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A Washington Post story on Sanders’s 1988 honeymoon in the USSR launched a press whirlwind. The center-left framing of both the Democratic party establishment as well as much of the political press has had a strong hand in shaping the information voters have received about Sanders—pushed not only by pundits but by debate moderators and moderate candidates like Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar. Debate moderators challenged Sanders on the viability of a socialist candidate in June 2019 and again September 2019, and his opponents joined in the ribbing. A nearly identical, wagon-circling discussion of healthcare policy has featured in all of the Democratic debates thus far, usually on terrain highly favorable to the moderate candidates. “Your campaign proposals would double federal spending over the next decade at an unprecedented level of spending not seen since World War II,” a CNN moderator asked Sanders on January 14. “How would you keep your plans from bankrupting the country?” The press relentlessly hammered Elizabeth Warren on the financing for her Medicare for All plan, and hammered Sanders for refusing to put numbers on his, indifferent to his view that campaign plans are statements of moral principle, not scorable policies.

Since Warren’s collapse in the polls that followed scrutiny of her Medicare for All plan—and her furtive attempt to satisfy the centrists’ demands for an explanation as to how the plan would be paid for—it has become conventional wisdom among pundits and television-paid political operatives that Sanders hasn’t received the same level of scrutiny. “The ‘likability’ of self-confessed yeller and grumpy guy Bernie Sanders never gets discussed,” Washington Post Never-Trump conservative Jennifer Rubin wrote on January 3. “When will he go through the vetting we expect of top-tier candidates?” Consultant and former Bill Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart conceded that there had been much discussion of Medicare for All, but, argued that “there has been far too little discussion of Sanders’s 50-year record” and that, “one of the leading candidates for the nomination has largely escaped the kind of scrutiny his opponents have been put through.”

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Democratic operatives like the Center for American Progress’ Neera Tanden, an obsessive and conspiratorial Sanders opponent on social media, seized on a Sanders endorsement from the podcaster Joe Rogan to upbraid Sanders for accepting support from a figure with noxious views on identity issues. That argument was reprised by yet another Never-Trump conservative, Atlantic columnist David Frum, who laid out Rogan’s history of anti-transgender comments as an introduction to his argument that “Bernie Sanders is a fragile candidate” who “has never fought a race where he had to face serious personal scrutiny.” (All this as prelude to Frum’s bizarre argument that, actually, Sanders’s supposed insensitivity to identity was good, something Democrats should learn from in the future.)

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Months of polling since the 2020 race began have overwhelmingly shown several Democratic candidates comfortably beating Trump in the general election, with Biden and Sanders as the reliable top two. In well over 50 national head-to-head polls conducted throughout the primary Sanders beats Trump in all but four. To his credit, Biden has an even stronger lead over Trump, and a few polls in states beyond Iowa and New Hampshire, where data is sparse, also show Biden wining with larger margins. Reasonable people can disagree about what the general election battle would look like, especially before any primary voting has actually taken place. But the perception of a candidate’s strength against Trump is, at this point, a form of tea-leaf reading inevitably reinforced by ideological priors.

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https://newrepublic.com/article/156333/eternally-unvetted-bernie-sanders