Kathleen Geier has a great piece on Bernie Sanders weaknesses, when it comes to race and gender. She writes from the perspective that Sanders has an exemplary record on these issues, but lacks political deftness when he has the opportunity to reach out to these groups and that he doesn't address these issues with the same passion he does economic inequality.
I think this points to a larger issue that the Sanders campaign faces, after IA and NH. The fight for economic inequality is powerful, but it’s not the defining issue among all voters. Among Sanders core support, it’s very important. Some believe that these groups will come around and support Sanders on this one issue alone.
This hasn't happened yet, so there’s an obvious need to fine tune the message, to be better prepared for the ethnically diverse states to come. Sanders will have to reach out and communicate more effectively with minorities and women, to close the gap. He needs to be as passionate about the issues that matter to them, as he is about economic inequality.
The writer is very complimentary of Bernie in the article. It is very well written and is very realistic. I recommend you read the entire piece.
www.thenation.com/...
His treatment of the reparations issue, on the other hand, is a political cock-up of the first order. Bernie’s first mistake was his failure to engage the reparations issue in any depth. He dismissed reparations as “divisive” and impractical (“its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil”).
Though opposing reparations is a defensible position, discussing the issue in such thoughtless and insensitive way is distasteful. And for Sanders, the man famous for proposing such implausible (for now) schemes as free college and single-payer, to play the pragmatism card is even worse. His handling of the issue has alienated the very voters (African Americans) that he needs to win over (one recent poll shows Clinton leading Sanders among Latino and African-American voters by some 50 points). The campaign’s failure to return Ta-Nehisi Coates’s calls asking for further comment added insult to injury (and also says not very comforting things about Team Bernie’s competence).
Both the Planned Parenthood/HRC and the reparations controversies highlight what is perhaps Bernie’s greatest weaknesses: Race and gender issues frequently seem like an afterthought to him, and he doesn’t embrace them with anywhere near the fervor he devotes to economic inequality. Yet his record on racial justice and LGBT issues is excellent, and objectively better than Hillary’s (he was supporting civil unions and same sex marriage long before she was, and he’s also to her left on civil-rights issues like welfare and criminal-justice reform). And on women’s issues, he’s at least as good as she is. (To take one example: Hillary has recently been touting her opposition to the Hyde Amendment, which is fantastic, but Bernie has been voting against it for decades).
Sanders’s Achilles heel is that because he focuses so singlemindedly on economic inequality, he is not always able to speak to the needs and desires of the modern left, a left that is passionate not only about economic injustice but also about injustices tied to race, gender, and sexual identity and orientation.