Tag Archives: Tad Devine

For Bernie, the clock continues to run

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The Bernie Sanders campaign had a great night, winning one-sided victories in the Idaho and Utah caucuses.

The Hillary Clinton campaign had a great night, winning the Arizona primary by a substantial margin.

The overall result: a strong positive for Clinton.

In spite of Bernie’s yoooge leads in the caucuses, Clinton comes out of Tuesday night with a slight net gain in delegates*. And that’s the only thing that matters. As good an outcome as it was for Bernie, he needs to do a lot better — and he can’t afford any Arizona-style setbacks.

*True when I wrote this. No longer the case; Bernie picked up a few delegates overall. My point remains the same: Bernie’s running out of time.

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“Maybe they’re going to put him on the ticket”

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I’m sure this will earn me a fresh round of ire from the Sanderistas, but this time you’ll have to blame Bernie’s top campaign adviser Tad Devine. In a wide-ranging interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, he delivered a rather astonishingly frank overview of the state of the campaign. And it included some definite indicators that Bernie’s quest for the presidential nomination is coming close to its end.

Not his campaign, mind you. Devine remains committed to, in Bernie’s oft-repeated words, fighting all the way to the convention. As well he should. But Devine threw out some unmistakable hints that time is running out on a serious quest for the big prize.

Starting with the headline, in which Devine openly mulls the possibility of Bernie as the vice presidential nominee.

“I’m sure, of course, anyone would,” Devine says when I ask if he could see a scenario where Sanders would actually say yes. They haven’t talked about the possibility, Devine adds, and he says Sanders would never, ever consider it “unless you know, it was done in the right and proper way.” That’s a far cry from last year, when Sanders and Co. rebuffed the second-banana suggestion by countering with an offer to give Clinton the vice presidential slot on his ticket.

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