Bernie Sanders’s Gift to His Party

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/opinion/bernie-sanderss-gift-to-his-party.html

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Though some opinion polls on Tuesday’s primary in Indiana show Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in a tight race, the plunge in Mr. Sanders’s latest fund-raising numbers makes clear what he doesn’t yet want to say. His campaign — for the presidency, anyway — is most likely nearing its end.

“We intend to fight for every vote and delegate remaining,” Mr. Sanders said in Washington on Sunday. While he continues to infuriate the Clinton campaign by battling for Mrs. Clinton’s superdelegates, his tone suggests that he’s no longer in it to win. He’s fighting to ensure that all his supporters get a chance to cast a ballot during the primary season ending in June, and most of all, that Democratic leaders pay attention to their views.

The Democratic Party and Mrs. Clinton are better off for Mr. Sanders’s presence in this race. His criticism, as Winston Churchill might say, was not agreeable. But it called necessary attention to unhealthy developments in the Democratic Party, including its at-times obliviousness to the lingering economic pain of the middle class and the young, and its drift toward political caution over aspiration.

“I like the idea of saying, ‘We can do much more,’ because we can,” Vice President Joseph Biden Jr., who deferred his own presidential hopes this year, said about Mr. Sanders recently. “I don’t think any Democrat’s ever won saying, ‘We can’t think that big.’”

To this day, Mr. Sanders’s rallies are lit up by people who say he is the candidate most focused on their struggle for jobs, better health care and debt relief, and most interested in taking action against those who profited while wages for the working class stagnated and their hopes diminished.

As President Obama said, Mr. Sanders had “the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose.” Unrealistic, short on details, the populist Mr. Sanders is a wildly gesticulating reminder of how far the Democratic Party, once champion of the underdog, has strayed. He points out the degree to which the party has become captive to economic elites whose agendas don’t necessarily represent the rest of America’s. Mr. Sanders, who raised more than $200 million through small donations, even cast doubt on Democrats’ claims that they need big-money backers to succeed.

Mr. Sanders’s unwillingness to compromise has contributed to a thin record of accomplishment over his decades in Congress. While Mrs. Clinton outflanks him on both knowledge and practice of foreign policy, on domestic policy he has forced her to address the impact of trade deals and globalization, spell out her stances on clean energy and oil and gas exploration, and put more meat on her plans for college affordability. He’s exposed her failure to support $15 an hour as a federal minimum wage, and rightly called her out on the Wall Street speeches that earned her millions and her refusal to make the transcripts public.

Mr. Sanders has exposed a broad vein of discontent that Democrats cannot ignore. Predictions that Mr. Sanders’s supporters could migrate to Donald Trump in the fall are overstated, despite Mr. Trump’s cynical efforts to woo them. It’s more likely that some simply won’t vote. Mrs. Clinton is betting that many Democrats will be motivated to get to the polls if Mr. Trump is the Republican nominee. But to truly unify the party, Mrs. Clinton and party leaders must work to incorporate Mr. Sanders and what he stands for in the party’s approach to the general election. It would also help to acknowledge that the party has strayed at times from its more aspirational path.

Unlike the voices on the Republican side, Mr. Sanders’s has elevated this campaign. The Democratic Party should listen.