What the Pundits and Experts Fail to Understand about the Bernie Sanders Phenomenon

[Demeter]

http://www.secularnirvanablog.com/what-the-pundits-and-experts-fail-to-understand-about-the-bernie-sanders-phenomenon/

... all of the political experts and pundits are uniform and unyielding in their response – “Bernie Sanders can’t win.” This seemingly unshakable position among experts filters their interpretation of the data, and has already yielded some embarrassing positions...Turn on CNN, MSNBC, or FOX and the narrative is basically the same – they are all very surprised by his success, but still very sure he can’t win. So what exactly, if anything, are the experts missing? The answer is actually rather simple, but its implications are profound. The reason political experts and models have failed to predict the rise of Bernie Sanders is that he is not playing by the established rules of the game.

**********

Let’s take for example the issue of campaign finance. If there is one political topic in which you can find bipartisan agreement among most Americans, it is the disastrous effects of money in politics. Both republicans and democrats understand that the current system in the United States essentially amounts to legalized bribery, and they aren’t happy about it. Yet politicians and pundits proudly tout the massive sums raised by each Super PAC as a statistical strength. And its true, if your Super PAC raises $60 million and mine raises $40 million, by all accounts you have a $20 million dollar advantage. But what happens when a candidate who’s Super PAC raised say $50 million goes up against a Sanders campaign which raised $15 million dollars in its first quarter without a Super PAC and an average donation of $33.51?

That is a much more complicated question, and it has numerous components. First the obvious, being the only candidate without a Super PAC will give Sanders an incredible favorability boost (and yes, even Trump has a Super PAC). And what about the balancing act that political favorites like Clinton and Bush have to find between donors and average voters? Normally all the participants are walking the same tight rope, Hillary has her backers and Bush has his (and often times they are the same). Under those conditions the best acrobat has an advantage, the most charismatic and efficient question “handler” (aka the best spin doctor) will win the race.

So the pundits look at Sanders, a man who is clearly not a political acrobat, and conclude he couldn’t possibly win the tight-rope race. But of course Sanders isn’t walking a tight-rope, he’s competing on foot. So we shouldn’t be asking ourselves who is faster between Clinton and Sanders, that is what the pundits are doing and it is precisely why they keep getting it wrong. The real question is can she walk a tight-rope faster than Bernie can run on the ground? I suspect some Clinton supporters will take issue with that claim but I would suggest they take a good look at how she has had to tiptoe around issues like the Trans Pacific Partnership, Keystone XL, and Glass-Steagall. It is also a fact that in a post-recession America, Wall Street and corporate regulation will be a topic of debate in the democratic primaries. The fact that Clinton’s largest campaign contributors are companies like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley is not an irrelevant factor. If you don’t think this will create difficulties for Clinton that Sanders will not have, you are vastly underestimating the influence donors have over candidates (you can see her top 20 contributors here). Sanders has and will continue to have an unparalleled freedom to speak his mind on each and every issue, a trait which will continue to captivate an electorate starving for political honesty and transparency. This is an advantage that he has not only over the democratic candidates, but all the presidential candidates alike...

AND THERE'S SO MUCH MORE! SEE LINK

[cantbeserious]

1. The Pundits Are Paid By The Establishment To Maintain The Statue Quo - They Will Not

Challenge Their Masters.

[jopacaco]

2. Very good explanation

The pundits and their masters don't want to see it and want it all to go away.

[bemildred]

3. The pundits and the experts are not paid to understand, that's not what they do.

What they do is parrot the party(*) line. One could call them newsreaders, except what they read is not news.

(*) - War Party

[Human101948]

5. Upton Sinclair said it well...

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

[bemildred]

7. +1. Or as Henry Miller said in Tropic of Cancer:

For the man in the paddock, whose duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses.
-- Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer"

[Human101948]

8. That's a good one!

You gave me a good laugh!

[Volaris]

9. Lol reminds me of the line from Dark Knight where the mayor is talking to Dent...

'The public likes you, that's the only reason this might fly. But you had better be ready, because they're all going to come after you now....and not just the criminals.Cops, lawyers, judges...ANYONE WHO'S WALLET IS ABOUT TO GET LIGHTER.'

The media gets paid (and paid well) to keep the illusion alive that there's only one game in town. Campaign Sanders destroys that narrative, so hell yea they're afraid.

They should be. Fuck em.

[wilsonbooks]

4. The concluding paragraph

Bernie Sanders is not running a political campaign, he has instead become the leader of a movement whose message transcends the personality of the candidate. It is the American electorate’s response to decades of corrupt campaign financing, divisive politics, and continuous foreign interventions and war. While the other candidates are playing at politics, Bernie Sanders is making history… its a completely different game.

[NorthCarolina]

6. She will only have to "tiptoe around issues like the Trans Pacific Partnership,

Keystone XL, and Glass-Steagal" in the primaries. They will cease to be an issue when competing against politically like minded GOP candidates who would not challenge her positions on them as they also represent their own positions. That's when the issues will be all Benghazi, and all emailGate, all the time...and she can deal with that happily, as it is far better than having to defend policy that is 180 degrees from public sentiment.