January 28, 2016 at 5:57 PM
Politicians are great at saying things without actually saying things — at suggesting something while allowing themselves enough plausible deniability to get out of whatever becomes of it.
With that said, we present to you: Bernie Sanders launching a negative ad against Hillary Clinton, without mentioning her.
It's clear as day what's going on here. Sanders doesn't want to be seen as directly attacking Clinton. It doesn't fit with his political brand. So instead, he simply mentions the things that have been part of his more-direct attacks on Clinton on the campaign trail (which is apparently where this stuff is okay — just not on TV). Specifically: Wall Street, and how it eludes regulation and rigs the system with campaign contributions and with exorbitant speaking fees. So who has Sanders attacked on the campaign trail for her Wall Street support and speaking fees? We'll give you one guess.
If the Sanders ad only mentioned Wall Street and campaign contributions, I could see a case that maybe this wasn't all about Clinton. He could be talking about all politicians who get money from Wall Street! But the invocation of "speaking fees" makes it obvious. That is a phrase uniquely tied to Clinton these days, given that she was paid $200,000-plus for various speaking gigs after leaving as secretary of state.
Look, we get it. Sanders runs the ad without mentioning Clinton. We all get excited because it's so blatant what he's really doing, and then we write pieces like this one about it. Clinton's name is thus tied to the ad, and the ad is aired even more than it would have been otherwise. More attention is drawn to the attack lines.
It's a little like what happened in 2008, when Mike Huckabee bizarrely gathered reporters to show the attack ad on Mitt Romney that his campaign declined to actually run on TV. He didn't want to run the attack ad, mind you, but he did want to let a bunch of reporters know the content of it. And they took it from there.
Which is all really a silly political game. Sanders is concerned about looking too much like a typical politician running a negative ad against his opponent. But make no mistake, this ad represents the same brand of political gamesmanship. With this ad, Sanders proves he's not above the kind of games that are often required when running for president.
Which really shouldn't be all that surprising.