Milbank: Democrats will hold their noses, nominate Clinton

Sanders and his supporters boast of polls showing him, on average, matching up slightly better against Trump than Clinton does. But those matchups are misleading: Opponents have been attacking and defining Clinton for a quarter-century, but nobody has really gone to work yet on demonizing Sanders. Watching Sanders at Monday night’s Democratic presidential forum in Des Moines, I imagined how Trump — or another Republican nominee — would disembowel the relatively unknown Vermonter.

The first questioner from the audience asked Sanders to explain why he embraces the “socialist” label and requested that Sanders define it “so that it doesn’t concern the rest of us citizens.”

Sanders, explaining that much of what he proposes is happening in Scandinavia and Germany (a concept that itself alarms Americans who don’t want to be like socialized Europe), answered vaguely: “Creating a government that works for all of us, not just a handful of people on the top — that’s my definition of democratic socialism.”

But that’s not how Republicans will define socialism — and they’ll have the dictionary on their side. They’ll portray Sanders as one who wants the government to own and control major industries and the means of production and distribution of goods. They’ll say he wants to take away private property. That wouldn’t be fair, but it would be easy. Socialists don’t win national elections in the United States.

A rational choice

Sanders on Monday night also admitted he would seek massive tax increases — “one of the biggest tax hikes in history,” as moderator Chris Cuomo put it — to expand Medicare to all. Sanders, this time making a comparison with Britain and France, allowed that “hypothetically, you’re going to pay $5,000 more in taxes,” and declared, “We will raise taxes, yes we will.” He said this would be offset by lower health insurance premiums and protested that “it’s demagogic to say, oh, you’re paying more in taxes.”

Well, yes — and Trump is a demagogue.

President Obama seems to know this, too — which would explain why he tiptoed beyond his official neutrality to praise Clinton in an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush. “I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics,” he said. He portrayed Sanders as “the bright, shiny object that people haven’t seen before.”

It doesn’t speak well of Clinton that, next to her, a 74-year-old guy who has been in politics for four decades is a bright and shiny object. The phenomenon has at least as much to do with Clinton as with Sanders: Democrats are eager for an alternative to her inauthentic politics and cautious policies.

I share their frustration with Clinton. But that doesn’t make Sanders a rational choice.