Bernie Sanders needs some better answers

Let me say upfront that of all the announced 2016 candidates, I identify most closely with Bernie Sanders at this point. I know this because I am a reasonably thoughtful adult human being who is pretty well-informed about politics and about my own political preferences, and also because every time I take one of those dumb internet “which candidate should I vote for?” quizzes, I get Sanders. So before any Sanders supporters start yelling at me for insufficient whatever to the cause, please bear this in mind.

The Sanders campaign, it’s safe to say, has surpassed anybody’s expectations, even though we’re just a couple of months into the approximately (according to mathematicians I’ve spoken with) 742 year long 2016 campaign cycle. That a guy who describes himself as a “Democratic Socialist” is polling in double digits in a Democratic primary and is winning or tying hypothetical general election matchups in 21st century America is frankly stunning to me. He’s obviously still polling well behind Hillary Clinton, but RCP’s average has him only 15 points behind her in New Hampshire, which is just close enough to matter. To be fair he’s got kind of a home field advantage in New Hampshire, and the polls that have him closest to Clinton there include an undeclared candidate (Joe Biden) in the mix, but did anybody think Bernie Sanders would ever be within 20 points of Clinton in any poll average, at all? His left wing (far more left wing than is usually permissible in national US politics) message appears to be resonating with people, and it doesn’t hurt that the campaign team working for his party’s front-runner is more interested in complaining about how one newspaper is covering her than they are in actually running for office.

(Yes, I understand that The New York Times screwed that story up monumentally, I realize that the NYT has a pattern of pulling this kind of crap with the Clintons, I understand that it’s important to work the refs this early in the process, and believe me, I get that the NYT can outright suck a lot of the time, particularly on certain beats where it seems to have an institutional bias that colors its reporting. I really get it. But the Times story, its corrections, and the Clinton campaign’s response are pretty much the only things for which Hillary Clinton has been in the news over the past week or so, and that’s not good for your campaign no matter who you are or what the circumstances might be. Time to move on to something else.)

As Sanders’ national profile rises, it’s natural that he’s going to start receiving more scrutiny. Over the past couple of weeks it’s become clear that he and his team need to work on developing better answers to questions that go beyond the economic/inequality issues that are at the core of his message. This first became apparent at the Netroots Nation conference on July 18, where Sanders struggled to respond to an angry crowd of “Black Lives Matter” protesters who clearly wanted to hear something about what a President Sanders would do for racial justice. They didn’t want to hear Sanders try to subsume their concerns into his economic message, which is entirely fair; racial inequality is related to economic inequality, but the two are most definitely not the same thing. Sanders has a good civil rights record, and he had just watched the same crowd take Martin O’Malley to task on the same issue (O’Malley handled it worse in the moment, but his campaign’s damage control afterward was better than Sanders’), so it’s somewhat baffling that he couldn’t handle that situation better than he did.

Then came Sanders’ interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, which was published on Tuesday. Now, I realize that understanding the actual details of foreign policy (at least when it doesn’t involve the US military) is a niche issue in presidential campaigns, but Sanders unfortunately hand-waved a lot of Klein’s foreign policy questions. Vox’s Dylan Matthews later criticized Sanders for not embracing an open borders immigration policy when Klein asked him about it, which is partly fair (there’s some research suggesting that open borders would be better for everybody, here and abroad, and it seems more consistent with Sanders’ domestic message on inequality) and partly unfair (for one thing, the benefit of open borders is still up for debate, and for another, Matthews is singling Sanders out for not taking a position that no other candidate would take either). Sanders’ immigration position is pretty consistent with an older generation (Sanders is 73, after all) left-labor stance on the topic, which may not be righteous and may even be a political liability nowadays, but it’s at least a coherent position.

On the other hand, you would like to imagine that Sanders could have offered a better answer for the question “what can we do about global inequality” than this:

What you do is understand there’s been a huge redistribution of wealth in the last 30 years from the middle class to the top tenth of 1 percent. The other thing that you understand globally is a horrendous imbalance in terms of wealth in the world. As I mentioned earlier, the top 1 percent will own more than the bottom 99 percent in a year or so. That’s absurd. That takes you to programs like the IMF and so forth and so on.

But I think what we need to be doing as a global economy is making sure that people in poor countries have decent-paying jobs, have education, have health care, have nutrition for their people. That is a moral responsibility, but you don’t do that, as some would suggest, by lowering the standard of American workers, which has already gone down very significantly.

“Programs like the IMF and so forth and so on” is not an answer to the problem of ameliorating global inequality, and the reason I know this is because the IMF was founded in 1945 and, although it’s talked a good game, over the past 70 years it’s done far more to kick old people off of their pensions than it has to address inequality in any way. Sanders is right that we shouldn’t be trying to make workers in other countries better off by making American workers worse off, but it would be nice if he could address the particulars on this topic a little more thoughtfully.

Then there was this exchange in the interview, which frankly makes Sanders seem weak on the question of whether he’s competent to manage America’s foreign policy (something that is not a niche issue in presidential campaigns):

Ezra Klein

I want to make a turn to foreign policy. Is there a particular foreign policy school of thought you ascribe to? Do you describe yourself as a realist or a democratic socialist?

Bernie Sanders

I don’t know what that means. I trust we’re all realists.

Yeah, let’s talk about that.

Somebody in the Sanders campaign would do well to skim an introductory International Relations textbook and then brief the Senator on it. “We’re” definitely not “all realists,” at least not as “realism” is defined in this context (where it has a very specific meaning). It physically pains me to write this, but if Sarah Palin answered that question the way Bernie Sanders did, all us lefties would be pointing and chortling at how inept she sounded. I don’t think it’s unfair to expect a would-be president to understand the most basic IR theories and to be able to situate his own worldview within that framework.

What makes this a little maddening is that Sanders actually gives some good answers in this interview on specific questions about what his foreign policy would look like (very high bar for military action, international engagement to solve humanitarian problems, more economic aid, etc.) that show he’s thought about this stuff. He subtly shifted Klein’s question about economic competition with China and India into a great response on climate change, the biggest long-term threat that we all face and an area where international cooperation is absolutely imperative. He just didn’t have an answer when Klein asked him to articulate an overarching theme, and he really kind of needs one. That seems to be a bit of a problem for his campaign overall.

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