"Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton, 50-50" might as well be the headline following Monday's first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. Technically, it appears that Clinton eked out a win by some decimal point, but she and the democratic socialist senator from Vermont were basically even. Which means Sanders basically won. It never should have been this close.

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Just look at these actual headlines:

New York Times: "In Iowa caucuses, victory extends beyond first place"

Washington Post: "Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders were the real winners in Iowa"

Clinton is going to have to endure this media narrative for a while. She's the political equivalent of the '68 Yale Bulldogs — the favorite who squandered a big lead. It certainly doesn't help that she's choked before, getting caught from behind in the 2008 Democratic nominating contest by then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and finishing third.

But Sanders's strong showing in Iowa could actually be a good thing for Clinton on the media front. It means the press will finally treat Sanders as a credible contender — and give him a dose of the intense scrutiny it prescribed to Clinton a long time ago.

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As I've written before, Sanders coasted through the pre-voting season as a fundraising, crowd-drawing phenomenon. His rise has, indeed, been remarkable. And many journalists have no doubt been grateful for the intrigue he's injected into a race that originally looked like it would be a snoozer.

But now it's time to get serious. Sanders wants to raise your taxes (see video, below). Is that going to fly? Can he really match wits with a former secretary of state on foreign policy? What's up with his plan to kinda-but-not-really "dismantle" Obamacare? What's up with his shifting position on liability for gun manufacturers? And aren't many of his progressive proposals — free public college for everybody comes to mind — DOA in Congress, anyway?

These are some of the tough questions on which Sanders has not been truly pressed yet. That's about to change, especially as he heads to New Hampshire as the favorite to win (for real) the nation's first primary.

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There's reason to wonder whether he'll be able to handle the pressure. Consider his reaction to a critical editorial that ran in this newspaper last week. After The Washington Post's editorial board called Sanders "a politician selling his own brand of fiction to a slice of the country that eagerly wants to buy it," the senator went off at a breakfast event put on by Bloomberg.

"Check out where all the geniuses on the editorial page were with regard to the invasion of Iraq," he said, among other things.

Ripping the media is standard political practice, of course, but it's most effective when the candidate has clearly been subjected to relentlessly harsh coverage. This is why Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson sounded silly asserting, as he did in an early November interview on CNN, that "the vetting that you all did with President Obama doesn't even come close — doesn't even come close — to what you guys are trying to do in my case."

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This was in that ever-so-brief moment when Carson was the new GOP front-runner. My exact thought at the time was: "Dude, it's been less than a week. You've already cracked?"

Carson, who finished fourth in Iowa and then went home to do laundry (seriously), isn't exactly the model Sanders wants to follow. He's going to have to toughen up and brace for the media wave that's coming his way.