The under reporting of the Sanders presidential campaign serves Bernie well
Last edited Sun Sep 13, 2015, 03:56 PM - Edit history (1)
Yes that is counter intuitive, and no the same thing can't be said for O'Malley, Webb and Chaffee, or for most of the Republican candidates for that matter. But unlike those other candidates, Bernie is already highly competitive where it currently matters, in Iowa and New Hampshire, and his national numbers have risen significantly over the course of the Summer. So as the post Labor Day "official" political season kicks off, Bernie Sanders is already established as one of the proverbial "first tier" candidates. Given the cumulative amount of and the dismissive predominant tone of the media attention paid to Sanders so far though it's not that surprising if most Americans haven't noticed it yet. Bucking conventional wisdom here I'll say that puts Sanders in a sweet spot. He represents a rare political phenomena. Sanders is an insurgent populist surging in political polls months before a single vote is cast, who is not on a trajectory to peak too early.
I've been tracking something interesting about how the media has covered Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump over the course of the Summer. In short it goes something like this. While the media and various political talking heads believed that the Trump ascendancy would be relatively short lived, prone to an inevitable bursting from an excess of hot air, the standard talking point was to pair Trump and Sanders as the angry bookends of the Right and Left. The public was said to be reacting emotionally in the heat of the early summer flirting with both men, blowing off some steam prior to actually examining their political viability and credentials in the cooler days of Fall. Trump and Sanders, in essence, were being politely dismissed as "light summer reading" before the school year resumed and the public had to "hit the books" in earnest. During that media phase an establishment agenda was covertly being advanced.
Neither Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders are trusted foot soldiers for the status quo but they have far from similar political personas. Leaving actual policy distinctions aside for the moment, which of course is the media default mode of coverage of presidential races to begin with, the two men could hardly differ more. With Trump it is first and foremost about his personal brand and advancing his belief that America needs him as a "Strong Man" to make us great again. With Sanders it is first and foremost about the issues he thinks matter to most Americans, and advancing the belief that the inherent power of the American people will ensure prosperity to our nation once the choke hold of the oligarchy is broken. As to personal temperament there simply is no resemblance. Trump shoots from the hip at anything and anyone, Sanders is always focused and deliberate. But bracketing Trump and Sanders as angry men at opposing political extremes seemed to neatly solve an establishment political problem; how to make them both go away.
The establishment thought Trump would implode under any real scrutiny so the media gladly offered him enough rope to hang himself. With the media portraying Sanders essentially as Trump's leftist doppelganger, that set Sanders up to become collateral damage when the Trump bubble burst and anger became discredited as a useful attribute of leadership. Except that Labor Day has come and gone now and Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican field while Bernie Sanders climbed to the top of the Iowa and New Hampshire Democratic polls. Meanwhile a curious thing happened in the process. Once it became apparent that The Donald wasn't going anywhere, linking Sanders directly to Trump became suddenly less attractive. It began looking like the public's attraction to political outsiders might be more than just a summer fling. Sanders was becoming an even more potent threat to the status quo as his exposure grew so they changed tack, trying to keep him out of the spotlight to stunt his momentum, and turned to Plan B; as in B for Biden.
The Vice President is an acknowledged national leader with consistently held beliefs. In short he's no one's puppet. Biden's long standing political aspirations are his own and are not driven by a need to undercut any momentum Bernie Sanders had been building. But the media needed an alternative narrative to be dismissive of Bernie Sanders with. Rather than directly acknowledge the political power of Bernie's deeply held convictions, they focused on Hillary Clinton's alleged weakness instead with the implicit message that ordinary Democrats were turning away from Clinton rather than turning toward Sanders to explain Sander's increasing political traction. And rather than focus on the resonant substance of the policy message that Sanders espouses, the media turned to constant speculation about whether a “credible” alternative to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination may still lay out there in the form of the current Vice President.
The cutting off of political “oxygen” to a political campaign by minimizing media coverage of it, whether by design or mere happenstance, has been known to throw more nationally prominent politicians than Bernie Sanders into a death spiral that they could not climb out of. There are a number of presidential aspirants on both sides, whose last names are not Trump, Bush, Clinton or Biden, who have been significantly hobbled by the relative lack of publicity, whether mortally so is yet to be seen. Sanders though doesn't fit that mold, he has not been hobbled. Without even a good debate performance under his belt to point to, his trajectory remains upwards. Yet for most Americans Bernie Sanders continues to fly below the radar. This while his fund raising capacity keeps growing and his campaign infrastructure keeps expanding.
Most Americans won't seriously turn to presidential politics until early next year when actual caucuses and primaries begin to loom larger. That is especially true on the Democratic side where it was long believed that Clinton would win the nomination in a cake walk, and where the first Presidential debate still remains weeks away. The public will soon wake up to the undeniable fact that Bernie Sanders is now poised to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, and that he is indeed a serious contender to become the next President of the United States. And when that happens they will want to know a whole lot more about both Sanders and what he stands for. And when that happens, at exactly the right time on the political calendar for a political campaign to really hit its stride, Bernie Sanders will have the full attention of the American voters. And that is exactly what America's establishment has always wanted to avoid.
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You should be a writer 
I just now read your entire post.
It should have more recs and or disagreements and probably would have 10 years ago.
Always appreciate your insight 
The time is right for a change, people need to decide if they want to stick with corporate candidates or take a chance on redirecting our country to a more sustainable future on a variety of levels.
Again thanks!
