by ADAM JOHNSON
Slate‘s William Saletan (4/26/16) told Democrats to ignore polls showing that Sanders had a better chance than Clinton of beating Trump.
There was a debate last spring, when the Sanders/Clinton race was at its most heated, as to whether Bernie Sanders’ consistently out-polling Hillary Clinton was to be taken as a serious consideration in favor of his nomination. Before, during and after the race was competitive, this was the Vermont senator’s strongest argument: He was out-polling Trump in the general election by an average of 10 or so points, whereas Clinton was only slightly ahead. His favorables were also much higher, often with a spread as much as 25 points.
Never mind, the pundits said—Clinton had been “vetted” and Sanders had not:
- “Republicans hate Hillary, Democrats love Hillary and independents are unsure. It may well be that Hillary Clinton has an image problem that she needs to work on, but it’s pretty much the same image problem she’s had forever.” —Kevin Drum (Mother Jones, 9/15/15)
- “All politicians get battered the more they’re known. Maybe that won’t happen to Bernie, but I think it will…. [Sanders] hasn’t spent 25 years in the spotlight being trashed by what I would also call the vast right-wing conspiracy.” — The Nation’s Joan Walsh (WNYC, 3/1/16)
- It’s true that Sanders does better than Clinton in hypothetical matchups against the Republicans…. But that’s not because Sanders is the stronger nominee. It’s because Republicans haven’t yet trashed him the way they’ve trashed Clinton. Once they do, his advantage over her would disappear. —William Saletan (Slate, 4/26/16)
- “It is true, as Sanders pointed out, that polls show him doing better than Clinton against Republicans in November. But it is also true that Clinton has not hit Sanders with a single negative ad. Not one.” — Michelle Goldberg (Slate, 5/2/16) [This statement was false, by the way.]
- “We in media haven’t told you much about Sanders. Esp. anything negative.” MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid (Twitter, 5/24/16)
These arguments suffered from two major problems:
1) As we noted in May (FAIR.org, 5/25/16), Sanders had, demonstrably, been vetted. Despite the many pundits cleverly framing the issue as “GOP attacks”, Sanders had been thoroughly vetted by the establishment center, in equally hostile terms. He’d been grilled about his socialism in the primary debates nine times, been subject to numerous attack ads by Clinton SuperPACs, had a half-dozen negative editorials in the Washington Post, received nonstop criticism from Vox, Slate, New York Magazine and MSNBC.
High-profile pro-Clinton pundits such as Joan Walsh, Joy Ann Reid, Jonathan Capehart, Jonathan Chait and others routinely took to social media to spin for Clinton and dismiss Sanders, and all major papers–New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, New York Daily News, LA Times, Las Vegas Sun and Rolling Stone—endorsed Clinton, and in doing so criticized Sanders. To saying nothing of the fact that every article complaining that Sanders had not been vetted, complete with “hypothetical” GOP attacks, were themselves a form of vetting.
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