One of the main talking points being used against Bernie Sanders on this site is that he supposedly “hasn’t been attacked yet.” This is used as an excuse to explain away Bernie’s slow, but steady, climb in polling and steadily positive favorable ratings over the last few months. According to his critics, Sanders can’t keep these numbers because no one has ever tried to dig up dirt about him.
Bernie isn’t some innocent newcomer who has never had volleys thrown his way. Bernie has been attacked numerous times during his previous elections, and he has weathered all of them to win eight terms in Congress and two terms in the U.S Senate. Overall, Bernie has won fourteen elections, losing only twice since the 1970s. Source
As you will see, Bernie’s opponents were grasping at straws to find something to attack him with…
In 2006, Bernie Sanders ran for U.S. Senate against Republican Rich Tarrant. Unlike Bernie, Rich had no qualms with throwing dirt to try to win:
PETER OVERBY: Rich Tarrant has been on Vermont television almost nonstop all year. First, 15 different meet the candidate spots. Then, this summer before he'd actually won the Republican nomination, attacks on Sanders.
(Soundbite of TV campaign ad)
Unidentified Woman (Actress): (In television ad) What's happened to Bernie?
Mr. RICH TARRANT (Republican, Vermont): (In television ad) I'm Rich Tarrant, and I approve this message, because we really need to know how our representatives vote.
OVERBY: Ads accuse Sanders of quietly voting to protect child molesters and against single working mothers.
Did the ads do any damage? As NPR reported,
These ads might be run-of-the-mill in other states, but in Vermont they've backfired. A recent poll shows that Sanders' negatives are up slightly, and Tarrant's' negatives are up more.
Rich used Attack Ad! It’s not very effective…
Bernie easily won his 2006 Senate election, receiving more than double the number of votes of his main opponent!
Another Republican went for a typical attack ad as well, this time in 2014:
A prominent Vermont businessman released a television ad Wednesday attacking Sen. Bernie Sanders and his wife, Jane. The ad, paid for by Republican benefactor Rodolphe “Skip” Vallee, demands that Jane Sanders return the severance pay she received in 2011 when she resigned as president of Burlington College.
Vallee is owner of R.L. Vallee Inc., a gasoline distributor and operator of the Maplefields chain of convenience stores. This is at least the third time Vallee has produced a television ad attacking Sanders.
…
The latest ad calls Sanders a hypocrite for criticizing “golden parachutes” in the corporate world while his wife accepted nearly $200,000 when she left the college. In a phone interview Wednesday, Jane Sanders defended her payout, saying it was a paid year of sabbatical contractually due her, and standard practice in academia.
Typical GOP tactics, trying to paint someone as a “hypocrite” since opposing executives getting millions of dollars in “bonus” money after leaving their “too big to fail” banks is supposedly the same as one’s wife getting a settlement for the wages she already earned.
How did Bernie respond?
“I’ll answer with a question,” Sanders said. “Why are you keeping gas prices so artificially high and when will you lower your gas prices 30 cents a gallon, more in line with the rest of the state?”
In 2012, Sen. Sanders launched an attack on high gas prices in northeastern Vermont and put the blame on the handful of companies, including Vallee’s, that owned most of the area’s gas stations. The resultant publicity brought prices down, although recently the Burlington Free Press has reported that once again, prices are significantly higher in the Burlington area than elsewhere in Vermont.
Much like with the recent dust-up concerning NGP VAN and the DNC, Bernie isn’t afraid to take the offensive and fight back.
Seriously, Bernie’s staff does NOT pull punches:
"Bernie Sanders will not be intimidated by a Republican millionaire Bush fund-raiser who has crawled into the gutter and bought TV ads attacking Bernie's wife," Briggs said in a statement late Wednesday afternoon.
Source
So what about now, with this election? Surely the Conservative media is completely ignoring Bernie… right?
Not quite. It didn’t take long to find screeds attacking Bernie (and Democrats in general) on foreign policy, claiming that Sanders is indirectly trying to “dismantle Western civilization.”
Don’t click on that link. Townhall doesn’t deserve our click revenue.
Conservatives are also trying to use Bernie’s stance on climate change against him. When Bernie was confronted by a reporter for a climate change denial group, he kept his cool giving a factual, to-the-point response.
“The planet is warming up. The oceans are warmer than they used to be. We’ve just had the hottest summer in modern history,” said Sanders. “There really is not a debate anymore about global warming. That debate is over.”
“The scientific community is unanimous about it. You ask the Department of Defense of the United States what they consider to be one of the great national security issues, it is global warming. And the time is now what people are saying by the hundreds of thousands that we have to transform our energy systems away from fossil fuels, move to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.”
But what about the dreaded “s-s-s-socialist!” label that we are told to fear?
Bernie has already been scrutinized over his “honeymoon” to Burlington, VT’s sister city Yaroslavl in 1988. I could see a TV ad aired over this as some sort of Soviet red-baiting, but its been known for a long time and hasn’t made an impact to my knowledge.
Conservative radio hosts have referred to Sanders as the “socialist senator” since at least 2007 and have recently attacked him as a “Liberal Weasel Jew” who is “anti-American.”
If Bernie is gaining in polls despite being called a “anti-American” “Jewish atheist”, what, exactly, are his critics expecting the GOP to say that will bring him down?
Maybe I’m supposed to stop supporting Bernie because some jerk said this:
Bernie Sanders is not connecting, I don't believe, with anyone outside of his demographic, which are old hippies that wish Woodstock would come back.
Apparently this millennial is just an “old hippie.” Who knew?
Don’t worry, fellow Sanderistas. Republicans have already “thrown the book” at Bernie, and Bernie has shrugged it off while beating his opponents by yuge margins. If my brief look at his past campaigns shows anything, it is that Sanders and his long-time staff know what they’re doing. Bernie isn’t going to be easily “swift boated” or “Benghazi’d” or taken down by the dreaded S-word.
The people of Vermont saw past these attacks, and have time and time again voted for a true man of the people. I hope the rest of America follows their lead.