The Economist takes a behind the scene’s look at the media bright shiny object and reveals what most DEMOCRATS know…
Bernie maybe a media darling….
But Democrats know that he isn’t a member of the party and he isn’t what they want…..
Set aside, for now, his crotchety-great-uncle charisma, and the idea that Mr Sanders is a major force rests on two myths. The first is that he almost won the Democratic nomination: had he not been stiffed by the party establishment, which assisted Mrs Clinton, Sandernistas say, he would have done. President Donald Trump says the same. It is nonsense. Mr Sanders won 4m fewer votes than Mrs Clinton and none of the most populous states. He won quirky, liberal hotbeds like New Hampshire, or through the caucus system that mimics them. He was considered competitive chiefly as a result of bored journalists’ efforts to inject drama into the yawnathon of Mrs Clinton’s slow-walk to the nomination.
The most fervent Sandernistas tended not to be Democrats at all. They were college kids and independents, many of whom subsequently drifted off to a third-party nominee. A middle-aged Sandernista in the crowd in Los Angeles, Jacinta, said she voted for the Green candidate in 2016, considered Democrats and Republicans as birds of a feather, and was frustrated that neither backs free movement across the southern border. Most Sanders voters, by contrast, were loyal Democrats who simply didn’t much like Mrs Clinton. Having little attachment to Mr Sanders’s statist ideas, they nonetheless swung grumblingly behind her. This helps explode the second myth: that the Democrats have veered to the left, where the rumpled Mr Sanders awaits them.
There are, to be sure, signs of a long-running leftward drift in the party, as it loses its last conservative whites to the populist right. But there are also counter-signals. Mr Sanders’s demand for “universal health care” has been taken up by almost every Democratic candidate in the mid-terms—but there is such ambiguity about what it entails as to make this no more meaningful than civil rights among other distant aspirations. None of Mr Sanders’s other big ideas—including free college and massive public works—is getting much play. Nor have Sanders-endorsed candidates fared well in the primaries. Our Revolution, a group Mr Sanders formed to promote his acolytes, has been a failure. “It doesn’t do anything,” gripes a strategist for one of its candidates….
image…RollingStone