The Most Important Question In Decades: Will Bernie Be President?

Netroots Nation happened. One of the guys who runs it, Markos from Daily Kos, told Vox that "Nobody’s excited about Biden. He’s old, tired, and elite." Nor was he there. Except for Elizabeth Warren, Markos' top pick, none of the front-runners showed up this year-- not Bernie on the left, Biden and McKinsey Pete on the right and not even Kamala from the identity politics lane lane. "While attendees have yet to identify which of those three candidates is their favorite, wrote Ella Nilsen and Tara Golshan for Vox, "it was clear the conference’s progressives had identified their enemy: Vice President Joe Biden, the frontrunner in the 2020 field. The weekend even featured a pop-up podcast titled “Why Joe Biden is the least electable major Democrat for president in 2020.”

[W]hile Sanders and Harris were absent, their surrogates and fans certainly were not. The same couldn’t be said for others like South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg or Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), however.

“You had the Buttigieg boomlet earlier this year and you might have thought that might have continued into a place like this, but it really hasn’t,” Neil Sroka, a spokesperson for progressive political action committee Democracy For America, said. “What’s pretty clear is it’s Bernie, it’s Warren, and maybe it’s Kamala.”

...Seven months from when the first 2020 voters have a say in the Democratic primary in Iowa, progressives are winnowing down a deep field of candidates in a party that’s increasingly turned toward more left-wing ideals-- from public health care to wealth taxes and free college proposals.

But at Netroots, only three names had any meaningful energy behind them: Sanders, Harris, and, of course, Warren.

Across the street from the Netroots convention on Thursday, Sanders’s campaign co-chair Nina Turner took the stage at a protest outside Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital, a local institution that’s set to shutter in coming weeks. Among the protest’s attendees were local activists, physicians, and Netroots attendees showing solidarity with the movement. Sanders himself wasn’t in attendance, but it was a show of the political revolution he’s been trying to build a campaign around.

“With these hands we will save Hahnemann hospital, and with these hands we will elect Sen. Bernie Sanders as the next president of the United States of America,” Turner said to a crowd with raised arms chanting “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.” Sanders is scheduled to rally at the hospital Monday.

...Biden’s lead in the polls means progressive activists are approaching their choices in the primary with some caution.

“I like both of them-- Bernie and Warren-- I trust both of them. Ultimately, it will be where are they in January or February of next year?” Sroka said. “Who is up and who is down?”

...Progressives may not know exactly who they want to be the Democratic nominee in 2020, but they know who they don’t want: Joe Biden.

Some activists [keyword: "Some"] at Netroots conceded they would support Biden in a general election if they had no other choice. But as far as exciting the base at Netroots, Biden seemed to represent everything attendees disdain, particularly because, despite clearly trying to capitalize on his ties to Obama’s progressive brand, Biden hasn’t made an effort to cultivate a progressive base.

“Biden is using a strategy of running out the clock,” said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party. “There’s a number of forums and spaces he could place himself in, in order to be scrutinized by the grassroots. Our job is not to coronate the person that the Third Way and elite media decision-makers think is most electable.”

“Biden’s campaign headquarters is four blocks away, and the only person I have seen come here is his digital guy,” Sroka said. “The fact that they are not even working to try and make the argument to this community is the sign of a campaign that doesn’t get where the future of the party is.”

The Biden campaign would not comment on their presence at the conference.

Underscoring the theme of there being a top-tier group of three, some Netroots attendees were gifted a six-pack of craft beers by event organizers. Warren, Sanders, and Harris were the only presidential candidates with a beer named after them: There was the “Professor Warren Perfect Plan Pale Ale” (a “quasi-session beer”), the “Kamala’s California Common” (a lager), and the “Bernie’s Barleywine” (“Gritty’s favorite beer”).

Joe Biden and the group of other moderate white men running for president, however, were symbolized by the “Average Centrist White Guy Cream Ale”-- “pale and not strong,” according to the beer guide handed out to attendees.

While progressives are only one segment of the Democratic electorate, Biden, and other candidates Netroots attendees were less than enthused about, could use their support. Particularly as it was progressives who helped energize the party’s base ahead of the 2018 midterm elections that saw Democrats retake the House of Representatives.

Progressives have grown sick and tired with the unabashedly biased way the corporate media covers Bernie and his campaign. As we noted last week, the NY Times coverage of the campaign is headed by rot-gut Wall Street shill, Sydney Ember, whose every piece reads like unadulterated Biden propaganda. Monday morning, Michael Calderone, posted a piece about that widespread bias for Politico readers. Bernie's campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, told Calderone that some reporters, "attempt to hide their disdain and masquerade their commentary behind purported straight pieces that amount to seeing everything as a 'bad news for Bernie' moment."... "If Bernie Sanders’ team had its way," wrote Calderone, "every reporter covering the Vermont senator would put out a tweet disclosing their unvarnished, personal feelings about the candidate." By the way, that ActBlue thermometer on the right? That's so you can contribute to Bernie's campaign if you want to. Just click on it.

It’s not going to happen, but campaign manager Faiz Shakir thinks he knows what it would reveal anyway.

"This isn't intended to be a sweeping generalization of all journalists,” he told Politico, “but there are a healthy number who just find Bernie annoying, discount his seriousness, and wish his supporters and movement would just go away.”

In the 2016 Democratic primary, Sanders’ complaint about the media was that he was ignored, especially early in the campaign, while a phalanx of reporters trailed Hillary Clinton and cable networks turned live to Donald Trump’s raucous rallies.

Now, he’s not having trouble getting airtime, giving interviews in just the last week on ABC, NBC, MSNBC and CNN. Among the Democratic field, Sanders ranks behind only Vice President Joe Biden in mentions in traditional news outlets this year, according to an analysis by global media and intelligence company Meltwater.

In the 2020 campaign, his team’s frustration has morphed, centering on what they see as excessively negative stories and dismissive commentary. Even though he’s consistently near the top in the polls, Sanders’ staff thinks pundits write off his chances. And they’re unusually vocal in calling out coverage they dislike on Twitter and on the media channels they’ve created in-house, fueling frustration once again among the senator’s supporters about whether he’s getting a fair shot at the White House.



On Sanders’ live-streaming show, The 99, three campaign staffers spent more than an hour last week discussing what they perceive as media bias, such as the tendency to focus on the shiny and salacious rather than Sanders’ decades-long advocacy for the poor and working class. “Standing up on these issues over 40 years is not new and exciting for people,” said chief of staff Ari Rabin-Havt.

...Rabin-Havt told POLITICO there’s something akin to a language barrier between political journalists and the campaign.

“They just will never buy that we don’t think it’s a game,” he said.

Sanders hosted a cable access show in the 1980s, and many of his campaign staffers have backgrounds at progressive news outlets-- Shakir was founding editor of ThinkProgress, Rabin-Havt served as executive vice president at Media Matters, Sirota wrote for The Guardian, and national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray was an editor at The Intercept.

They all share a skepticism of the “corporate media.” “The media work for huge multinational corporations,” Sanders told Rolling Stone last month, adding that “anyone with my agenda is going to attract a lot of opposition.”

He doesn’t have much patience for reporters who want him to talk about anything other than that agenda. Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos kicked off an interview Thursday by telling Sanders that voters want to know more about him as a person.

Sanders didn’t take the bait. Americans “have a right” to know about a person running for president, Sanders acknowledged, but “sometimes the media goes overboard on that and does not pay enough attention to what you are trying to do to transform the country."

On Sunday, he said on NBC’s Meet the Press” that he had no plans to change his approach.

“When the poor get richer and the rich get poorer, when all of our people have healthcare as a right, when we are leading the world in the fight against climate change, you know what? I will change what I am saying,” Sanders said.