Sanders: The Best Thing to Happen to Clinton?

Jacob Heilbrunn

Politics, United States

The senator has jolted the former secretary of state out of her bubble.

Who knew that Henry Kissinger would become an issue in the Democratic race for the presidency? Last night it became a defining moment between Bernie Sanders’s utopianism and—dare I say it?—Clinton’s realism. Sanders harrumphed that “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger.” Presumably this did not come as a deep disappointment to Kissinger. Sanders went on to blame Kissinger for Pol Pot’s depredations in Cambodia, a line popularized by William Shawcross in his 1979 book Sideshow, which alleged that “Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime.” A somewhat surprised Clinton—she must have wondered why they were relitigating the Vietnam War in 2016, other than that the exchange offered further proof of Sanders’s New Left heritage—responded that “his opening up China and his ongoing relationships with the leaders of China is an incredibly useful relationship for the United States of America."

The question about Sanders, if he’s unwilling to accept advice from Kissinger, is pretty simple: who, if anyone, is he talking to? As David Ignatius points out in the Washington Post today, Sanders is a black hole when it comes to foreign policy. It might take the foreign policy equivalent of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory that just detected the waves that Einstein predicted to discover what Sanders would do as commander in chief.  

Clinton, by contrast, wrapped herself in the mantle of President Obama. The discerning Cathleen Decker of the Los Angeles Times notes that Clinton invoked Obama’s name 21 times last night, using him as what Decker calls a kind of “character witness” to appeal to the younger voters that Obama attracted during his own runs. Clinton acted as though Sanders is regularly defaming Obama. She declared,

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