Bernie Sanders vs The DNC

A few days ago, news broke that the Bernie Sanders campaign had been suspended by the Democratic National Committee (The DNC, which is basically the official Democratic Party.  Democratic Candidates represent the DNC's platform, or at least will default to it when they have no other pressing interest).  The Sanders campaign has since be reinstated, but not before the fight got pretty ugly, and even in it's resolution, shots were fired.  If the Republican party is desperately trying to figure out how to prevent Trump from becoming their nominee, the DNC seems set on trying to ensure Clinton does become their nominee.

I'm not going to rehash the story (But if you want good primers, try here and here), but in reading about it I noticed a startling trend.  While behind the scenes there may be animosity between the candidates, usually they try to play nice publicly.  In the second debate (I believe - I wasn't able to find an actual source, but I know this happened in an early debate), John Kasich said that Trump had hit a chord with the American people.  At the start of the third debate, he opened with: "My great concern is we are on the verge of perhaps picking someone who cannot do this job."  This wasn't because Kasich's opinion on Trump changed.  He just initially tried to play nice with him (because Bush and Walker, who had attacked him head on, got destroyed in the polls), but when that didn't work, he decided to pile on.  What they say aloud isn't necessarily reflective of their real feelings - it's all a calculation.

So it was shocking to me that, in describing how the issue got resolved, both the Sanders campaign and the DNC took some pretty low pot shots at each other:

From the Sanders campaign in a statement: 

"The Democratic National Committee on Friday capitulated and agreed to reinstate Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign's access to a critically-important voter database,"

From DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on CNN:"Thankfully, after refusing to give us the information we were asking for for nearly two days, last night, we did reach an agreement with the campaign.  They finally gave us the information that we had been asking for so that we could begin to assess the depth of the breach where their staff looked inappropriately at unauthorized material that was the proprietary information of the Clinton campaign."

From Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders' campaign manager in a statement: 

“We are extremely pleased that the DNC has reversed its outrageous decision to take Sen. Sanders’ data. The information we provided tonight is essentially the same information we already sent them by email on Thursday,” Jeff Weaver, Sanders’ campaign manager, said in a statement.

These are not friendly statements.  And these were the statements made after things were resolved.  Usually, when an issue is resolved, statements try to be at least a little positive, to show no hard feelings.  The Sanders campaign says the DNC 'capitulated,' Schultz takes the opportunity to point out that the Sanders campaign held out for two days, and Weaver fires back that whatever information the DNC finally got was very similar to the information that had been sent to them earlier.  It doesn't even matter who is right: This is not just a national party enforcing rules among its candidates.  There is real animosity here!

The Sanders' campaign have consistently accused the DNC of favoring Clinton.  (So has Martin O'Malley.)  Eric Fehrnstrom, formerly of the Romney campaign, said "The possibility that she could lose New Hampshire has everyone in a panic. Not only are they denying Bernie Sanders access to voter information, but they’ve limited the number of debates and the ones they are holding are tucked away on nights when nobody is watching."  The first democratic debate was on a Tuesday, the second one was on a Saturday, and the third one will also be on a Saturday (tonight).  The five Republican debates have all been in the middle of the week.  The disparity of amount is probably linked to the number of candidates (14 GOP, 3 Dem), but the timing of the debates is note-worthy.

You might think the Dems might want to have their fewer debates be better highlighted.  Or maybe you think the Dems want to tuck their debates away just so as to not distract from the chaos of the Republican race.  There are lots of non-nefarious reasons for limiting the number of debates.  However, it is hard to doubt that fewer debates benefit Clinton substantially.  Debates give candidates exposure to the public - Clinton is a former Senator, Secretary of State, and First Lady.  Further, the Republicans drop her name all the time in their debates - and rarely Sanders' and never O'Malley.  More exposure.  Debates also give candidates a chance to say something that gives them a big bump in the polls, or something that brings them down.  The higher you are, the less of a bump you can get, and the more room you have to fall.  Front runners do not benefit from debates.

Bernie Sanders' campaign from the beginning has been an underdog campaign - not just in numbers but in style.  He constantly shows how he's against the media and the establishment.  While Sanders supporters tend to say they want more mainstream coverage, I'm not really sure how that would help - suddenly a core part of his message is nullified.  It's hard to be on all the talk shows and claim there's a media blackout against you.

Meanwhile, the DNC seems to be getting less subtle about tilting things towards Clinton.  I disagree that this whole scandal is concocted, or that it was dropped purposely to be politically damaging (The worst time for the Sanders' campaign for this story to break would have been early next week, when people are getting ready for Christmas and people are watching the news less.  But with a debate a few days away when the story initially broke, it was in the DNC's interest to get this resolved as soon as possible.  Can you imagine the field day Sanders and O'Malley could have during the debate if this hadn't been resolved?  Clinton would've been forced to play the part of the establishment candidate, which she's always tried to avoid, or else take an otherwise untenable position.).  However, it seems more likely than ever that - if the DNC is not actively rooting for Clinton - they at least have adversarial feelings against Sanders.  This feeds Sanders' narrative, and may drive his supporters to be even more motivated.

What's most interesting to me is that the DNC is playing chess while the Sanders campaign is playing dodgeball.  The two games have really nothing in common, and strategies in one just do not apply to the other.  Whenever the DNC tries to undermine Sanders, he can make it work in his favor.  But when Sanders tries things his way ("The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!"), the DNC can exploit it to their advantage (Clinton tried to use that moment to say the whole scandal was foolish and should be dropped, and Sanders needed to back pedal and say: “You get 12 seconds to say these things.  There’s an investigation going on right now. I did not say, ‘End the investigation.’ That’s silly. . . . Let the investigation proceed unimpeded.”

Even in this latest controversy, both sides have admitted that the Sanders campaign alerted the DNC to the breach: "Josh Uretsky, a Sanders campaign staffer who was fired Wednesday after viewing Clinton campaign data, told ABC News he was trying to investigate the data issue to see what information was vulnerable on their end so he could adequately report it to the software company. He said his team did not export any data and that he intentionally left a record of what he was doing in the system and did not try to hide his actions."

An interesting note - usually if a campaign/company fires someone for an error, they'll try to blame the campaign/company.  It's rare to have them say, essentially, "This is what we were doing.  The campaign/company is blameless here."

We'll see what happens moving forward, but I think we can doubtlessly say that there is serious friction within the Democratic race, not just between the candidates, but between the party and one of the candidates.  It's not every day that when a political party agrees to reinstate voter data access, it's referred to as "capitulation."

(I will update this post after the first Democratic debate if I feel new light has been shed on this story)

Edit: Nothing significant to update.