2016 Why Progressives Shouldn’t Support Bernie Wishful thinking won’t win the White House.

Barney Frank is a Politico columnist and a former Democratic representative from Massachusetts.

As skillful a controversialist as Bill Kristol is, he couldn’t help grinning. When we were discussing the 2016 campaign on “Morning Joe” last month, he expressed strong admiration for Bernie Sanders and pretended disbelief that I was not supporting him for president. But the strategically driven discipline he brought to the task of lavishly praising a man whose views he usually derides did not extend to control of his facial muscles.

If you weren’t watching the TV and only overheard our discussion, you might have wondered why one of the leading conservative strategists was speaking so approvingly of a tribune of the left. Viewers who saw the broad smile he was unable to suppress had a clue to the answer: Republicans fear that if Hillary Clinton is nominated fairly easily, while they are locked in a bitter, lengthy, ideologically charged series of primaries with a large cast of characters of varying degrees of plausibility, she gets a head start for the real fight.


Of course Republicans recognize that at its most vigorous, a debate between Clinton and Sanders on how — not whether — to toughen financial regulation or diminish income inequality will fall decibels short of the fundamental arguments between Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush on immigration, Lindsey Graham and Rand Paul on military intervention, Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee against many others on how sharply to press against same-sex marriage, and Donald Trump and all of the others on the role of rational discussion in politics. But they believe boosting Sanders’ candidacy is their only way to prevent Clinton emerging as the nominee with broad support early in the process, strengthening her position in November.

They are correct.

I know that there is a counter-argument made by some on the Democratic left that a closely contested nomination process will help our ultimate nominee — that Clinton will somehow benefit from having to spend most of her time and campaign funds between now and next summer proving her ideological purity in an intraparty fight, like Mitt Romney in 2012 — rather than focusing on her differences with the conservative she will face in the election. But neither an analysis of the current political situation nor the history of presidential races supports this.

I believe strongly that the most effective thing liberals and progressives can do to advance our public policy goals — on health care, immigration, financial regulation, reducing income inequality, completing the fight against anti-LGBT discrimination, protecting women’s autonomy in choices about reproduction and other critical matters on which the Democratic and Republican candidates for president will be sharply divided — is to help Clinton win our nomination early in the year. That way, she can focus on what we know will be a tough job: combating the flood of post- Citizens United right-wing money, in an atmosphere in which public skepticism about the effectiveness of public policy is high.

I realize that before explaining why I am convinced that a prolonged prenomination debate about the authenticity of Clinton’s support for progressive policy stances will do us more harm than good, that very point must be addressed. Without any substance, some argue that she has been insufficiently committed to economic and social reform — for example, that she is too close to Wall Street, and consequently soft on financial regulation, and unwilling to support higher taxation on the super-rich. This is wholly without basis. Well before the Sanders candidacy began to draw attention, she spoke out promptly in criticism of the appropriations rider that responded to the big banks’ wish list on derivative trading. She has spoken thoughtfully about further steps against abuses and in favor of taxing hedge funds at a fairer, i.e., higher, rate.

This is reflective of her role in the 1990s, when she was a consistent force for progressive policies in her husband’s administration. And as Paul Krugman documented throughout the 2008 nomination campaign, she was, on the whole, to Barack Obama’s left on domestic issues.

True, not on Iraq. Having myself voted against that terrible mistake, I agree that her position on the war is a legitimate concern for those of us on the left. The question then becomes whether this was a manifestation of a general tendency to support unwise military intervention, or the case of her joining every other Democratic senator who had serious presidential ambitions in voting for a war that the Bush-Cheney administration had successfully hyped as a necessary defense against terrorism. While I wish that she, Joe Biden and John Kerry had not been spooked into believing that no one who voted no would have the national security merit badge required to win the presidency, I regard liberal senators’ support for the Iraq War as a response to a given fraught political situation rather than an indication of their basic policy stance — like Obama’s off-again, on-again support for same-sex marriage. (Yes, I am saying that in deciding whether or not to support a candidate with whom I have disagreed on a fundamental issue, I am more at ease if it was a one-time political accommodation rather than a genuine conviction.) Most relevantly for this discussion, she will clearly be for less military spending and intervention than the Republican nominee. While I admire Paul’s skepticism about an expansive global policing role for America, even the more tempered version of this he now propounds is an absolute bar to his winning a Republican convention.

Of course it is not only possible to accept the legitimacy of Clinton’s liberal-progressive credentials and still prefer that Sanders be president, it makes sense for the most ideologically committed to hold that view. But wishful thinking is no way to win the presidency. There is not only no chance — perhaps regrettably — for Sanders to win a national election. A long primary campaign will only erode the benefit Democrats are now poised to reap from the Republicans’ free-for-all.

Decades ago, Sanders made a principled choice to play a valuable part in our politics — the outsider within the system. He defied the uniquely American aversion to the word “socialism.” We are, after all, the only Western democracy in which no self-identified socialist party has ever played a significant governmental role. While voting with the Democrats to organize first the House and then the Senate, he made clear he did so as a regrettable necessity, not a preference, and cited his nonmembership in the party as an indication of his political integrity. Substantively, he has consistently, forcefully and cogently made the case for a larger federal government role in improving both the fairness and the quality of life in our country, refusing to soft-pedal in the face of declining support for this view in public opinion.

His very unwillingness to be confined by existing voter attitudes, as part of a long-term strategy to change them, is both a very valuable contribution to the democratic dialogue and an obvious bar to winning support from the majority of these very voters in the near term.

And as much as I wish it weren’t the case, we are still very much in that near term. As the intriguing challenger to Clinton, Sanders gets a pass in the current campaign. The media are very happy to have a race to cover where they feared — yes, feared — there would not be one. While Republican officeholders cannot be seen to be kind to a socialist, conservative commentators and media will be joining Kristol in touting Sanders’ heretofore unnoticed virtues. Meanwhile, Democrats — especially those who, like me, share most of Sanders’ policy views and do not have an allergic reaction to the word “socialism,” even if we disagree with it as an economic theory — are reluctant to be critical of someone who is an ally.

I know from past experience I will be criticized for writing here about making such tactical and strategic arguments. Some of my liberal allies will object that precisely because Sanders will not win the nomination, it is unnecessary — even unseemly — for me to write as I just have. But the critical point — that many of my fellow and sister Democrats understand but would rather not be caught saying — is that one clear result of a long Clinton-Sanders nomination contest would be that some of his vulnerabilities will accrue to her.

The attack on Clinton in the fall campaign will be more on her personally than on her views. Whoever the GOP nominee ends up being, he will publicly de-emphasize his commitments to undoing financial reform, appointing Supreme Court justices who will reverse the same-sex marriage decision, and totally repealing the Affordable Care Act. Instead, the Republicans will try to impugn Clinton’s integrity by regurgitating the old accusations from the ’90s, supplemented by distorting the facts about Benghazi and greatly exaggerating the horror of her email trail. They will not be deterred by the inconvenient fact that Kenneth Starr grudgingly told the Judiciary Committee in 1998 that after spending several million dollars for three years, he was unable to point to anything she — or President Bill Clinton — had done wrong involving Whitewater, the FBI files or the Travel Office, nor by their inability after what will have been by then at least five congressional investigations to specify how she should be blamed for the murder of American officials by terrorists in Libya.

Her ability to point to the total absence of any evidence to validate these charges will help blunt their impact, and she in turn will stress her commitment to the reforms that respond to the public’s dissatisfaction with the economic status quo. Given the appeal of her specific policy proposals, the Republicans will use the Sanders candidacy to make a two-pronged attack on her call for fairer taxation, tougher rules governing the financial industry, re-establishment of the right of working people to join unions, raising the minimum wage, incentivizing profit sharing, and increasing the availability of health care and higher education.

Prong 1 of the attack will be that her advocacy of this package is further evidence that she cannot be trusted — that her platform does not represent her sincere commitment but rather her need to fend off the challenge from her left in the primaries. That last point will be the basis of prong 2: That for reasons of expediency she has moved not only to the left, but perilously close, if not entirely, to socialism. Rather than debate the merits of specific policies to diminish inequality, they will argue that she has let a proud, self-identified socialist shape her approach. Supporters of President Obama who have indignantly defended him against the right-wing claim that he is a closet socialist obviously understand that this charge is a damaging one. A strong vote for Sanders in the primaries and caucuses guarantees that the argument will be made with renewed force and more plausibility in November. That the attack will be inaccurate and demagogic does not mean that it will be without impact when the Republicans spend hundreds of millions of dollars demonizing the “Clinton-Sanders” socialist plan for America.

There is one more counter to the argument that serious competition for the nomination would be better for the eventual nominee: the historical record. There have been seven times in the past 40 years when an incumbent president was on the November ballot. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama won. Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush lost. The winning incumbents had no primary challenger. The losers all did — serious threats from Reagan and Ted Kennedy for Ford and Carter; a less plausible but nonetheless well-publicized and disruptive one from Pat Buchanan for Bush senior. There were several reasons why the three incumbents lost. But the criticisms leveled by intraparty challengers, and the political need to shape a message to appeal to their co-partisans before being able to focus on appealing to the broader electorate, were contributing factors to the defeat in every case.

The last claim is that Hillary Clinton needs the experience of a tough nomination contest to learn how to campaign. I confess amazement that people who have never themselves run for any office think that a woman who went through a hard nomination contest with her husband in 1992, two difficult final election campaigns in ’92 and ’96, a bitter first race for the Senate in New York in 2000, and another grueling nomination contest in 2008 is unprepared for a fifth major campaign next year.

I wish we lived in a country where the most relevant political dispute was over how far to the liberal side the electorate was prepared to go. Until we do — and I will continue to work with Sanders and others to get us there — spending our resources on an intraparty struggle rather than on working to defeat our very well-funded conservative opponents is self-indulgence, not effective political action.