The problem is, as Al Gore or John Kerry can tell you, once you start seeing a politician in a certain light, you start seeing it more and more. Things that would have been insignificant start to loom large. So once I’d first questioned Bernie Sanders’ honesty, I started seeing a lot more reasons to question it. What could be called little stuff—the campaign’s response to the NGPVAN data breach, the repeated strong implications that Sanders had endorsements he doesn’t have, the staffers posing as Culinary Union members—seems bigger than it might in isolation. But even in isolation, that’s quite a pattern of, at rock-bottom minimum, the kind of campaigning the authentic and honorable Bernie Sanders is supposed to stand against. Of course he didn’t make those decisions himself, but he hired Jeff Weaver and Jeff Weaver has built a campaign organization that did all those things. And his arguments about his progressivism vs. Hillary Clinton’s require us to ignore a lot of history:
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I believe that while Sanders supports things like paid family leave, Clinton would be a bigger step forward in those areas. Not just because she’s a woman, mind you, but because, as Walsh points out, Sanders “has more than a tin-ear on gender. He routinely talks about ‘mothers’ needing family leave.” That’s a problem, one that made me take a real step back in early Democratic debates. Also because, as Madeleine Kunin implicitly points out, some of the same ways Sanders is being dismissive of Clinton's commitments on gender have a long history with the Vermont senator, and while Sanders has pushed back some against the raging sexism coming from a vocal bloc of his supporters, I wonder how much his incomplete vision on the realities of sexism bolster his appeal to some of his supporters to begin with.
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