Some people just can't win...

Bernie Sanders, Progressive Enemy #1

The ultimate progressive is getting kicked in the teeth by fellow progressives.

By BILL SCHER

The presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders was supposed to put leftward pressure on Hillary Clinton. Instead, it’s Sanders who has become the left’s punching bag.

Sanders has been sandbagged by Black Lives Matter protesters for not prioritizing solutions for institutional racism, knocked by immigrant advocates for arguing that too much immigration would depress wages and had his bona fides on campaign finance reform challenged by new Democratic party presidential aspirant Lawrence Lessig.

Meanwhile, Clinton is getting off light, as she skirts progressive wish list items like restoring Glass-Steagall bank regulations, scuttling the Trans-Pacific Partnership and blocking the Keystone pipeline—issues where Sanders’ aligns strongly with the left.

So why can’t Bernie win? To borrow a phrase from Sen. Elizabeth Warren: the game is rigged.

In effect, Bernie isn’t running for President of the United States of America. He’s running to be President of Progressive America. And when you are running to be an ideological standard-bearer, your ideological fellow travellers all demand you adhere to their own standard. That involves not just checking every box on the liberal to-do list, but giving maximum rhetorical emphasis to everyone’s top priority. Which is impossible. It’s a game that can’t be won.

Sanders has already proposed immigration reform more liberal than the 2013 bipartisan Senate bill in a speech to the National Council of La Raza and incorporated a searing critique of entrenched racism into his regular stump. His reward was a public scolding by Seattle activists who prevented him from speaking at a Social Security rally, one of whom demanded the crowd “join us now in holding Bernie Sanders accountable for his actions.”

The Vermonter also regularly fingers the Citizens United ruling for corrupting democracy and pledges to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn it. That wasn’t enough for Lessig, who complained Sanders dilutes his message by having the gall to campaign on other issues. He told the Washington Post that neither Sanders nor Clinton could enact his preferred package of small-d democratic reforms because both “would be coming to office with a mandate that’s divided among five or six different issues.”

The Lessig swipe parallels the critique coming from Black Lives Matter: For Sanders, all issues come back to economic inequality. For Black Lives Matter, that approach fails to fully confront the centuries-old scourge of institutional racism. For Lessig, only by prioritizing election reform can anything else be solved.

Sanders defenders are apoplectic that the ultimate progressive is getting kicked in the teeth by fellow progressives. “Don’t Piss On Your Best Friend” upbraided Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan. But the critics don’t see Sanders’ as their best friend, because his strategic approach doesn’t line up with theirs.

Sanders is forced to grapple with the various strands of the progressive movement in ways he hadn’t before because he decided to enter the presidential arena. A senator can pick and choose his issues more easily than a presidential candidate. While a traditional candidate succeeds by knowing when to cater to a party’s political base and when to keep it at arm’s length, a movement candidate doesn’t have that luxury. All that complicates the progressive objective of influencing the party Establishment.

If Sanders’ campaign ultimately proves incapable of pinning Clinton down on issues of progressive importance and moving the party farther to the left, it will be another strike against the efficacy of the ideological primary challenge—and against the tactics of single-issue liberal activists.

In the run-up to her announcement, Clinton kept a wary eye on the threat posed by Warren, who had invested considerable time and energy building grassroots support around a set of progressive economic proposals and arguments. Clinton invited her to a secret meeting in December to talk policy. Clinton’s presidential announcement used language that echoed Warren’s jabs at a “rigged” system: “the deck is stacked … my job is to reshuffle the cards.” One of her first policy speeches excoriated the upward distribution of wealth to “not just the top 1 percent but the top 0.1 percent, the 0.01 percent of the population.”

The threat of what Warren might do—run, scold, set tough bars to clear—produced enough pressure to at least shape Clinton’s rhetoric. If her policy prescriptions still fall short of the progressive ideal, they at least point in the desired ideological direction. Any inclinations for Clinton to “triangulate” and show off her willingness to reject liberal orthodoxy were greatly tempered at the outset of her campaign.

But a long held principle in chess is that “a threat … is often far more effective than its actual execution.” Warren only threatened. Sanders executed.

Sanders supporters will likely point his huge rallies and the latest New Hampshire poll, showing him in the lead for the first time, as evidence he is thriving despite the setbacks. But the rallies only show strength inside America’s bluest dots, and poll aggregates indicate that Sanders’ numbers are plateauing. In turn, Clinton is increasingly willing to put distance between herself and the populists.

She threw a brushback at Warren by responding dismissively to a question about her proposal to restore Glass-Steagall bank rules, “I am not going to be pointing at any one change and saying, you know, ‘that’ll solve all our problems.’” She practically trolled environmentalists by refusing to take a position on the Keystone pipeline at a New Hampshire town hall, “If it is undecided when I become president, I will answer your question.” Bernie’s insistences that Hillary take explicit positions on these matters are routinely ignored, to little consequence.

The usual argument against an insurgent challenging an incumbent or a heavily favored Establishment pick is the risk of damaging the eventual nominee in the general election. In 2010, national progressives tried to make an example out of right-leaning red stater Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), only to ease the path for her Republican opponent in the year of the Tea Party. Ted Kennedy softened up President Jimmy Carter before Ronald Reagan could finish the job. Anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy (whom Lessig seeks to emulate) made it impossible for Democrats to unify around President Lyndon Johnson, and later, the eventual nominee Hubert Humphrey, paving the way for Richard Nixon and a longer Vietnam War.

There is also the risk of turning the target of the primary challenge into a more dangerous enemy. Progressives succeeded in beating Sen. Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary, only to see him keep his seat as an independent, freed from any need to cater to Democratic desires. Such primary challenges are a dicey proposition even when a president gets involved, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt learned in 1938. He tried to purge the Democratic Party of conservatives in the midterm elections. But his targets survived, then joined forces with Republicans to put the kibosh on additional New Deal reforms.

The Sanders challenge, which eschews scorched-earth tactics, doesn’t appear to be endangering Clinton’s general election prospects or driving her into the arms of Speaker John Boehner. In that respect, no harm, no foul. But if the risk was small this time around, the benefits remain hard to spot. Progressives eager to exert maximum leverage over Democratic administrations may want to ask themselves: was the threat of a primary challenge more useful than a real one?