THE ESTABLISHMENT STRIKES BACK IN THE EMPIRE STATE
ONE OF THE GREAT BEAUTIES of the country that we experienced traveling from one end to the other is how different one place can be from another. And that’s certainly true of how politics is done as well. What’s off-limits in one state is more than fair game in another. New York is one of those places with a reputation for a more rough-and-tumble sort of politics, as CNN’s Jeff Zeleny described the coming contest in an April 6 story.
Tad told Bernie before we arrived in New York, “This isn’t going to be like Iowa or New Hampshire. Voters in New York are much more used to bare-knuckle politics. The Clintons know that. They’ve played politics here a long time, so you should be ready for them to really come after us in a way that would have backfired in other states.”
New York had become a critically important state for both campaigns. There were 247 delegates at stake, so a win in New York could help us further close the delegate gap. But New York had a closed Democratic primary, and New Yorkers had elected Hillary Clinton to the U.S. Senate twice. She was a favorite for both those reasons, although that also meant that expectations were very high for her.
A few critical events happened before Bernie even arrived in New York, on April 7, after spending the day before in Philadelphia—including that we won the debate over whether there would be a debate in New York before the primary. Of the three additional debates we had secured before the New Hampshire primary, the campaigns had relatively quickly agreed that the first would be in Michigan and the third in California. The location of the second debate—to be held in April—had long been a point of disagreement. We wanted it to take place in New York prior to the primary there. The Clinton campaign wanted it held in Pennsylvania in the week after the New York primary.
In late March we stepped up the pressure for a New York debate. I sent a letter to my counterpart, Robby Mook. On the Sunday news shows, Bernie called for a New York debate. I did the same on cable news. The Clinton campaign spent a couple of days trying to keep the debate from happening. Campaign strategist Joel Benenson went on TV to make the case that they would not debate unless Bernie changed his “tone,” as reported by CNN and many others.
It looked more and more like the Clinton campaign was trying to dodge a New York debate. And that suited us just fine. We had a great two-day back-and-forth, which they also obviously understood they were losing. They wisely just gave in. I was disappointed when they did. My arguments with Clinton folks on cable media about the New York debate were some of the easiest of the entire race because their position was so indefensible, including in the eyes of the media, who wanted either to host the debate or cover it. We were hoping the Clinton campaign would dig in their heels and keep the discussion going for another week. But all good things must come to an end.
Another critical event, or series of events, was that we were coming off seven straight wins, our longest streak so far. All those wins had been by double digits—we were coming into New York with a head of steam. Bernie’s string of wins had caused Hillary Clinton’s lead in New York to shrink. Our polling showed her 21 points ahead in the third week of March. At the beginning of April her lead slipped to 17 points, and within a few days it was down to 14. Bernie’s win in Wisconsin was sure to shrink it even more. And in fact it did. Our polling over April 6 and 7 found that Hillary Clinton’s lead was down to just 10. We had overcome 10-point deficits in a number of states, so we were feeling positive.
Whittling Clinton’s lead to only 10 points was impressive from our standpoint because of New York’s closed primary. Since only registered Democrats could vote, Bernie would not be able to rely on the support of Democratically aligned independents, among whom he had won by 3-to-1 margins in most states. To make matters worse, the rules in New York required voters who wanted to switch their party registration to do so six months before the primary. New York’s closed primary and its draconian registration-change deadline meant that over 3 million voters were excluded from participating in the Democratic primary.
The Clinton folks also knew what we knew about Bernie’s momentum, and their response was to go on the attack. With Bernie in Wyoming on the night of the Wisconsin primary, I was on set at CNN in Washington with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. They cut to Jeff Zeleny, who reported that he had just talked with Clinton campaign officials and that they were going to employ a new strategy against Bernie. They would “disqualify him,” “defeat him,” and “worry about unifying the party later.” In other words, they would do whatever it took to win, no matter how much damage they did to the party.
Zeleny reported further on this later that night on Anderson Cooper’s show. He said that one of the issues on which the Clinton campaign was going to step up its attacks was guns. The Clinton campaign was taking off the gloves. This is the part where the New York Daily News reenters the story, as do the columnists at the Washington Post.
Before I explain how the Clinton campaign, with the complicity of the New York Daily News and pro-Clinton columnists at the Post, masterfully executed a plan to knock Bernie out in the New York primary, I’d like to issue a caveat: It is not my intention to demonstrate that there was some grand conspiracy where Hillary Clinton, Jeff Bezos, and Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman got on a conference and plotted a “kill Bernie” strategy—although if anyone was on that call I’d love to hear about it. What is clear, however, is that the Clinton campaign used sympathetic columnists at the Post and editorial writers at the Daily News who, knowingly or not, functioned in this effort as campaign proxies for Hillary Clinton.
Just a bit of background on the owners of the two papers at issue. I think many people are somewhat familiar with Washington Post (and Amazon) owner Jeff Bezos. What many do not know is that he has donated to such right-wing entities as Reason.com, and he fought raising taxes on the rich in his home state of Washington. Of Bezos, in an article that unflatteringly compared the local charitable giving of Amazon with that of other Seattle-based businesses, such as Microsoft and Boeing, the Seattle Times wrote: “[Early Amazon investor Nick] Hanauer and others who know Bezos describe him as a libertarian. In 2010, Bezos contributed $100,000 to help defeat Initiative 1098, which sought to impose a state income tax on Washington’s wealthiest residents. ‘There’s almost nothing I could have predicted with more precision than that Jeff would hate the idea,’ said Hanauer, an advocate for I-1098. ‘He’s a libertarian, and I am not.’”
The media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting found that in the days immediately preceding the Michigan primary, the Washington Post put out sixteen negative stories about Bernie Sanders in sixteen hours. That wasn’t the first time the Post had gone after Bernie. Back on January 27, shortly before the Iowa caucus, the Washington Post published an editorial, the crux of which was the following sentence: “But Mr. Sanders is not a brave truth-teller. He is a politician selling his own brand of fiction to a slice of the country that eagerly wants to buy it.” Ruth Marcus (formerly on the Post editorial board herself), in a column the next day defending the Post’s anti-Sanders rant, was quite honest about the editorial board’s feelings toward Bernie: “To put it mildly, the editorial board doesn’t ♥ Sanders either.”
For those not moved by the editorial board’s hit-you-over-the-head approach, Post columnist Dana Milbank had penned a softer piece, imploring all those who, like him, thought Bernie was the cat’s pajamas to vote for Clinton because Bernie was unelectable: “I adore Bernie Sanders. I agree with his message of fairness and I share his outrage over inequality and corporate abuses. I think his righteous populism has captured the moment perfectly. I respect the uplifting campaign he has run. I admire his authenticity. And I am convinced Democrats would be insane to nominate him.”
To show how personally painful it was for him to suggest that all good progressives vote for Hillary Clinton, Milbank wrote, “Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is a dreary candidate. She has, again, failed to connect with voters. Her policy positions are cautious and uninspiring. Her reflexive secrecy causes a whiff of scandal to follow her everywhere. She seems calculating and phony. And yet if Democrats hope to hold the presidency in November, they’ll need to hold their noses and nominate Clinton.” I give Milbank an A+ for his electability appeal to voters but an F for political soothsaying. He was not alone in the latter category within media or establishment political circles.
Milbank’s piece is representative of the consistently pro-corporate, pro-establishment, and, as a consequence, anti-Bernie spin that pervaded the Washington Post editorial and opinion sections. In fairness to the Post, its political reporters, including Karen Tumulty, Dan Balz, John Wagner, Dave Weigel, and Phil Rucker, have made the DC paper the premier print source for political news. Compare that to the New York Times, which had a more evenhanded editorial policy. Its dismissiveness, cynicism, and at times hostility toward Bernie were much more likely to find their way into the actual news reporting.
The Daily News’ Mort Zuckerman is a billionaire real estate magnate who has been involved in politics for a long time. Many will remember his many appearances on NBC’s political roundtable program The McLaughlin Group. Zuckerman was never shy in his defense of the monied. He was extremely critical of Obama for what he considered inflammatory rhetoric against the rich. In an October 15, 2001, Wall Street Journal article, John Freeman wrote: “As Mr. Zuckerman ponders the Occupy Wall Street movement, he concludes that ‘the door to it was opened by the Obama administration, going after the “millionaires and billionaires” as if everybody is a millionaire and a billionaire and they didn’t earn it.… To fan that flame of populist anger I think is very divisive and very dangerous for this country.’”
Back in 2010, when Zuckerman was considering a U.S. Senate run against Kirsten Gillibrand, the late Wayne Barrett wrote, in the Village Voice: “Fox asked him what he thought of Obama’s attacks on Wall Street ‘salaries and bonuses’ and Mort rallied to the cause: ‘I don’t think it’s right to demonize these people. You just don’t diminish them and beat them over the heads and shoulders for political reasons. And that’s what it’s about.’”
Whatever one’s view of the billionaire class, I think it is fair to conclude that Bernie is not exactly Bezos’s or Zuckerman’s cup of tea.
The first volley from the Clinton campaign through Zuckerman’s Daily News was launched on March 27, when the paper printed a Clinton campaign–authored op-ed on the issue of guns that took a swipe at Bernie. On the day after the Wisconsin primary, as the campaign moved to New York, the Daily News decided to chime in, based on answers he gave during the April 1 editorial board meeting—a transcript of which they released on their website the afternoon of April 4. The blaring tabloid headline: “Bernie’s Sandy Hook Shame.” The story inside the paper in fact distorted what he had told the editorial board.
The lead:
Presidential populist Bernie Sanders came under blistering fire Tuesday for opposing efforts by families of Sandy Hook shooting victims to sue gun manufacturers.
Sanders, in an exclusive interview with the Daily News last week, said, “No, I don’t,” when asked if victims of a crime with a gun should be able to sue the manufacturer.
In truth, Bernie never said in the interview that the Sandy Hook families should not be able to sue. Okay, based purely on the one quote pulled out of context, the quote seems to confirm the inflammatory conclusion of the previous sentence. But waaaay down in the editorial, even the New York Daily News had to confess that there was more to it.
“But I do believe that gun manufacturers and gun dealers should be able to be sued when they should know that guns are going into the hands of wrong people,” Sanders said.
“So if somebody walks in and says, ‘I’d like 10,000 rounds of ammunition,’ you know, well, you might be suspicious about that. So I think there are grounds for those suits, but not if you sell me a legal product.”
Oh, so Bernie’s position is more nuanced than the conclusion. Even these quotes are just a fraction of what he said in the interview.
Here’s the full exchange:
DAILY NEWS: There’s a case currently waiting to be ruled on in Connecticut. The victims of the Sandy Hook massacre are looking to have the right to sue for damages the manufacturers of the weapons. Do you think that that is something that should be expanded?
SANDERS: Do I think the victims of a crime with a gun should be able to sue the manufacturer, is that your question?
DAILY NEWS: Correct.
SANDERS: No, I don’t.
DAILY NEWS: Let me ask you. I know we’re short on time. Two quick questions. Your website talks about …
SANDERS: No, let me just … I’m sorry. In the same sense that if you’re a gun dealer and you sell me a gun and I go out and I kill him [gestures to someone in room].… Do I think that that gun dealer should be sued for selling me a legal product that he misused? [Shakes head no.] But I do believe that gun manufacturers and gun dealers should be able to be sued when they should know that guns are going into the hands of wrong people. So if somebody walks in and says, “I’d like 10,000 rounds of ammunition,” you know, well, you might be suspicious about that. So I think there are grounds for those suits, but not if you sell me a legal product. But you’re really saying …
DAILY NEWS: Do you think that the discussion and debate about what defines a legal product, what should be a legal product, hence AR-15s, these automatic military-style weapons … which is the grounds of this suit at the moment is that this should have never been in the hands of the public.
SANDERS: Well, you’re looking at a guy … let’s talk about guns for one second. Let’s set the record straight because of … unnamed candidates who have misrepresented my views. You’re looking at a guy who has a D, what was it, D minus voting record from the NRA? Not exactly a lobbyist for the NRA, not exactly supporting them.
But it’s interesting that you raised that question. If you’ll remember this, if you were in Vermont in 1988 [gestures to Vermonter in the room], three people were running for the United States Congress. We have one seat, Vermont. Two of them supported assault weapons. One candidate, Bernie Sanders, said, in 1988, “No, I do not support the sale and distribution of assault weapons in this country.” I lost that election by three points. Came in second. And that may have been the reason, that I was opposed by all of the gun people, okay? So to answer your question, I do not believe, I didn’t believe then and I don’t believe now that those guns should be sold in America. They’re designed for killing people.
DAILY NEWS: So do you think then, with that in mind, that the merits of the current case are baseless?
SANDERS: It’s not baseless. I wouldn’t use that word. But it’s a backdoor way. If you’re questioning me, will I vote to ban assault weapons in the United States, yeah, I will.
[Emphasis added.]
Whoa! So what Bernie actually told the New York Daily News is that he does not support suing gun sellers when the guns are used for criminal purposes and the sellers are not culpable in some other way. He specifically lays out one instance in which a transaction should result in liability because the seller knows or should know that the gun or ammunition will be used improperly. “So I think there are grounds for those suits.” Huh?
How is that opposing the suit of the Sandy Hook family? Although he appropriately doesn’t weigh in on the specific claims in a specific pending lawsuit, Bernie is crystal clear that, when gun manufacturers or dealers act in a way that contributes to the likelihood of criminal activity or ignores suspicious conduct, they should be subject to suit. When the New York Daily News directly asked him if he believed that the Sandy Hook suit was baseless, Bernie was pretty direct. “It’s not baseless.” Exactly!!
More to the point, he stated without qualification that he had consistently supported in every public statement, including those going back as far as 1988—and still supported—a complete ban on the sale of semiautomatic assault weapons. He voted that way in Congress 100 percent of the time. His support of banning assault weapons was one of the primary motivators for his voting yes on the 1994 Crime Bill (along with the Violence Against Women Act provision), which he otherwise condemned on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The New York Daily News completely ignored Bernie’s policy release in mid-January calling for changes to the gun liability law so that it was substantially narrowed to reflect his view on the matter—that in cases where gun manufacturers and rogue dealers are culpable, they should be held accountable. But that did not fit into the political agenda of the New York Daily News.
One of Clinton’s frontmen in her attacks on Bernie was Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy. After the horrendous Sandy Hook shootings, he helped pass a number of important gun safety measures in Connecticut. But Malloy (and others, including Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, who criticized Bernie) has nothing to say about the fact that Connecticut is home to several firearms companies, that assault weapons are manufactured in their state, and that Malloy’s administration made state money available to the gun industry for expansion.
Gun sales in Connecticut make up a tiny fraction of these companies’ sales, so the new laws put in place in Connecticut (including a ban on large magazines and semiautomatic assault rifles, which Bernie consistently voted for on a national basis in Congress) don’t have a significant impact on their profits. As long as their product is being shipped to other states, Malloy appears indifferent. Indeed, he actively aided them with state money.
Eight days before the Sandy Hook shootings, as reported by the Hartford Courant on March 13, 2013, the Malloy administration offered the parent company of Bushmaster—the company that made the assault weapon used in the shootings—a $1 million loan (most of which could be forgiven) to entice it to move its headquarters to Connecticut. That deal was withdrawn in the aftermath of the tragedy. But Malloy’s administration continued to offer financial support to gun makers. As recently as March 2017, the Hartford Courant reported Malloy speaking approvingly of a $10 million state loan ($2 million of which could be forgiven) to Colt Industries for headquarters expansion in Connecticut.
Why did Malloy never push for a ban on the manufacture of civilian versions of military-style assault weapons in the state of Connecticut? It is true that the companies could move that production elsewhere, but at a cost of millions of dollars to ship machinery out of state, build or lease new facilities, and train new workers. And isn’t that what the concern over the liability bill is all about? Hitting the manufacturers of semiautomatic assault weapons where it hurts—in the wallet.
During a political trip to New Hampshire in August 2015 that was covered by the Union Leader, Malloy is reported to have said: “With respect to Bernie’s position on [the Brady Bill]. It is anathema to my own. I don’t understand it. I think [it’s] political expediency.” I certainly would never accuse Governor Malloy of “political expediency” because he talked about gun control out of one side of his mouth while providing state dollars to the gun industry out of the other. There’s another technical term in politics that’s more fitting: hypocrisy.
After the release of the transcript of Bernie’s New York Daily News editorial interview on April 4—the day of the Wisconsin primary—the Clinton campaign launched phase 2 of their announced “disqualify him” attack. As Bernie was winning Wisconsin and Clinton’s campaign spilled the beans to CNN’s Jeff Zeleny about their strategy to attack Bernie, two—yes, two—Washington Post writers, Chris Cillizza and Jonathan Capehart (the same “that’s not really Bernie fighting racial discrimination in those photos” columnist), published columns parroting the very attacks the Clinton campaign would make.
Cillizza played the role of articulating the main part of the Clinton attack around bank reform. “Time and again, when pressed to get beyond his rhetoric on the evils of corporate America and Wall Street, Sanders struggled. Often mightily,” he wrote. He made sure to remind readers that none other than Hillary Clinton herself had seen this coming: “For Sanders’s critics—including Hillary Clinton—the Daily News interview is the ‘aha!’ moment that they have been insisting will come for Sanders, a time when his pie-in-the-sky proposals are closely examined and found wanting.”
In an email to supporters attacking Bernie—sent out the evening of the fifth, according to CNN’s Dylan Byers—the Clinton campaign wrote, “We’ve said for a long time that this primary is about who’s really going to be able to get things done. And from reading this interview, you get the impression Senator Sanders hasn’t thought very much about that.” It’s like Chris Cillizza was reading their minds.
Capehart included the same banking reform attack as Cillizza—that was, after all, the central Clinton messaging point, so it had to be in more than one column. Repetition in politics is important so voters don’t miss the main proof point. But his piece offered more of an overview of Bernie’s inability to answer questions on a wide variety of topics—the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, combatting ISIS. For comic relief, Capeheart resurrected Bernie’s reference to the now-discontinued use of subway tokens in New York. Good to remind anyone who missed it that, despite Bernie’s accent, Hillary Clinton was the real New Yorker, not Green Mountain Bernie.
Once the story line was put out there by the Clinton campaign and the Washington Post columnists, others in the media started repeating it: Dylan Byers and many others listed in his story: the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin. That’s a grand slam in politics. Create a story, get it validated in the media, and then have it bleed into all the other outlets. Priceless!
The pile-on as Bernie came into New York with a string of victories and a head of steam could not have been better choreographed. Juan Gonzalez, a twenty-nine-year veteran reporter, now retired from the New York Daily News, was present at the editorial interview. When asked by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman about the charges in the media that Bernie had bungled it, he strongly disagreed: “I certainly didn’t get that impression, tell you the truth. The editorial board is notorious, especially our editorial page editor, Arthur Browne, for his laserlike one question after another, and he bombarded, as several others of us also asked questions. I, overall, thought that Bernie Sanders handled the exchange very well.” He did acknowledge that he felt Bernie stumbled “a little bit” on the question of breaking up the banks.
Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, described the criticism of Bernie this way: “Some of the complaints are just silly. When asked how he would break up the big banks Sanders said he would leave that up to the banks. That’s exactly the right answer.” And the fact that Sanders didn’t know the specific statute—who cares? How many people know the specific statute for someone who puts a bullet in someone’s head? That’s murder, and if a candidate for office doesn’t know the exact title and specifics of her state murder statute, it hardly seems like a big issue.
Mike Konczal, an expert on financial reform at the Roosevelt Institute, wrote, “Yes, these are answers I’d expect for how Sanders approaches financial reform.” He continued, “Sanders has a clear path on how he wants to break up the banks, which he described”; “If anything, Sanders is too wonky.”
Peter Eavis, a business reporter at the New York Times, took issue with the Clinton/Cillizza/Capehart/Daily News line that Bernie didn’t understand his banking plan. “Bernie Sanders probably knows more about breaking up banks than his critics give him credit for,” Eavis wrote. “In the interview … Mr. Sanders does appear to get tangled up in some details and lacks clarity. Breaking up the banks would involve arcane and complex regulatory moves that can trip up any banking policy wonk, let alone a presidential candidate. But, taken as a whole, Mr. Sanders’s answers seem to make sense. Crucially, his answers mostly track with a reasonably straightforward breakup plan that he introduced to Congress last year.”
The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim went even further in debunking the media narrative: “In fact, in several instances, it’s the Daily News editors who are bungling the facts in an interview designed to show that Sanders doesn’t understand the fine points of policy. In questions about breaking up big banks, the powers of the Treasury Department and drone strikes, the editors were simply wrong on details.”
Grim’s conclusion: “This wasn’t an interview about policy details. It was about who the media has decided is presidential and who isn’t, who is serious and who isn’t. The Daily News and much of the rest of the media don’t think Sanders is qualified to be president, and that’s the motivation for an interview meant to expose what the media have already decided is true.” In other words, some members of the media had bought the Clinton narrative, and others were affirmatively pushing it, and all the pushback from economists and financial experts was going to get little traction, because it was in conflict with what they believed or were trying to get others to believe.
* * *
Our strategy in New York was to repeat what we had successfully done in other contests where Bernie had the time to blanket a single state with events. The Washington Post’s Phil Rucker accurately captured our strategy: “To capitalize on his fresh momentum, Sanders plans an aggressive push in New York, modeled after his come-from-behind victory a few weeks ago in Michigan. He intends to barnstorm the state as if he were running for governor.”
On the way to New York we hit another media-driven bump in the road. At his rally in Philadelphia the day before, Bernie moved to counter what Jeff Zeleny had reported was the Clinton campaign’s strategy of disqualifying and defeating him and what the Washington Post had announced in a headline: “Clinton Questions Whether Sanders Is Qualified to Be President.” Responding to the emerging Clinton narrative, Bernie told the crowd, “She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am not qualified to be president. Well, let me, let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton: I don’t believe that she is qualified, if…,” and he proceeded to list the reasons—having a super PAC, coziness with Wall Street, trade positions, voting for the Iraq War, and more—why she should be disqualified from being president. But the phrase he used was “not qualified.”
The Clinton folks struck back immediately. Their first line of attack was that Hillary Clinton herself had never used the words “not qualified” or “unqualified” with respect to Bernie. That was technically true. In a Morning Joe interview, pressed on the point, Clinton said: “I think the [New York Daily News] interview raised a lot of really serious questions”; “I think he hadn’t done his homework, and he’d been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn’t really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions”; and “I think that what he has been saying about the core issue in his whole campaign doesn’t seem to be rooted in an understanding of either the law or the practical ways you get something done. And I will leave it to voters to decide who of us can do the job that the country needs, who can do all aspects of the job, both on the economic domestic issues and on national security and foreign policy.”
It was these comments that led to the Washington Post headline about Clinton’s questioning Bernie’s qualifications. In attacking Bernie for what it called his “false attack” on Clinton for calling him “not qualified,” the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler threw its own headline writers under the bus. “Many Washington-based reporters have experienced the frustration of having an accurate article denied by an agency spokesman because of a headline that went a little far off the mark.” In truth, the Post’s headline dovetailed with the lead of the story: “Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on Wednesday questioned whether her rival in the Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), is qualified to be president.”
Kessler’s attack piece then engaged in an incredible feat of political contortion. It was acceptable for the Post’s reporters to thus characterize Clinton’s remarks, but Bernie could not draw the same conclusion: “Those kinds of answers certainly give license to reporters to offer an interpretation that Clinton is raising questions about her rival’s qualifications. Clinton, after all, is a former secretary of state and is adept at signaling messages without actually saying the words out loud. But it’s not the same as ‘quote unquote’ saying Sanders is unqualified.”
I certainly was not aware, until this flap, that columnists (or reporters writing opinion columns) carried such sharp razors that they could engage in this type of hairsplitting. But the establishment was petrified that Bernie was going to win in New York and upend the Democratic primary. Any perceived mischaracterization, no matter how tiny or how immaterial to the substance of what Bernie was saying, was going to draw a blistering counterattack not just from the Clinton campaign but from its media allies. The proof is that the media gave Clinton a pass when she made the same kind of mischaracterization: In response to Bernie, she tweeted the following: “I’ve been called a lot of things over the years, but ‘unqualified’ has not been one of them.—Hillary.”
Wait a minute. Bernie never said Hillary Clinton was “unqualified.” He said she was “not qualified” by virtue of the positions she had taken during her political career, thereby suggesting she was disqualified. In Glenn Kessler’s subsequent article criticizing Clinton for misstating what Bernie said, he wrote “”. That’s right: He wrote nothing because there was no Glenn Kessler article holding Clinton to the same standard Bernie was being subjected to.
In fairness, perhaps Hillary Clinton mistakenly believed that Bernie had called her “unqualified” because she was relying on media headlines such as this one from The Hill, on April 7: “Sanders Defends Calling Clinton Unqualified for White House.” Or maybe she read articles like Ben Geier’s piece in Fortune: “In a speech on Wednesday evening, Sanders said that Clinton was ‘unqualified’ to be president. He again alluded to payments she received for speeches she delivered to big banks and the fact that she is supported by a Super PAC, arguing that these items made her unqualified to be president.” If so, she was doing exactly what Kessler had excoriated Bernie for.
One reporter who did understand what Bernie was saying at the Philadelphia rally sent me an email: “I have a theory Which is that he mean to say she’s DISqualified, not UNqualified. Am I right? Is he planning to say anything about this today.”
Yes, Nancy Cordes was right.
But the Clinton campaign quickly pivoted to turn Bernie’s attack on Clinton’s positions and fund-raising that “disqualified” her, and twisted it to argue that Bernie was attacking her résumé or credentials, which of course he did not do because that was impossible to do. By moving to the “unqualified” frame, rather than the “disqualified” frame, the Clinton campaign could highlight her extensive résumé, while the media echo chamber repeated over and over again the Clinton/Cillizza/Capehart/NYDN charge that Bernie’s Daily News editorial interview demonstrated he was unqualified.
Yet, both Bernie and I had to defend on TV how Bernie could claim she’s “unqualified,” which he never did, when she had been a U.S. senator and secretary of state. We were then left in the position of having to acknowledge Hillary Clinton’s admittedly impressive résumé and credentials. To voters in New York, who had elected Hillary Clinton to the U.S. Senate twice, the idea that Bernie believed Clinton “unqualified” must have seemed bizarre indeed.
In the end, our internal polling showed the impact of the one-two punch we got from the Clinton campaign and the media. We had whittled Clinton’s lead down to 10 points, according to our April 6–7 tracking poll right after Wisconsin. Over the next few days, her lead quickly grew to 12 points, to 14 points, and, finally, in our April 9–11 tracking poll, to a whopping 22 points. That was more than double the deficit of only a few days before. We were in free fall!
* * *
While the Clinton campaign waged its campaign in the press, Bernie held rally after rally in the New York City area. Across the boroughs, tens of thousands of enthusiastic New Yorkers came to hear him. The energy of the crowds has received a lot of coverage elsewhere. It stood in stark contrast to the cynicism that dripped from the pages of the tabloids.
Bernie left the city to crisscross upstate New York. As part of his tour, he highlighted his opposition to fracking—a position that Hillary Clinton had refused to take since Iowa and would refuse ever to adopt. Bernie’s upstate tour ended as he returned to the city for the Brooklyn debate with Secretary Clinton. All of his campaigning was paying off. The nosedive in the polls leveled out, and we began to see some recovery as the newness of the “disqualify him” effort began to wear off. But we were still in a big hole—bigger than when we had arrived in the Empire State on the seventh.
* * *
The debate CNN hosted on the fourteenth became increasingly important as our numbers in New York suffered. Both candidates came in “hot” and ready to spar. In terms of tone, what turned out to be the final such contest of the primary season was also the testiest. In substance, however, it covered mostly well-trodden ground, making it unlikely to move the needle substantially. There was an exchange over what appeared to be Hillary Clinton’s newfound support for a $15 federal minimum wage. She had campaigned on a $12 floor throughout most of the campaign. But she had found religion at a press conference with New York governor Andrew Cuomo on April 4 to celebrate New York’s new $15 minimum. Those not already bothered by her flip-flop on the Trans-Pacific Partnership or the Keystone XL pipeline were unlikely to find her support for an extra $3 in the minimum wage that troubling.
In another development, Bernie agreed to release his 2014 tax returns. As promised, they were boring. I went on the Anderson Cooper 360° show that night to discuss them. Cooper came on the mic before the show and expressed to me his surprise at just how boring they were. It was a short interview.
With the debate in the rearview mirror, Bernie headed to Rome at the invitation of the Vatican to participate in an international conference on economic and social justice. Pope Francis had publicly sparred with candidate Donald Trump over Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Now Bernie was being invited by the Vatican. The contrast was hard to miss. On the campaign trail, Bernie had repeatedly expressed his admiration for the pope’s call for a greater focus on the Social Gospel. There never was much question that Bernie would accept the invitation even in the midst of a hard-fought campaign.
He returned from Rome for a few final events in New York and some media interviews. On election day, he had already moved on to Pennsylvania, which was voting a week later.
Our election night war room was in a conference room in our Manhattan hotel. As always, we were looking for any information about how the voting was going. We started getting reports of big problems in Brooklyn, where over 100,000 voters were improperly dumped from the rolls. Just as in Arizona, we heard all day about people whose party registration was incorrect and who were therefore denied access to the ballot box.
As the afternoon grew late, a pile of pizza arrived. I got a call from a media contact with an update on the late exit polls, which showed us losing by only 4 points. “Congratulations!” my contact said. Losing by 4 points would have been widely perceived as a victory for us—or at least not a victory for the Clinton campaign. Politics is a game of expectations, after all. But we were going to lose by much more than 4 points. The fact that the media was seeing the race so close in the exit polling was raising their expectations only a short bit before those expectations were about to be severely disappointed. Their disappointment came through in their election night commentary. You can’t put even seasoned journalists on a roller coaster like that without it affecting them.
As the increasingly grease-soaked pizza boxes sat next to me on the wooden conference table, the actual results starting coming in. In the end, we would be down 16. In other words, we gained back 6 of the 12 points we’d lost earlier in the pummeling we took from the New York Daily News, the Washington Post columnists, and the media echo chamber. Upstate, Bernie beat Hillary Clinton (remember, only registered Democrats could participate). But her margins in New York City and the surrounding counties more than made up for her loss there. As in so many places, Bernie won the geography primary.
The loss in New York was a severe blow to our chances. The primary season had been a series of ups and downs so far, with successes followed by setbacks. This last drop had been a severe one. We all knew that climbing the next hill would be more of a challenge than we had faced in the past. In addition, April would see our fund-raising start to come down out of the stratosphere.
In March we had raised an unbelievable $44 million. In April that number was below $26 million—an extraordinary amount of money and still well above our monthly campaign average of around $17 million. But it was almost $20 million lower than the month before. That presented two problems. The first was the political expectations game. If we had raised $20 million in March, the $26 million April total would have been hailed as a sign of momentum. But we were victims of our own success and the incredible generosity of Bernie’s donors. The second problem is that the road ahead included several very expensive states, including California. The current spending levels could not be maintained. Although our April fund-raising totals were not released until May, we began internally to plan for the major adjustments that were inevitably coming without a major turnaround. John Robinson and I met frequently to track our spending and to begin planning where to scale back. It was depressing work, done as far from the spotlight as possible.
While we were scrambling to adjust to a financially tighter reality, the Clinton campaign had cleverly devised a way to rake in the dough—abuse of the joint fund-raising committees established with the DNC and state parties.