Getting nasty

Things are getting nasty between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. And that’s fine.

By Greg Sargent

There seems to be a whole lot of hand-wringing and maneuvering today around the notion that the Democratic Primary battle between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton is about to get a whole lot tougher.

To which your humble blogger says: So what? That’s what primaries are for.

Bloomberg’s John Heilemann stirred the pot this morning by reporting that the Sanders operation is set to “take the gloves off” against Clinton. In recent days Sanders has unloaded with a tough series of attacks on Clinton, questioning her vote for the Iraq War and her change of positions on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other issues, while vowing not to base his positions on what is “politically expedient,” implicitly suggesting that’s what she’s been doing. Heilemann reports that this could be the start of a new phase in the campaign.

This new phase will be more aggressive, hard-edged, and focused on driving home contrasts between Sanders and Clinton. In other words, it will be more negative. Just how nasty things will get remains one of two central questions that will define the battle ahead. The other is whether Sanders, with his deep aversion to negative campaigning, is willing and able to do what is required to take down Clinton without tarnishing his brand as a different kind of politician.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports today that Sanders’ pollsters are quietly testing negative messages (cue the scary-sounding organ music) about her as too close to Wall Street or unreliably liberal based on previous positions. Sanders chief strategist Tad Devine, however, tells the Times that Sanders won’t allow this to stray into “negative” or “personal” attacks, by which he seems to mean attacks on her character, as opposed to her positions.

Okay, things are about to get very contentious, and they will get a whole lot more so as the voting gets closer. So can we talk about this for a moment?

First of all, none of this hints at anything even close to the intensely nasty and bitter battle we saw between the Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns in 2008. As anyone who closely followed that contest can attest, the oppo research deep into the two candidates’ pasts and the dark insinuations about pretty much everything about both of them were far more vicious and negative than anything we’ve seen between the Clinton and Sanders camps.

Second of all, if things are going to get a lot rougher, let’s at least hope the campaigns don’t insult our collective intelligence with the old game of feigning piety about the other side’s awful “negative attacks” while simultaneously launching their own. The Sanders campaign suggests it will sharply question Clinton’s record but won’t get into attacking her character. But suggesting Clinton is changing her positions for political reasons is attacking her character. And the Sanders camp has been doing a whole lot of that. Which, by the way, is fine. If the Sanders campaign wants to cite Clinton’s previously held positions to suggest she may be insufficiently committed to her current ones, that’s what this process is for. It’s completely fair game. Just don’t pretend that isn’t what you’re doing.

Similarly, the Clinton campaign has been faulting Sanders for going negative on her. But Clinton plainly did suggest that Sanders’ criticism of her was motivated by sexism. After Clinton attacked Sanders’ record on guns, Sanders said that “all the shouting in the world” isn’t going to solve the problem. Clinton has since picked up on that, claiming that “sometimes when a woman talks, some people think it’s shouting.” This is not exactly Lee Atwater territory, but it’s too cute by half.

The general consensus seems to be that Sanders is going more negative on Clinton than the other way around. That seems generally right, but ultimately, none of this stuff is really a big deal, at least not yet. The candidates gain from as robust a debate as possible. And by the way, both of them almost certainly know this. It has been suggested for months that Clinton was expecting a coronation. But all of the available evidence suggests otherwise — it’s far more likely that Clinton’s team always anticipated the possibility of a very tough battle. And as her strong debate performance and series of surprisingly ambitious, detailed and progressive policy positions suggest, she’s the better for it.

Obviously there is a line that negative attacks can cross, after which they become destructive. But we aren’t near that line yet. Get back to me when the campaigns begin dishonestly wrenching the other side’s words out of context to completely change their meaning, or when Sanders goes after Clinton’s emails in some form or other, or when Clinton red-baits the self-avowed socialist from Vermont. Then we’ll have something to wring our hands about. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.