By now, most professional Democrats expected the party's pivot to the general election to be getting underway in a bit way. It's not really happening. That's in large because the media loves a fight, even one that has a clear underlying dynamic contrary to the contest storyline. And in part because Bernie Sanders has, once again, an outside chance to upset Hillary Clinton's apple cart.
Even though Hillary Clinton has a much bigger lead in the popular vote, delegates won in primaries and caucuses and overall delegates (thanks especially to her dominance among party leader "super-delegates") than Barack Obama ever had over her in his essentially in-the-bag-for-months win over her in 2008, her race against Bernie Sanders is, if anything, heating up.
At least for now.
Sanders is presently on a major roll. And he is being aided by larger factors in the dynamics of history. Unfortunately for him, he can't rely on the US media to push those factors, even though the unprecedented Panama Papers data leak on global elites manipulating a wide-open system and a reappraisal of the Bill Clinton presidency would seem to be right up its alley.
First to the campaign roll for Sanders.
Despite getting pounded by Hillary in most of the earlier primaries, especially in big states, the Vermont senator is closing in national polls. In fact, he has an ever so slight lead in one respected national poll.
Meanwhile, Sanders is dominating the much lower turnout caucus states, which in turn are dominated by activist folks. In fact, he has won seven of the last eight state contests after getting shellacked by Hillary in five big primaries on March 15th.
And then there is the great elephant in the room. Although the Clinton machine is one of the best conventional fundraising operations in history, the Sanders campaign is out-doing it by a huge margin now that the race is fully underway.
Last month, Hillary raised a fantastic $29.5 million. Sanders bested her by an astounding $15 million, continuing his clearcut fundraising dominance since the New Year. In the first three months of 2016, Sanders has raised an amazing $109 million, virtually all of it in small online donations driven by the power of Sanders's authenticity and democratic socialist message.
As a result, he's gotten the Clintons pushing all out to hold on to her home state New York primary on April 19th. And, in the new Field Poll, he has closed the gap in California, the biggest prize of all, to only six percent.
The revelations of the Panama Papers and a reappraisal of Bill Clinton's presidency all serve to provide a potentially supportive environment for the Sanders candidacy. The question is if he can take advantage of it.
The Panama Papers -- that mega-leak implicating the global uber-wealthy and powerful, in which little old Nevada plays a not insignificant part as one of the world centers for fugitive capital -- is a world historical journalistic event. It demonstrates how the "rigging of the system" that Sanders rails against in a domestic context is actually part and parcel of what has become a globalized system of unaccountable wealth and power. The multi-dimensional story is gaining some traction in the US, but our fragmentary ADD media culture all too typically lacks much focus on the subject matter. Sanders could provide that focus with a big speech.
A speech which would also include an integrated look at the problems of the Bill Clinton presidency. In at least a figurative sense, some are on display on the Panama Papers scandal, with its emphasis on deregulated secret flows of capital around the world. The Clinton presidency was marked by a deregulationist approach to finance, energy, trade, and media. And some of the other issues of the Clinton presidency have already been on dramatic, and very direct, display in the fracas between Black Lives Matter activists and the former president a few days ago in Philadelphia, where Clinton was directly confronted with the ill effects on the black community from his draconian sentencing policy on low-level drug offenses.
Not that Sanders doesn't already have a terrific speech. He does. But to take advantage of new developments, he needs something new. Putting aside the bravado about his current win streak, built largely on victories in smaller caucus states, Sanders needs to go big. Literally. His big test to come, and perhaps last chance to change the largely baked-in delegate and popular vote dynamics favoring Hillary, is to scale up and win a string of big state primaries. What he's been doing simply hasn't accomplished that.
So far, seven of the ten most populous states have held Democratic primaries. (None of the big states holds caucuses.) Hillary has won six of the big seven, usually by big margins. Texas, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina. She lost only in Michigan, and there quite narrowly. The impact of the Sanders victory was magnified greatly because it seemed in first reports that he had overcome a big Hillary lead over the final weekend. In reality, the polling there was very faulty. There was no fast and furious late Sanders surge.
Now there are several big states coming up. California, the biggest of all, coming in June, with New York, the next biggest, next week. In between is the other Big 10 state, Pennsylvania, along with New Jersey, which boasts the 11th largest state population.
Hillary is ahead in all four of those states.
Sanders has shown some movement, but not enough yet.
Indeed, there are signs he is relying on the terrific speech that has brought him so far, to a fault. He went into what should have looked to his campaign like a trap at the New York Daily News editorial board on April 1st without the answers to some fairly obvious questions.
As you see from the transcript and recording of his performance at the New York Daily News, Sanders wasn't able to move much beyond the longtime talking points in his speech to explain how he would carry out his agenda. He didn't seem to know how he would go about breaking up the big banks, for example, or on what authority that would be done. And his answers on pressing geopolitical and national security matters -- such as Isis and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- too often elicited "I haven't thought about it a whole lot" and something distressingly very like it.
Since the Daily News has a very hands-on owner in billionaire Mort Zuckerman, and Zuckerman is one of the most down-the-line pro-Israel folks around and Sanders was the only presidential candidate to skip the AIPAC meeting, Team Bern should have anticipated a grilling. As it was, Sanders came off as a passionate advocate but a not so plausible president. The Daily News ed board even got Sanders to reveal that the Brooklyn native doesn't know how to ride the subway.
After that, Sanders let himself get into a non-serious tactical fight with the Clintons over whether or not she is "qualified" to be president. Playing nasty rhetorical small ball with the Clintons is exactly what they want. You never win doing that.
Sanders may think he has the right big play in his upcoming attendance at a Vatican conference on, among other things, global inequality, just four days before the New York primary. But his message there is already getting muddied up over questions of how, precisely, he came to be invited, and whether or not he will meet privately with Pope Francis.
This could go well for Sanders, or it could teeter into a wet firecracker stunt. There are just too many factors he and his campaign can't control.
Better to do what he can control, and that is a refurbished message that speaks to changed circumstances.
And even then, it's hard to see him cutting much into Hillary's huge popular vote and delegate leads.
But if he can win most of the big remaining states, keeps on raising enormous amounts of money from what looks like the greatest popular fundraising base in American political history, and takes a national lead in polling over Hillary, he is going to have an even more powerful claim on the Democratic Party than his already extremely impressive showing grants him.
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