“The first principle,” said Richard Feynman, “is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
When it comes to pundits and politics this year, I’d revise the great physicist’s admonition as follows: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself that Bernie Sanders can’t win – not just the Democratic nomination, but also the presidency itself.”
The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn’t have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don’t want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can’t.
According to the theory, Sanders’ support has a hard ceiling: It may be intense, but it’s also cultlike and off-putting. Too many Americans know enough about socialism to want a president who wears the term proudly.
And then there are those clips of him saying nice things about the Soviet Union, or defending the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, or finding the silver lining in the Castro dictatorship in Cuba.