Bernie Sanders went off for a month to contemplate life after the revolution, and this was the best he could come up with? “Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that.”
So said Sanders at a rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday, where he appeared on stage with Hillary Clinton as an ally for the first time. As big events go, it felt pretty small, with Sanders waving his arms around and offering up his usual list of shouted slogans.
Sanders avoided subjects like war and foreign affairs, since he and Clinton disagree violently on those things. He harped on his successes, which was understandable, but it was passing strange when he claimed that he and his backers “showed the world that we could run a successful national campaign based on small individual contributions.”
Yes, if you define successful as losing.
Clinton — who actually wrapped up the nomination more than a month ago — stood next to him looking uncomfortable, nodding endlessly like a bobblehead doll and smiling at odd, seemingly random moments.
The event was bound to be stiff, since Sanders has spent most of the year attacking Clinton as corrupt, excessively hawkish and beholden to Wall Street.
So it would have been naive to expect Sanders to give Clinton a roaring tribute. But did it have to be as awkward as it was? Who thought of leaving the winner up there with the loser the entire time? The same public-relations genius who put Michael Dukakis in a tank in 1988?
There were times when Clinton sounded almost excited about joining forces with Sanders, or at least pretending to. Perhaps more accurately, there were times when she sounded like Sanders, or at least pretended to.
She trashed the Trans-Pacific trade pact that she once supported but that Sanders and his followers hate. Clinton grinned and nodded vigorously when Sanders talked about raising the federal minimum wage, even though she has disagreed with him in the past about how high it should go.
“These aren’t just my fights,” she said. “These are Bernie’s fights. These are America’s fights.”
But Clinton sounded distinctly more sincere about the state of play in the campaign at the very beginning of her speech, when she said of Sanders: “Being here with him in New Hampshire, I can’t help but reflect how much more enjoyable this election is going to be now that we are on the same side.”
Will Sanders’s fights continue to be Clinton’s fights? Certainly, Sanders has steadily pushed Clinton to the left. She will probably keep pressing issues like trade and the minimum wage during the rest of the campaign, and she promised on Tuesday to pursue them as president. But we all know what happens to campaign promises.
The Clinton campaign gave in to Sanders on some of these issues in the drafting of the Democratic Party platform over the weekend, and her concessions will keep the peace at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia at the end of this month.
There will be the ritual first-round votes in which the Great State of Whatever proudly casts its votes for Sanders. But in the end, the platform will be adopted, Sanders will get his prime-time speaking slot, Clinton will be nominated and that will be that.
The question for Clinton is how many of the 13 million people who voted for Sanders will vote for her — indeed how many of them will vote at all. Motivating that crowd is going to be the big challenge for Sanders if he was sincere on Tuesday when he promised to help Clinton get elected.
He may need a different formula from the one he used on Tuesday — talking about the things on which he and Clinton now agree, and ignoring the ones on which they disagree.
“I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years,” he said. “I remember her as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role that a first lady was supposed to play as she helped lead the fight for universal health care. I served with her in the United States Senate and know her as a fierce advocate for the rights of children.”
What about her time as secretary of state? Sanders called his former opponent “Secretary Clinton” a couple of times, but never mentioned the State Department, probably because he has relentlessly attacked her over her record in that job.
If his primary aim is to keep alive his cult of personality, perhaps all Sanders can do is accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. I’m not sure that will get his supporters to vote in Novembe
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