First Rule: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
Second Rule: Never go outside the experience of your people.
Third Rule: Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.

FOURTH RULE: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.


“Rules” in the context of this political campaign is not so much an instruction book as it is a declaration of policy or statement of political identity.

Rule Four plays out as a “Gotcha!” moment; it is meant to shame, to stop momentum; to disparage. It’s a tactic that can be overwhelmingly effective or drawn out to its nastiest extreme.

Early in the campaign, Sanders chose several hot button areas for this ploy: civil rights, gay rights and same-sex marriage. He and his team hammered Clinton. He portrayed himself as a civil rights activist, marching with Martin Luther King while contrasting her as a “Goldwater Girl” for her brief internship with the GOP conservative. Sanders accused Clinton of coming late to rally for the rights of people of color. Bundled with this was the term “super predators,” used when she was First Lady under Bill Clinton’s term of office. When it came to LGBT and same-sex unions, Sanders vilified the path most politicians have taken – the evolution in acceptance.

Echoes of these attacks are still murmuring around the edges. They are brought up periodically to shame Clinton, to cast her as a liar and hypocrite. And, they are meant to anger voting blocs and place Clinton in a defensive mode.

Rule Four can fall apart though. One’s hands must be clean before launching an attack or it will boomerang. So it was in this campaign. Clinton’s team could easily direct those same accusations toward Bernie Sanders.

In the case of civil rights activism, Sanders’ history is weak. He has been rejected by the Congressional Black Caucus and by Rep. John Lewis in particular. Numerous black leaders have endorsed Clinton rather than him, and his three black surrogates – Cornel West, Killer Mike and Nina Turner – have limited appeal. There were also several questionable photos from the 1960s portraying him as a Chicago activist or marching in Selma with MLK. The controversy over identity resulted in a Snopes site, and the messiness of it all detracted from his claims.

But the nightmare for Sanders came after his NY Daily News interview when he admitted to not having studied how big banks would be broken up. |SEE FULL TRANSCRIPT| Clinton wasted no time in attacking him for this in the last CNN debate. Not only did he not follow his rule book, Sanders didn’t know the rules. Clinton, who is a student of Alinsky, tore into him and the effect is still reverberating.

FIFTH RULE: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
SIXTH RULE: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy
SEVENTH RULE: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
NEXT: The Final Rules (8-13)

Hillary’s New York victory brings her to the brink of the Democratic nomination. And she is now the first and only 2016 candidate to surpass ten million total votes. Media, THERE’S your enthusiasm.

With a sweeping NY victory, Hillary Clinton showed them how it’s done, pulling in strong Democratic support from every part of the state and energizing what appears to be a record turnout.

Other than that, no big deal. Other than she’s also been fighting the “no one is excited about Hillary” narrative, the “she’s under-performing” digs from media types, and a long string of vile character attacks from detractors across the political spectrum.

Hillary Clinton can celebrate after having received far more votes in New York than any other Presidential candidate in either party. But while she defeated him in a blowout by more than a quarter million votes, Bernie Sanders was the second place New York finisher in either party. In fact Sanders defeated Donald Trump by nearly a quarter million votes in his own right. Almost bizarrely, Hillary received more votes in New York than all republican candidates combined. What kind of math is going on here?

It’s a reminder that even though Donald Trump dominated the New York republican primary contest, he’s not particularly popular there. New York is a blue state that will go to the Democratic Party in the general election in November handily. Even though Ted Cruz did horrendously with just 123,000 votes in the state, finishing behind sideshow candidate John Kasich, it turns out Trump didn’t do particularly well either. His turnout of 518,000 votes was dominant on a percentage basis but not at all inspiring. In fact Trump lost his home base of Manhattan by about five percent to Kasich. However, the real story here is Hillary Clinton’s utter dominance.

Hillary already led Bernie Sanders by around 2.4 million votes nationwide, a tally which now climbs to around 2.7 million votes. Sanders had a strong night against the republicans, tallying 752,000 votes. But it turns out that Clinton and her 1.03 million votes are more than Trump, Kasich and Cruz received combined.

Except….he’s really not. As Sanders notes, he caucuses with the Democrats and has a committee appointment given to him by the Democrats, but he isn’t a Democrat. He could have run for the senate as a Democrat. No one was stopping him running as a Democrat. His refusal to was a freely made choice and he made it for a reason. The odds are that Sanders returns right back to being an independent the second he loses the nomination.

The Sanders campaign has been minimizing his status as a non-Democrat for months now, and, by and large, the Clinton campaign has been hands off about it, letting Sanders portray his non-Democratic status as a whimsy instead of a serious choice to distance himself from the party. But, as the race has intensified going into the New York primary, Clinton has decided to make more of an issue of it.

“He’s a relatively new Democrat, and, in fact, I’m not even sure he is one,” Clinton said on MSNBC earlier this month. “He’s running as one. So I don’t know quite how to characterize him. I’ll leave that to him.”

On the campaign trail, Clinton has been hitting this talking point hard, and it appears to be working in her favor.

“The biggest applause lines always have to do with Sanders’s recent status as a Democrat,” Joan Walsh of Nation wrote this week after attending multiple Clinton events around New York City.

Sanders has repeatedly argued that his disassociation from the party is inconsequential, a line that has become harder to sell in light of a recent dust-up over party fundraising.

Clinton supporters have been noting for weeks now that their candidate does a lot of down-ticket fundraising and the Sanders campaign does not, but things really came to a head when Sanders started castigating actor George Clooney for hosting a pricey fundraising event for Clinton. Things intensified when Sanders supporters showed up at the fundraiser to protest the event.

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — The event was billed as “Totally Free” and “Totally Chill(ary),” an unofficial Hillary Clinton campaign party that would feature stand-up comedy, live rap and a pantsuit competition.

The pantsuit contest never happened, and the local rap act failed to show up to the club, a small, out-of-the-way venue in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

But for nearly two hours on Saturday night, three days before the New York primaries, a cast of comedians put together by the film maker Heather Fink held up their end of the deal, delivering a free, feminism-themed show for a crowd of mostly female Clinton supporters who were there to celebrate her presidential campaign.

For both the comedians and their audience, the event represented a rare opportunity to express support for Clinton in public without fear of being criticized by friends and family members — or reprimanded by male supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders, known as “Bernie bros,” who have become infamous for lashing out against female Clinton voters on Facebook and Twitter.

“Anytime I post something positive about Hillary on Facebook, people tell me I’m a bad person, they tell me I’m stupid and don’t know anything.”

The Sanders letter cited a February report by The Washington Post that detailed the Clinton campaign’s expansive use of a joint fundraising committee it set up last year with the DNC and 32 state party committees.
To put it mildly, it’s not at all common for a Democratic presidential candidate to accuse his own ostensible party, late in the primary process, of being involved in an illegal scheme, but 2016 really isn’t a normal year.

Regardless, do the accusations have merit? Have the DNC and the Clinton campaign hatched an improper operation that violates campaign-finance laws? It’s a real stretch.

Right off the bat, it’s worth noting that the Democratic National Committee offered Team Sanders the identical opportunity for a joint fundraising operation, but the senator declined – not because the joint victory fund is illegal, but because Sanders preferred to simply do his own thing, separate from the national party.

Also note, it’s not altogether clear how serious the Sanders campaign is about the allegations themselves. The “proof” of wrongdoing is a Washington Post article from two months ago, which doesn’t actually point to any specific misdeeds, and there’s been no explanation as to why Sanders waited two months to complain about it.

What’s more, the Sanders campaign didn’t take its complaints to the Federal Election Commission, which is responsible for reviewing such allegations, but rather, to the DNC itself – the entity that already believes there’s nothing improper about its own operation.

As Bernie Sanders makes his case that he is a stronger general election candidate than Hillary Clinton, he often cites polls showing him outperforming his Democratic rival in hypothetical general election match-ups with Republicans.
"You know, in virtually all of the general election match-up polls between Trump and Secretary Clinton and Trump and Bernie Sanders, in almost all of those polls, I do better than Secretary Clinton," Sanders said Thursday night during the Brooklyn Democratic debate, attributing his strength to independents. "We are not going to win the White House based on just long-term Democratic votes. We have got to reach out to independents and I think I am well qualified to do that."

And yet, prominent Republican operatives are chomping at the bit to face Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont and self-described democratic socialist in the general election, believing he'd be an easier opponent than the former first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state.
"Republicans are being nice to Bernie Sanders because we like the thought of running against a socialist. But if he were to win the nomination the knives would come out for Bernie pretty quick," said Ryan Williams, a former spokesman for 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney's campaign. "There's no mystery what the attack on him would be. Bernie Sanders is literally a card carrying socialist who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. There'd be hundreds of millions of dollars in Republican ads showing hammers and sickles and Soviet Union flags in front of Bernie Sanders."