas made two pitiful runs for the Republican nomination in 1980 and 1988. He managed to win it in 1996, when he never seriously threatened Bill Clinton’s re-election. Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee was just as hopeless when he sought the Democratic nomination 1988, and ran such a clunky race in 2000 that he lost to George W. Bush (or, in a plausible alternative interpretation, won it by such a close margin that it got taken away from him).
Then there’s Hillary Clinton, who in the almost unanimous assessment of political observers and practitioners could not lose the 2008 Democratic nomination. She did. Then she lost the 2016 general election to the most unpopular candidate in the history of polling. With precious few exceptions, people who aren’t good at running for president the first time don’t improve later.
So where does Bernie Sanders fit in here? Because he did so much better than almost anyone thought possible in 2016, it’s tempting to conclude that he’s a good candidate.
In some ways he is. He can attract and excite a crowd at a rally. Even voters who don’t agree with him admire his candor and determination. His refusal to soften his rhetoric – continuing, for instance, to call himself a socialist (which he isn’t) – gives him the kind of “what you see is what you get” quality that appeals to voters.
But if he’d been really good, he wouldn’t have lost to a weak candidate.
The scheduled release of his tax returns should provide Sanders with both an opportunity and a test. First he’ll have to deal with the taunts already coming that the candidate who regularly assails “millionaires” has become one, meaning he must be a hypocrite.
A little historic ignorance here. The presidents who did more for poor and low-income Americans than any others – John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, and his cousin Teddy – were far richer than Sanders ever will be. Nobody called them hypocrites (though some rich folks did assail FDR as “a traitor to his class”).
But blasting “millionaires and billionaires” was not a constant theme of their speeches, as it is for Sanders. He gives the impression that he thinks there’s something wrong with being rich. It isn’t just that most voters don’t agree. It’s that now that he’s rich himself, he might have some explaining to do.
Even if some of the criticism is unfair, how he handles it could shed more light on how good a candidate he is. So far, he’s not handling it very well.
His new wealth, he said, came because he wrote a best-selling book.
“If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too,” he said.
Right. If you’re very famous because you’re a United States senator who got very famous running a credible campaign for president, you, too, can write a book which, regardless of its merits (modest in this case) can become a best seller and you’ll be a millionaire.
A good candidate wouldn’t have said that.
