The real reason Bernie Sanders failed

Bernie Sanders is vowing to carry on his fight for the Democratic presidential nomination all the way to the Democratic National Convention in July. He may just do that, too, but he won't win. On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton secured enough pledged delegates to win the nomination even without the help of superdelegates.

Nobody can really be surprised that Clinton clinched the nomination by this point. Certainly Sanders' top aides weren't. Postmortems were already being written before Tuesday about the Sanders campaign, and how Bernie could have beat Hillary if only he had attacked her on her "damn emails" (The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza), or hadn't spent "months painting Democrats as corrupt corporate sellouts" (Amanda Marcotte at Salon), or learned to connect with black and Latino voters earlier (John Wagner, Philip Rucker, and Robert Costa at The Post). Surely more diagnoses will come in as soon as Sanders bows out.

But I don't think any of those are quite right — and neither does the Sanders campaign. Sanders was plenty combative, considering himself wronged and disrespected by the media and the Democratic Party, but "every time Sanders got into a knife fight, aides say, they ended up losing," Politico reports. Sanders got to where he is by being a happy warrior for progressive economics and revolutionary fervor, and there's no reason to believe that bringing up Bill Clinton's sex scandals or Clinton's email woes — as the Sanders campaign considered in the fall — would have helped him more than hurt him.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Tad Devine, Sanders' senior strategist, got closer to the problem. "I don’t think anybody had figured out how to win when we got in," he told The Washington Post. "It was 'How do we become credible?'" Sanders became credible by winning where it wasn't expected, proving that his ideas are actually popular among a sizable chunk of the Democratic electorate. What he failed to do was offer a plausible explanation as to how he would get any of his ideas enacted, especially if one or both houses are controlled by Republicans.

The typical Bernie Sanders supporter wasn't alive in the mid-1980s, when this Wendy's ad was (for some reason) a cultural phenomenon. But it sums up the Sanders shortcoming pretty well:

Sanders has acknowledged that he entered the Democratic race as an issues candidate, without any real expectation of becoming the nominee. That changed in the fall, but coming up with legislative strategies takes time, and Hillary Clinton has had years of planning — and some very high-profile failures — to come up with concrete goals and ideas on how to get them through Congress.

As former "young Hillary hater" Rebecca Traister writes in New York Magazine, "Clinton is a master at identifying problems and coming up with plans to solve them." She continues:

Sanders is no spring chicken when it comes to politics, and unlike Clinton, he has executive experience as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. But his entire plan to get huge policy proposals — universal Medicare-for-all health care, tuition-free college, and even more modest ones, like a $15 minimum wage — through Congress was a popular revolution. If the American people rose up and bugged Congress enough, he thought, Congress would listen to them. And when Clinton and other people would note the problems with this aspirational approach, Sanders would accuse them of thinking too small, not "thinking outside the box."

Of course America can do all these things, Sanders would say. Look at Norway — a homogenous country of 5 million with vast oil wealth and no global military commitments. Perhaps government-sponsored health care is possible in the U.S. — it would be really nice not to have to deal with insurance companies, or get rid of student debt — but just because Europe has developed a different system of governing itself isn't proof that America can do it, too. Most European countries still have monarchies, but nobody is suggesting the U.S. decide to anoint its own king.

Bernie Sanders did better than most people expected, including myself and probably Bernie Sanders, too. His self-professed democratic socialism, it turns out, wasn't a deal-breaker. I'm not going to tell him how to end his campaign — that's his call. But the "next Bernie Sanders" might have more success if he or she has more than just big ideas.