Sanders’ backers will dig in — both their heels and their pockets — if Obama tries to give him the hook Carrie Miller Follow Mar 18, 2016 · 3 min read

If Bernie Sanders were at all reliant on fat-cat Democratic checkbooks to fuel his insurgent primary campaign, maybe finding out that President Barack Obama has begun undercutting him with big donors would be a devastating blow.

As things stand, though, Sanders’ actual financial backers, who number in the millions, are much more likely to dig in and dig deeper should Obama overtly try to give their candidate the hook. Many will be livid to learn that in a recent Austin, Tex. donor meeting, Obama downplayed the importance of authenticity, which is Sanders’ calling card and Hillary Clinton’s Achilles heel, by saying that George W. Bush was also authentic, Mother Jones reported. Coming from someone who traded shamelessly on his likability as a candidate, that’s such a low blow that it borders on abuse of power.

Yeah, try again, President Obama

So what is it that’s motivating Obama? Given that Hillary Clinton went the distance against him in the primaries, why shouldn’t she get as good as she gave against Sanders?

Perhaps he’s feeling a little burned by Sanders’ sharp critique of politicians who claim they are deeply committed to campaign finance reform but then strap on a few super PACs rather than “unilaterally disarm.” The longer Sanders keeps proving that it IS possible to run strong and also to run clean, the more hypocritical both Clinton and Obama look by comparison.

Have you noticed that whenever Sanders presses Clinton on her $15 million of donations from banks, she runs and hides behind Obama’s skirts, saying that he also took lots of bankers’ money yet signed Dodd-Frank into law. But anyone who was paying attention knows that Dodd-Frank was significantly and repeatedly weakened as it passed through the hands of lawmakers who had also stuffed their pockets with Wall Street cash. And then there’s the little matter of no Wall Street executive having been prosecuted in the years after they caused a financial meltdown — non-prosecutions that didn’t happen on Obama’s watch.

Perhaps Obama would rather not see a “good governance” candidate ushered into office just as he is planning to splashily cash out. (What’s a politician who has run his last race doing palling around with donors, anyway? Funding the library? Distributing his resume?)

According to Mother Jones, Obama is planning to do all he can to make sure that a Democrat wins against Trump in the fall. If that’s his real motivation, he might want to cool his heels a bit longer, because there is a non-trivial subset of Sanders’ supporters who are going to be very tricky to win over to Clinton, and that’s if they can be persuaded at all.

They are, in a phrase, ‘unlikely voters’: idealistic first-time voters, younger voters and those middle-aged voters who have long been disconnected for the political process for wont of a candidate that moves them.

This primary has already been chock full of somebodies other than regular voters throwing their weight around: the DNC, Superdelegates and the corporate media, to name just a few. If Obama personally starts trying to muscle Sanders out and to snuff the revolution, he risks losing those idealistic and energetic voters from the Democratic party forever.