Just as the Republicans of 1972 left George McGovern alone before he won the Democratic presidential nomination, then afterwards savaged him into a loss so comprehensive that Tad Devine would help invent the superdelegate concept as a way to prevent such a disaster from reoccurring, the Republicans of 2015 and early 2016 made made a point of being much nicer to Bernie Sanders than to Hillary Clinton so they could metaphorically rip him limb from limb if he won the Democratic presidential nomination:



“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.” “Hillary Clinton is a much more centrist candidate in comparison,” Williams said, and she would have a better chance of winning over moderate and undecided voters, despite numerous polls showing that many Americans, even in the Democratic Party, don't view her as honest and trustworthy. “Bernie's numbers are better than hers right now because she's been in the political arena for 30 years getting beat up,” he said. [...] Believing that Sanders may be too far outside the mainstream to win the Democratic primary, the Republican National Committee is doling out reams of opposition research on Clinton, and virtually none on Sanders. (By contrast, the Democratic National Committee has continued to launch attacks on Kasich, even though he has no mathematical chance of winning the GOP nomination before the convention.)

One thing conveniently forgotten by her attackers both right and left is that Hillary Clinton’s approval rating was in the high 60s when she was Secretary of State. Then the RNC and their media allies (especially the New York Times, which has hated Hillary Clinton from Day One) went to work against her, creating and publicizing one bogus investigation after another with the express purpose of damaging, in true Karl Rove attack-your-strongest-foe fashion, the Democrat most likely to win the 2016 nomination.

And now we see the man she beat soundly and fairly for the 2016 presidential nomination telling everyone who will listen, in the name of party unity for a party he wants to run but will not join, that pro-choice Democrat Jon Ossoff is bad and anti-choice Heath Mello is good. How lovely… not.