By Adam Johnson, AlterNet
“Pretend” there’s a race? Isn’t that sort of the whole point of democracy? To have as much debate and vetting as possible before nominating a potential leader of the free world? Matt Yglesias at Vox also dismissed this entire primary process out of hand, titling a section in his review of the debate, “Clinton is not facing first-rate competition.”
It’s unclear what the rush is. The first primary is months away and they’re ready to call it based entirely on they and their pundit buddies’ ad hoc analysis of one debate. This tweet by Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe would perfectly sum up mainstream media’s cluelessness:
A “protest candidate”? If Cohen hasn’t noticed the electorate is full of piss and vinegar and rancor which is precisely why an otherwise obscure, self-described socialist has rose in the polls the way he has.
But the question still remains: why the rush to write off Sanders? Why the constant gap between how the public perceives Sanders and how the mainstream media does? Why, most of all, would anyone listen to the very same pundit class that was wrong in ‘08 and continues to be wrong in 2015?
