On April 1, Bernie Sanders sat down with the editorial board of the New York Daily News. It could’ve gone better, but it wasn’t the face-planting that most media sites reported.
The hour-long interview reads like a laundry list of political talking points. Sanders sounds great behind a podium, and his rhetoric has definitely hit a nerve with young voters, but when pushed for specifics, Sanders comes up short time and time again.
Here’s a snippet:
Daily News: And then, you further said that you expect to break them [big banks] up within the first year of your administration. What authority do you have to do that? And how would that work? How would you break up JPMorgan Chase?
Sanders: Well, by the way, the idea of breaking up these banks is not an original idea. It’s an idea that some conservatives have also agreed to.
You’ve got head of, I think it’s, the Kansas City Fed, some pretty conservative guys, who understands. Let’s talk about the merit of the issue, and then talk about how we get there.
Right now, what you have are two factors. We bailed out Wall Street because the banks are too big to fail, correct? It turns out, that three out of the four largest banks are bigger today than they were when we bailed them out, when they were too-big-to-fail. That’s number one . . .
It’s a dodge. The interviewer wants a detailed policy conversation, and Sanders isn’t having it.
That being said, most media outlets are skewing Sanders’ interview as a head-over-heels failure. The Washington Post headline, for example, reads: “This New York Daily News interview was pretty close to a disaster for Bernie Sanders.” Not necessarily. Was it his best moment? By no means. But it wasn’t the implosion of the Sanders campaign.
Sure, he rails against big banks in New York City, which might not be the most politically cognizant idea. His responses to the Israeli-Palestinian question and America’s educational crisis consist mainly of idealistic fluff. But he’s got a firm handle on his base, and though he rambles at times, he manages to stay on message.
The entire shebang is a fascinating look into media spin, if nothing else. But it does underpin the brutal contest underlying the upcoming New York primary.
The Path Ahead
After winning seven out of the last eight primary and caucus contests, Bernie Sanders has been flying high on that ever-elusive electoral drug called “momentum.” The Sanders campaign has narrowed its pledged delegate deficit with Hillary Clinton to 212. A presidential nomination is a still a long-shot, but it’s starting to look a lot more probable.
But if Sanders wants to be the one onstage at the Democratic National Convention this July, when all the delegate votes are officially cast, he has to pull off a miracle. Clinton leads by massive margins in California, Pennsylvania, and New York. Though NYC might be Sanders’ hometown, it’s Clinton’s stomping ground.
When you exclude superdelegates, Sanders needs 57 percent of all remaining delegates to clinch the nomination. That isn’t looking likely, but it’s not impossible.
Regardless of the electoral math, interviews like the one Sanders’ just had don’t exactly help. If anything, it’s a good reminder to voters that reading the transcript beats blindly believing your favorite media outlet any day of the week.
New York goes to the polls on April 19. Until then, the rat race continues.
Featured image courtesy of DonkeyHotey/Flickr under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
