From an email sent out by the Sanders campaign today:
You MUST see what CNN reported last night about the Clinton campaign's new strategy. It's crazy.
"The Clinton campaign has been watching these Wisconsin results come in, and the delegate race of course is tight there, but the reality is they're running out of patience. So they're going to begin deploying a new strategy, it’s going to be called disqualify him, defeat him and then they can unify the party later."
Disqualify Bernie, defeat our movement, and pick up the pieces later. That's their new strategy.
Hillary Clinton has never taken Bernie Sanders seriously as a candidate, yet with all her structural advantages, she just can’t put him away. I’m not sure what’s more surprising, the fact that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has to stoop to these measures, or the fact that they just admitted it on national TV
New York (CNN)Hillary Clinton's campaign is taking new steps to try and disqualify Bernie Sanders in the eyes of Democratic voters, hoping to extinguish the argument that he is an electable alternative for the party's presidential nomination.
As Sanders took a victory lap following a 14-point triumph in Wisconsin, Clinton took fresh aim at the Vermont senator as part of a three-part strategy before the New York primary on April 19: Disqualify him, defeat him, and unify the party later.
"Some of his ideas just won't work because the numbers don't add up," Clinton told a labor union audience Wednesday in Philadelphia. "In a number of important areas, he doesn't have a plan at all."
It's the latest chapter in Clinton's approach to Sanders. She's tried ignoring him, brushing him aside, gently dismissing his policies. The Clinton campaign has refrained from going nuclear on Sanders, aides say, in large part to keep at least some good will alive in hopes of unifying the party at the end of the primary fight.
No more, a top adviser told CNN. The fight is on. Extending an olive branch to Sanders' supporters "will come later," an adviser said.
It's a new moment in this Democratic primary fight, with the Clinton campaign poised to dramatically escalate its criticism of Sanders in the coming days.
Aides to Clinton said they were simply going on defense, a step needed even more in the wake of their double-digit loss in Wisconsin.
I find it ironic that Clinton is arguing that Bernie’s plans won’t work because they can’t get past Congress, while at the same time attempting to distinguish herself from Bernie on their respective gun stances. Gun control, which couldn’t pass Congress when 90% of the public wanted it, but that is what she claims she will be able to accomplish.
And how exactly after this scorched earth tactic does she intend to offer an olive branch to disaffected voters?
Some Clinton supporters were worried yesterday about what this would do to the party and rightly so. In addition, Bernie’s coalition comes from outside the Democratic party so this ‘strategy” has all the makings of what HuffPost’s Seth Abramson calls “the Democrats flawlessly executing a 10 part plan to lose in November”.
3. Fracture the Democratic Party by broadly supporting the Clinton camp’s attempts to smear Bernie Sanders and his supporters.
Three weeks ago, no one was talking about the Democratic race being “negative.”
Then Bernie Sanders starting winning more Election Day votes than Clinton, started cutting into her delegate lead, and started developing the sort of momentum that could lead to catastrophic electoral results for Clinton in the latter half of the election season. After winning 60% of the delegates in February, Clinton won only 51% of them in March, and is now set to lose the first two votes on April (Wisconsin and Wyoming). The frustration in her camp is palpable, and recently was seen on the face of the candidate herself while reprimanding a Sanders supporter during a public rally.
So the Clinton camp — with the help of the media and cable-news interviews (as well as newspaper editorials) by Party elites — changed the narrative.
Clinton campaign staff put out the conspiracy theory that Sanders was planning (I paraphrase) “a massive negative attack campaign” in New York, based solely on internal polls taken by Sanders to determine which issues New York voters are most interested in hearing the candidates discuss. Clinton supporters Barney Frank and Bakari Sellers accused Sanders of being a “McCarthyite” — comparison to the late Senator Joe McCarthy being one of the most damning slanders in American politics — for noting that oil lobbyists were bundling money for the Clinton campaign and for her super-PAC. The Clinton camp accused the Sanders campaign of “playing games” with the scheduling of a primary debate in New York. They said Sanders was deliberately permitting his supporters to boo Clinton at his rallies. They attacked his surrogates for mentioning, in passing, the FBI investigation into Clinton’s private email server. They accused the Sanders campaign of “lying” about Clinton’s record. They accused Sanders of a secret and anti-democratic plan to convince super-delegates to vote the same way as their states of origin did (and if you can explain to me how that’s either a secret plan or anti-democratic, I’d appreciate it). They falsely claimed that Sanders hadn’t sufficiently rebuked Donald Trump for his comments about criminalizing abortion.
Every day for the past two weeks the Clinton campaign has attacked the ethics and integrity of Sanders and his campaign, usually by falsely claiming that Sanders — for instance, by broadly and on principle opposing super-PACs and money from lobbyists, no matter who their money goes to — was maliciously doing the same to them.
In short, the Clinton campaign went relentlessly negative and managed to get the national media to accusethe Sanders campaign of doing so — a premise set up by a Clinton campaign memo leaked to the media alleging that Sanders “was about to go negative” in New York. It was Karl-Rovian political philosophy at its very best, and it worked for the Clinton campaign — but not in the way they intended.
With each new attack on Sanders, the Clinton campaign has permanently alienated a new crop of Sanders voters. 33 percent of Sanders supporters already say that they might not vote for Clinton; so by going negative and so relentlessly, the Clinton campaign is tearing up potential November votes for their candidate by the tens of thousands or more.