The Chicago Tribune (1/24/16) is not happy with the choices voters are thinking of making this year:

Democrats and Republicans usually find comparatively safe, steady options. But this year, risky and disruptive options are in vogue. The way the campaign is going, it’s easy to imagine that in 2016, voters in the sensible center will find themselves abandoned by the major parties.

The “candidates who could be politically disastrous” by turning off the “broad, sensible center” are, in the Tribune‘s view, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, the frontrunners in the Republican race, and, on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders—candidates who are “uncomfortably close to the cliff,” putting parties at risk of “being smashed on the rocks below.”

The Tribune editorial offers reasons its disfavored candidates are beyond the pale:

Trump has done his best to alienate Latinos, blacks, Muslims, women and anyone with an aversion to Sarah Palin. Cruz is widely despised by fellow Republican senators, and his over-the-top rhetoric (such as vowing to carpet-bomb Islamic State) is music only to the GOP’s right wing. Sanders brandishes a label that, a Gallup poll found, would automatically make him unacceptable to nearly half the public.

So disqualifying qualities in a candidate include racism/Islamophobia/misogyny, a commitment to mass-slaughtering civilians—and socialism. One of these things is not like the others.

The idea that you can’t be president if you believe in socialism—which Sanders defines as “a government that works for the many, not the few”—rests heavily on that Gallup poll, which found that 50 percent of respondents said they would not vote for “a socialist.”

It also found that 38 percent said they would not vote for a Muslim—though clearly the Tribune would not be bringing that up as the sole reason a Muslim politician should not be running for president. Nor does it mention that 40 percent said they wouldn’t vote for an atheist, even though Sanders is widely (though apparently wrongly) believed to be an atheist. How come? Because corporate media in general treat religious prejudice as a shameful thing, whereas capitalist institutions like giant media conglomerates tend to see an aversion to socialism as normal and healthy.

The thing is, voters would not be asked to vote for “a socialist”—they’d be asked to vote for Bernie Sanders. And while pollsters don’t include Sanders in general election matchups as often as they do Hillary Clinton, they have asked how the Vermont senator would do against various Republicans—and he generally does pretty well. In particular, against the candidate the Tribune says is “best positioned” to “capture the broad, sensible center”—Jeb Bush—Sanders leads in polls by an average of 3.0 percentage points, based on polling analysis by the website Real Clear Politics.

When pollsters match Sanders against the four top-polling Republican hopefuls, on average he does better than Clinton does against each of them—even though she, like Bush, is supposed to be “best positioned” to “capture the broad, sensible center,” according to the Tribune.

Actually, the elements of Sanders’ platform that elite media are most likely to associate with “socialism”—things like universal, publicly funded healthcare and eliminating tuition at public colleges—are quite popular with the public, and go a long way to explain his favorable poll numbers. But they are also the sort of proposals that make Sanders unacceptable to the nation’s wealthy elite—and to establishment media outlets.

In addition to the Gallup poll, the other piece of evidence for Sanders’ disastrousness is the testimony of a conservative Democrat:

What if self-declared democratic socialist Sanders is the Democratic winner? “It would be a meltdown all the way down the ballot,” Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, assured the New York Times.

Missouri is a state with interesting politics. As recently as 2000, the Democratic Party controlled both houses of its legislature. Today, Republicans make up 72 percent of Missouri’s house, and 75 percent of its senate.

Is that because the Missouri Democrats nominated too many socialists? Or is it because of candidates like Jay Nixon?

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter: @JNaureckas.

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