I'll tell you now the same thing I told you at this point in 2007. It's that Hillary Clinton is sure-as-shooting going to be the Democratic presidential nominee.
It turned out then that Barack Obama was a more powerful force than I knew. Bernie Sanders this time ... isn't. Surely to goodness he isn't.
But Sanders will have a season, or two.
He's having one now. It may last until January and February. It may fade and come back at that time. But it will inevitably fade. Bernie is no Barry.
Sanders, the self-described socialist Democratic senator from Vermont, fiery and lovably avuncular and unapologetically liberal, has drawn massive crowds in places like Madison, Wisconsin, and Iowa City, Iowa. Those are college towns loaded with white, college-educated and left-inclined Democrats who want to express, at least for now, what they really think, not what would work most effectively for November 2016.
What they really think is that the country needs unabashedly liberal social and economic policies, not politically calibrated and corporate-approved liberal-lite ones.
So, naturally, pundit speculation is rising--credibly--that Sanders could cause problems in Iowa for Clinton, the coasting front-runner who finds herself--yet again--trying to win her party's presidential nomination by pre-emptive anointment, or acclamation, while the true-believing partisan fervor gets directed elsewhere.
Remember that party primaries--and especially party caucuses such as in Iowa that require participants to wade out into the cold and snow of a January night--are not about the general population's mood. They are about the subset of partisan liberal mood, and the intensity thereof.
So here's the relevant polling from Quinnipiac in Iowa: Hillary led Sanders 60-15 in May. She leads him now 52-33.
You see what's happening. The Clinton-Obama-John Edwards dynamic from 2008 is starting to seep in.
Let me remind you, then, of the final order of finish in Iowa in 2008: Obama won. Edwards placed. Hillary came up to show. It was close all around. But that was the order.
No one gets nominated for president without some tension.
Acclamation will not occur until a convention.
Politics abhors a vacuum. And a powerfully favored, pre-emptively invincible presidential nominee leaves a vacuum where a real political contest ought to be.
So let's just put it out there: Sanders could come close to Clinton in Iowa, or even beat her, and then, as a senator from small, neighboring Vermont in a television market shared from Boston, run her a real race in New Hampshire.
The best analysis of the effect of that came the other day to the New York Times from Joe Trippi, a veteran Democratic strategist who ran Howard Dean's campaign in 2004.
"Certainly she could lose Iowa," Trippi said. If that happened, he said, "Mostly they'd just have to ride out the punditry and people with their hair on fire" and go on to capture the nomination.
Precisely. Sanders may have his season. The punditocracy will go ape if he beats Hillary or runs her close in Iowa. But he is not the sustainable political force that Obama was.
Sanders has no legitimate shot at the nomination as the race moves rapidly, week after week, with Hillary exercising her overwhelming financial advantages and Democratic voters in primaries and caucuses across the country realizing that Sanders might have been a fun, liberating, empowering and statement-making choice for Iowans, but is no real choice for them.
Iowa may enjoy a luxury. Subsequent states will bear a responsibility.
The differences between Obama and Sanders are basic and profound. They are legitimacy, credibility, money, organization, mainstream political talent, ability to inspire broadly and staying power. That's all.
What will prove intricate and interesting is whether, when and how Hillary forces will make negative attacks against Sanders.
Her campaign probably won't do that directly. That kind of thing is why you have a filthy-rich super-PAC, not that it would ever coordinate with a campaign. Wink, wink.
Calling her opponent an avowed socialist Democrat might not do Clinton much good in an Iowa Democratic caucus or an immediately ensuing primary in a New England state practically conjoined with his.
But calling Sanders obviously unelectable in an election Democrats must win to save the Affordable Care Act and maintain an occasionally helpful U.S. Supreme Court ... that kind of urgent plea for strategic voting seldom works with primary voters, who most usually act from their hearts, not their brains. But I'm inclined to think it might work in this context, combining the high stakes with the fact that a man calling himself socialist to any extent is not going to win the presidency.
Here is the calculus and theme of Hillary's primary campaign: You love Bernie, but he can't win. You like me all right, and I can win.
In the end she's a cinch, just as I assured at this point for 2008.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/09/2015