Bernie Sanders Reveals He Has No Plan (And That Might Be a Good Thing)

I didn’t watch the snoozefest of a Democratic debate last night, but it looks like Bernie Sanders is up to his normal old tricks.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty tweeted, “In Bernie’s world, there are no thorny problems or complicated trade-offs. Every problem is just because ‘we’ haven’t ‘stood up’ enough to somebody powerful. And apparently once we ‘stand up’ to these powerful forces, the problems just get solved.”

In other words, Bernie might sound like he has glorious plans, but he has no idea how to pull them off.  The New York Times editorial board  asked for his plan to deal with Mitch McConnell:

That’s a really ambitious agenda. What of that legislation do you think could pass a Mitch McConnell Senate? 

I think, and thank you for asking that, I need a minute on this one, O.K.? Because I want to just convey to you that I look at the world maybe a little differently than you do, and I say that in due respect. When I talk about a political revolution, it means being an administration unprecedented, certainly in the modern history of this country, maybe going back to F.D.R Maybe even beyond F.D.R. So to me, what my administration is about is not sitting with Mitch in the Oval Office or wherever it is, negotiating something. It is rallying the American people around an agenda that they already support. All right? This is, I think, what makes me a little bit different than other candidates, and that is not only will I be commander in chief, I will be organizer in chief. 

And I think the agenda that we have brought out in almost every respect is supported by the American people. So one of my first stops, by the way, will be in Kentucky, a state that is struggling very hard. One of the poorest. I love the people in Kentucky. I’ve been there and we, you know, and I will be back … 

 David French, writing in The Dispatch, translates:

Sanders is saying, “I got nothing.” He cannot “organize” his way through senators who were elected in large part to block the Democratic agenda. 

A visit to Kentucky won’t change the election results for Mitch McConnell or Rand Paul. Absent an Obama-scale victory, he can’t even promise the relatively modest Obama-scale results. Even if the Democrats win a slight Senate majority, don’t think for a minute that vulnerable Democrats from purple states would either discard the legislative filibuster or ram through the largest and most consequential government expansion in the nations’ history on a bare majority vote. 

Of course, I’d argue that he has no workable plan, because his proposed policies don’t work. Last night’s debate proved that for all reasonable Americans.

Let’s hope naïve Democrats can see it, too.

Hat Tip: The Dispatch