Smearing Bernie

On Friday night, Ryan Grim broke a fascinating piece of news. It isn't news to anyone who's been reading DWT for the last 12 months that Elizabeth Warren was the most likely Bernie running mate, despite two campaign staffs that are hostile to each other. But what Grim reported was that Bernie was considering Elizabeth for two jobs: VP and treasury secretary... at the same time. They researched if it is constitutional and found that it is. Great! And then she can be president for two terms after him. 12 or 16 years of a progressive executive brand-- just what we need after 4 years of a fascistic one.

But then came the Great Smear Meagan Day called it a manufactured narrative that exemplifies "how the media repeats cynical, bad-faith attacks until they get seen as fact." Pundits, she wrote, are whispering that "a Sanders victory would mean 'another misogynist as president.' These broad characterizations will be repeated ad nauseam until nobody even remembers where they came from. They will be “obviously true” because they’re things everybody knows, and everybody will know them because they’re obviously true. If ugly, baseless accusations like these aren’t confronted with unequivocal pushback from the very outset, they have a tendency to snowball. This is exactly how the absurd and blatantly false claim that Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of an 'antisemite army' in the Labour Party became a kind of common sense in the United Kingdom."

One of the most bitter and furious of the vast MSNBC contingent of Bernie haters...

This isn't our first rodeo. We’ve seen tendentious and cynical allegations of personal misogyny leveled at Sanders before, notably during his previous presidential run against Hillary Clinton. When Sanders told Clinton that the gun control debate will not be resolved by people shouting at those they disagree with, she suggested that Sanders has a problem with women speaking out. When he wagged his finger as he asserted that single-payer is the only way to realize health care as a universal right, his finger-wagging was condemned as sexist.

Over time, people stopped being able to recall these specific incidents, if they ever caught wind of them at all. “Bernie’s sexist” was just a feeling many people had, and they didn’t know where it came from. This is how baseless rumors harden into consensus. It’s how we ended up with MSNBC analysts saying that “Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl. I can’t even identify for you what exactly it is. But I see him as sort of a not pro-woman candidate.”

The only way to deal with such distortions is to push back with the truth.

In this case, the truth is this: whether or not it was originally her idea to do so, Warren consciously chose to weaponize unverifiable rumors about the content of a private conversation between her and Sanders in order to damage him in the eleventh hour, as he was rising in the polls and she was falling. She was intentionally ambiguous in a way that encouraged the worst possible interpretation of Sanders’s contribution to their conversation. She got a big applause at the debate by sparring with a fictitious version of Sanders who doesn’t believe women can win presidential elections

And now we have media figures implicitly comparing whatever Sanders said to Warren to sexual assault, and suggesting that skepticism of her account is tantamount to disbelieving a rape survivor-- cowing people into silence about what very plainly transpired before all our eyes.

Sanders’s campaign is on the rise. If we begin to see an uptick in chatter about his supposed misogyny, we shouldn’t be surprised. And we shouldn’t let it slide, either. If we hear someone say that Bernie Sanders doesn’t think a woman can be president, we should recount this story to them. We should help them understand that it’s all a game of telephone, and that there’s too much at stake to keep playing.

Morning consult just announced the most popular and the least popular senators again, as they do every year. Every year Bernie has been the most popular senator within his state (65%)-- and he is again this year. Lucky for him Joy Reid and the rest of the Comcast hate squad don't live in Vermont! Here are the approvals for all the senators who ventured out onto the presidential candidates' stage this cycle:

Bernie- 65%
Amy Klobuchar- 56%
Elizabeth Warren- 50%
Sherrod Brown- 46%
Cory Booker- 45%
Kirsten Gillibrand- 42%
Kamala Harris- 41%
Michael Bennet- 39%