Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

It was only a tweet, but one could detect a certain jubilation in Hillary Clinton’s voice as she “welcomed” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – the senator so far to the left he’s not even a registered Democrat — into the presidential race. "I agree with Bernie. Focus must be on helping America's middle class. GOP would hold them back,” Clinton tweeted. To be sure everyone noticed, she signed the tweet "H." This is really me talking, everybody!

You can bet that, if it had been Elizabeth Warren, there would have been less jubilation in Clintonworld.


Why is Hillary happy? First of all, Bernie has no chance of winning the Democratic nomination, whereas a Warren might actually have a shot. Second, the quixotic nature of his campaign will all but ensure that resistant progressives go over to Clinton sooner rather than later. Finally, he is the first of a bunch of progressive-come-latelies, Lincoln Chafee, Jim Webb and Martin O’Malley, whose main achievement will be to split the anti-Hillary left. With Clinton generally polling around 60 percent among Democrats, having four candidates divvy up the remaining tally is a recipe for a Hillary coronation. If Clinton doesn’t have to sweat, then she doesn’t owe anybody anything.

Above all, the weakness of Bernie Sanders and her other likely challengers virtually ensures that she will not be forced to adopt policies so progressive that they could cost her the election in November. Indeed, Warren’s hovering over the race has put more pressure on Hillary than anyone actually preparing to join it.

Needless to say, Bernie Sanders was not the first choice of progressives who crave a primary challenge. Progressives all like Bernie. But they love Elizabeth. Bernie has been teasing a run for months, and has been fighting the left-wing fight inside Congress for decades. Yet groups like MoveOn.org ignored him in favor of a formal–and by all indications, futile–campaign to draft the first-term senator from Massachusetts.

Why so little love for Bernie? He and Warren share the same ideology and agenda. The two have both achieved first-name only status among the left’s rank-and-file. (Sanders has long held court on Thom Hartmann’s national radio show, mixing it up with callers for the weekly segment, “Brunch With Bernie.”)

Bernie can even boast of a stronger electoral record compared to Elizabeth. When he first won statewide, back in 1990, Vermont voters simultaneously elected a Republican for governor and two years earlier backed George H. W. Bush over its Massachusetts neighbor Michael Dukakis. That year, the political independent and self-described socialist reached out to conservatives and secured the endorsement of the NRA to help him oust Vermont’s lone U.S. representative. Warren, on the other hand, didn’t have to do any heavy coalition building to win back Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat.

Yet Warren is the one that progressives believe has the secret sauce that can sell the progressive message across ideological lines. Conservatives may mock her as a Harvard professor, but on the stump she comes across more like a regular middle-class Jane, pithily distilling widespread frustration at a system skewed in favor of Wall Street.

Sanders, on the other hand, speaks in the leaden language of the old-school left-wing activist that he is. (“That was a depressing speech,” one fellow traveler said after a recent stem-winder.) He may have won over some right-wing voters while retail politicking in Vermont, but few progressives believe he can replicate that across the nation.

As to the other progressives who are likely to run, all have suspect credentials. Chafee is a former Republican, and Webb served in the Reagan administration. O’Malley had a solid reputation as a left-of-center technocrat while governor of Maryland, though in the wake of the Baltimore riots, his mayoral tenure is being remembered for high incarceration rates and not low poverty rates.

Yet all three now are singing out of Bernie’s populist songbook and all have the potential to diminish his ability to consolidate and maximize the progressive anti-Hillary vote.

O’Malley can appeal to Hillary skeptics who want a safer, button-down alternative. Chafee has suggested he wants to emphasize foreign policy, which may entice liberals most aggrieved by Clinton’s perceived hawkishness. Webb, like Sanders, believes Democrats need white working-class voters who spurned Obama to ensure an electoral majority. Unlike Sanders, Webb’s pitch is more tribal. The author of a book celebrating his fellow Appalachian Scots-Irish, Webb is fond of saying “If you’re poor and white, you’re out of sight.” Such racially competitive victimhood may not help Webb get far with in the multicultural Democratic electorate, but he could make it harder for Sanders, as well as Clinton, to make inroads with that constituency.

Before Sanders took the plunge it was clear that others would jump in. The question that Sanders had to ask himself was: Would it be better for progressives if I get behind one of the other challengers to minimize division, or am I the best champion of the progressive agenda?

Understandably, Sanders saw himself as the real deal. He has a fully fleshed out worldview, fingering the “billionaire class” as the problem and ridding money from politics as the solution. He has a 12-point action plan for revitalizing the middle-class. He has been talking about these economic issues, inside the Capitol and over the airwaves, on a daily basis for decades, with an eye toward appealing beyond the progressive base.

But while Sanders might give the most comprehensive one-hour speech on how to save the middle class, it’s less certain he knows how to move Hillary Clinton in his direction, or if that is even his underlying goal. (He insists, of course, that he’s running “to win" and “not running against Hillary Clinton.”)

As we have seen in the escalating fight over trade policy, Hillary can nod in the direction of the populists without embracing specifics. The left can demand she take a stand on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the “fast track” negotiation authority. But she will give you vague principles for what a trade deal should look like and skip the part about fast track, for as long as she can.

A strong primary challenger can make it harder for Hillary to skirt specifics. But much of the Sanders’ agenda and rhetoric doesn’t put Hillary on the spot.

For example, on the day he announced, Sanders’ Twitter feed declared: “Every candidate for president has got to answer one simple question. Are you prepared to take on the billionaire class whose greed is destroying the middle class and, through Citizens United, our American democratic system?" This is a softball question disguised as a hardball. Hillary can easily answer, “Yes!” without committing to any specific policy, or even swallowing the class-based rhetoric her advisers want to avoid.

Other elements of his “Agenda for America” similarly give challengers plenty of latitude. He wants “a progressive tax system in this country which is based on ability to pay,” “quality education [that’s] affordable for all” and to "lead the world in reversing climate change.”

But certain planks could squeeze Hillary if Sanders decided to drill them. Either you are for expanding Social Security benefits or you’re not. Either you believe Wall Street banks “must be broken up” or you don’t. Clinton’s restraint on trade may have to give way if Sanders hammers her over it.

Yet Bernie is a gentleman, apparently. “I’ve never run a negative ad in my life,” he says. If he continues that streak, many Democrats who fear a bloody primary would be relieved. But many populist progressives who want to push Hillary out of her Establishment comfort zone would not be. It looks as if they are destined to be disappointed.