http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-electability-spin-machine-20160202?page=4


But if you want maximal spin, just raw, thick tar spin, look to the Democratic Party and a legion of electability-policing flunkies.

What Bernie Sanders did Monday night was incredible. Until very recently, even a good showing would have sufficed to confirm his candidacy's seriousness, and any characterization of his loss as critical merely demonstrates how rapidly the goalposts can be moved when narratives need to be upheld.

At the start of last May, he was 54 points behind in Iowa to Hillary Clinton, a frontrunner with the most open path to the eventual nomination in primary history. Sanders is a cranky old Jewish man from a tiny state and proudly considers himself a socialist, which in the rarified air of Beltway Centrism and in the swamp-gas of an America that still thinks the Cold War can be lost at any moment is somehow a more revolting word than "pederast."

With the exception of a few pro-Biden holdouts, almost the entirety of the Democratic Party establishment and the big money lined up behind his opponent, including veteran organizers and advisors. The Democratic Party chair scheduled a tiny number of debates on broadcast evenings so hostile to reaching a mass audience that their only purpose must have been minimizing exposing the electorate to any names that aren't Hillary Clinton's. Against this apparatus, Sanders decided to refuse to use super PAC money.


Meanwhile, every dead-eyed hack angling for a gig taking "Socks II" for walkies in the new Clinton administration has responded to Sanders' rising popularity with the Clinton-endorsement equivalent of Marge Simpson holding up her excised frontal lobe in a jar and groaning, "It's bliiiiiiiiiiiissssss."


You have Ezra Klein really taking it to some bozo named Ezra Klein over Sanders' health care plan. Along with assists from The Atlantic and The New Republic, Salon has gone balls-to-the-wall stupid peddling a mythic creature named the Bernie Bro whose existence is about as well documented as Prester John's.


The most substantial claim is that Bernie Sanders has some fans on the Internet who are assholes. Which puts him in exclusive company with literally everything. The same thinkfluencers who argue that Bernie Sanders needs to take personal responsibility for people he's never met being rude to journalists on the Internet (who are already berated and ridiculed by fans of everything else) are also filling column inches by doing the human-dignity equivalent of reaching a whole arm through a buzzing garbage disposal to latch onto yet another slime-slicked take festering in the U-bend and explaining why Hillary Clinton does not need to explain anything further. She doesn't need to justify that Iraq War vote again, or the destabilization of Libya, or that desire to go hog wild in Syria, or that 1990s support for welfare reform that hit women hardest, or those 1990s tough-on-crime policies she endorsed along with private prisons, or those speaking fees at Goldman Sachs or that opposition to reinstating Glass-Steagall.

Against this habitual sycophancy, you have a 24-hour news and legacy media structure that has consistently pushed the "conventional wisdom says that a socialist like Bernie Sanders can't win" line to hammer home the message that Bernie Sanders can't win underneath a veneer of objectivity. It's not advocacy, after all, if you're only saying what everybody thinks. Even if your job is literally to help shape how everybody thinks.


Against all that, Bernie Sanders fighting Clinton to an essential draw in a state in which his opponent held a huge advantage in terms of local political operators and influencers is nothing short of extraordinary. Which, combined with Sanders' 18-point lead in New Hampshire, means it's time to crank up the RPMs on the spin cycle fast enough to rip apart space-time.

You will hear that Sanders can't win South Carolina because black voters love Hillary Clinton, without the qualifier that black voters largely don't know who Bernie Sanders is. You will hear the Clinton team again attack universal health care from the right, scaremongering about taxes while ignoring the savings people would enjoy from no longer paying health insurance premiums. You will hear Chelsea Clinton or some other mouthpiece again claim that Bernie Sanders — the guy who wants to give Medicare to everybody — is going to take away everybody's health care.

You will see Clinton wrap herself in the mantle of Obama's legacy not only to appeal to black voters but to obfuscate her record with that community. Embracing Obama obscures her support for her husband's welfare reform and tough-on-crime policies that harmed that community. It obscures that his first presidential bid is remembered for a "Sister Souljah moment" that amounted to a repudiation of Jesse Jackson, literally sitting next to him on the dais, and a reassurance of the white audience "right there in room" that they were good white people. And it helps to wipe the memory of Bill embarrassing himself in front of the black community in 2008 while Hillary herself challenged Barack Obama's electability because white people wouldn't vote for him.

This isn't just another leg in the 44-year-old Democratic-hack sprint away from McGovern suddenly made more frantic by Bernie Sanders' visage haunting them from the left, like George returned to life to remind them of their sins. This is a long low road stretching toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, un-illuminated by any purpose greater than the tautological — that we use electability to win elections, that we win elections by being electable, that we cannot fail to be victorious, that we must be victorious for we cannot fail.

This is the dim path where a career pro-gay-rights feminist looms as a misogynist and an enemy to identity politics because some people with egg avatars sent some tweets. Where a candidate who personally earned millions in speeches and whose campaigns were significantly funded by Wall Street firms that nearly broke the world is equivalent to the candidate whose whole campaign opposes them because, apparently, he took money from a nurses' union. Where a legitimate candidate of the working class will be hammered over and over in an authenticity battle with a campaign that weekly releases some "How do you do, fellow kids?" embarrassment and whose Instagram manager is a woman with her own HBO series. Where the real progressive candidate has already pledged not to raise any middle-class taxes and once called people on welfare deadbeats.

This is the claustrophobic world of small meaning that is born when everyone knows the only idea you have to aspire to is the reaffirmation that the Republicans are worse. It's the logic that says that nothing we do to each other in this room — that nothing we do anywhere — matters when we know there's a monster behind the door. It is a mean and interminable partnership with nihilism that will get much worse before it gets better, and no one will blame you if you fill your pockets with rocks and walk into the sea.

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