It is Bernie's ability to unite Americans that I think has brought the greatest shock to the establishment. They were already alarmed by his ability to spark a movement, and to organize a campaign, and to outflank the media narrative, and to rack up victory after victory, and to beat the establishment's anointed candidate at her own high-stakes and all-important game--raising money--all of which have been minimized to the greatest extent possible by a well-coordinated and relentlessly on-message corporate/state media.
But because of the authenticity and commonsense nature of his message, it is Bernie's ability to appeal not only to progressives, but to independents and conservatives, and to unite people in the common cause of cleaning up a corrupt and decadent political system, that seems to have made the establishment realize that his political revolution could actually be a genuine threat.
So in their eyes, it must be stopped.
This serious turn in the establishment attitude is, as usual, most evident in the media. As long ago as 2014, the media has been in the tank for Hillary, as Chris Cuomo openly admitted on CNN. "We couldn't help her any more than we have," he said on June 9, 2014. "She's getting a free ride from the media. We're the biggest ones promoting her campaign."
That media pattern of Hillary promotion has been apparent throughout the campaign, but has intensified in the wake of the Wisconsin primary, where Bernie's 13-point victory vastly outperformed every mainstream prediction, and an uninterrupted Bernie winning streak made the media's "inevitability" narrative look increasingly silly.
As progressive radio host Thom Hartman has noted, most of the post-Wisconsin cable news coverage has concentrated on the Republican race (where Ted Cruz is much farther behind Donald Trump than Bernie is of Hillary). An absurd example of this occurred when Nation reporter John Nichols, a very early advocate for Bernie Sanders, appeared on a panel on CNN the day after Wisconsin, and was only asked about Cruz. The media are continuing a pattern of ignoring Bernie as much as possible. And the headlines about his string of victories are all, "Bernie wins, but math."
The media has also mostly parroted Clinton campaign misrepresentations of Bernie's recent interview with the NY Daily News. A Washington Post headline even suggested that, in Hillary's opinion, Bernie is "unqualified" to be president, spurring a reaction from Bernie that the media also tried to turn in Hillary's favor. The correspondence between the media metanarrative and Hillary's rhetoric on breaking up the big banks is exact: they're in agreement that Bernie doesn't know what he's talking about.
The Hillary Clinton campaign and establishment media have virtually merged. Two days after Wisconsin, CNN ran a near-continuous loop of Hillary on the NYC subway, woman of the people, kissing babies and using her Metro card. It looked more like a Clinton campaign commercial than a journalistic report on a candidate who hasn't held a press conference in weeks.
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