Come on Bernie Sanders, you said you weren’t going to pull this crap this time
Earlier this week Bernie Sanders fell behind Joe Biden by about a million popular votes, and the polls in upcoming states suggest that he’ll have an extremely difficult time catching Biden. Faced with this new reality, Sanders publicly announced this week he had no desire to engage in personal attacks against Biden.
What Sanders didn’t tell us was that he was planning to sit back and remain silent while sending his campaign surrogates out there to engage in personal attacks against Joe Biden. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has engaged in ugly attacks on Biden’s character on Twitter, drawing sharp rebuke from observers, but no public response from Sanders. Now Cornel West has taken the stage at a Sanders campaign event and compared Biden to Milli Vanilli. No, really:
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At a @BernieSanders event in Flint, @CornelWest just compared @JoeBiden to Milli Vanilli, saying he was a “neo-liberal centrist” “lip-syncing” progressive ideas because it was an election cycle. pic.twitter.com/IyGjnsNqEx
— Adam Kelsey (@adamkelsey) March 8, 2020
It’s true that Bernie Sanders can’t control what his official campaign surrogates say. But when they say things that are inappropriate, or incompatible with his campaign’s message, he can stop using them as surrogates. We’ve seen no evidence that Sanders has any intention of reining in or dumping his surrogates who are smearing Biden. In other words, Sanders was lying. He’s engaging in personal attacks on Biden; they’re just not coming out of his own mouth.
