In retrospect, the May 2016 mobilization of the “unvetted” argument, deployed overwhelmingly by Clinton loyalists and centrist opponents of Sanders’s ideas, looks less like a claim grounded in actual press coverage and more like a polemical response to Sanders’s persistent popularity. Since the 2016 primary, which made Sanders a national figure and the symbolic leader of a left resurgence, coverage has multiplied exponentially.
A
Washington Post story on Sanders’s 1988 honeymoon in the USSR launched a press whirlwind. The center-left framing of both the Democratic Party establishment as well as much of the political press has had a strong hand in shaping the information voters have received about Sanders—pushed not only by pundits but by debate moderators and moderate candidates like Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar. Debate moderators challenged Sanders on the viability of a socialist candidate in June 2019 and again in September 2019, and his opponents joined in the ribbing. A nearly identical, wagon-circling discussion of health care policy has featured in all of the Democratic debates thus far, usually on terrain highly favorable to the moderate candidates. “Your campaign proposals would double federal spending over the next decade at an unprecedented level of spending not seen since World War II,” a CNN moderator
asked Sanders on January 14. “How would you keep your plans from bankrupting the country?” The press relentlessly hammered Elizabeth Warren on the financing for her Medicare for All plan and hammered Sanders for refusing to put numbers on his, indifferent to his view that campaign plans are statements of moral principle, not scorable policies.
Since Warren’s collapse in the polls that followed scrutiny of her Medicare for All plan—and her furtive attempt to satisfy the centrists’ demands for an explanation as to how the plan would be paid for—it has become conventional wisdom among pundits and television-paid political operatives that Sanders hasn’t received the same level of scrutiny. “The ‘likability’ of self-confessed yeller and grumpy guy Bernie Sanders never gets discussed,”
Washington Post Never-Trump conservative
Jennifer Rubin wrote on January 3. “When will he go through the vetting we expect of top-tier candidates?” Consultant and former Bill Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart conceded that there had been much discussion of Medicare for All but
argued that “there has been far too little discussion of Sanders’s 50-year record,” and that “one of the leading candidates for the nomination has largely escaped the kind of scrutiny his opponents have been put through.”
Lockhart’s list of issues “unknown to most primary voters”—Sanders’s past positions on gun control, his anti-imperialist critique of American foreign policy, the “socialist” label—were all litigated extensively in 2016—circulating in Republican attacks on Sanders and other left Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ever since. These have also been widely echoed by Democratic Party insiders. “I think there are a number of people who are concerned that Bernie Sanders has not been fully vetted in this current field the way that other candidates have,” former Clinton staffer Zac Petkanas
told CNN. “And there are a lot of unknowns about him.” These “unknowns” remained unspecified, but the emerging conventional wisdom seeped into even straight news reporting: On the eve of the January debate,
The Hill reported that “For much of the race, and despite polling showing him nipping at Biden’s heels for the lead in national surveys, [Sanders] has been a virtual afterthought.”
Now, as new polls confirm his
rise to front-runner status in Iowa and New Hampshire and a
tentative leveling with Biden at the national level, Sanders’s opponents
have begun to attack him directly, and the media knives have come out in the form of try-hard opposition research and an intensification of the “unvetted” argument, with Never-Trump conservatives again playing a starring role in the chorus. Late last week,
The Daily Beast unearthed video of Sanders saying low-wage workers were “slaves” and, grasping for relevance, declared that “newly unearthed baggage from his own decades-long political career could call his own past statements and judgment into question.”
Democratic operatives like Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, an obsessive and conspiratorial Sanders opponent on social media, seized on a Sanders endorsement from the podcaster Joe Rogan to
upbraid Sanders for accepting support from a figure with noxious views on identity issues. That argument was reprised by yet another Never-Trump conservative,
Atlantic columnist David Frum, who laid out Rogan’s history of anti-transgender comments as an introduction to his argument that “Bernie Sanders is a fragile candidate” who “has never fought a race where he had to face serious personal scrutiny.” (All this as prelude to Frum’s bizarre argument that, actually, Sanders’s supposed insensitivity to identity was
good, something Democrats should learn from in the future.)
Meanwhile, the January 27 front page of
The New York Times resurrected the 2016 specter of Sanders’s “internet army,” which has the gall to criticize other candidates and allegedly visit harassment on anyone who dares to criticize its candidate.
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin quickly weaponized it for her anti-Sanders crusade,
writing, “Sanders’s holier-than-thou ethos often manifests itself in refusal to answer ordinary, utterly appropriate questions.”
Months of polling since the 2020 race began have overwhelmingly shown several Democratic candidates comfortably beating Trump in the general election, with Biden and Sanders as the reliable top two. In well over 50
national head-to-head polls conducted throughout the primary Sanders beats Trump in all but four. To his credit, Biden has an even stronger lead over Trump, and a few polls in states beyond Iowa and New Hampshire, where data is sparse, also show Biden winning with larger margins. Reasonable people can disagree about what the general election battle would look like, especially before any primary voting has actually taken place. But the perception of a candidate’s strength against Trump is, at this point, a form of tea-leaf reading inevitably reinforced by ideological priors.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that the narrative of “unvetted Bernie Sanders” functions, just as it did in 2016, as a preemptive attack-response by his ideological opponents within the Democratic Party—and a few conservative opportunists on the margins—to his mounting success in the polls. There’s no telling the extent to which history may repeat itself. How many more stories retreading his Vermont career will be published? How many videos from the 1980s of him saying almost exactly what he says today will be resurfaced? How many more denunciations of the costs and practical impossibility of Medicare for All shall we endure? How many more reminders that he’s a socialist? How many more fixations on outlier polls to predict doom at the hands of moderate suburban voters? What would it take for him to finally be considered “vetted”? As long as he’s at the front of the pack, it appears that nothing will ever be enough.
