"Why Bernie Sanders Still Doesn’t Pose a Critical Threat to Hillary Clinton" By Jamelle Bouie
"For more than 20 years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have engaged with black voters, black leaders, and black communities. They’re familiar. And when coupled with the role blacks play in the Democratic primary—stalwart voters who tend to support the safest choice—this adds up to a powerful advantage for Hillary. So much so that the only candidate to breach it—Barack Obama—had to run an almost flawless campaign, in addition to being black himself. Had Obama failed to build ties to the black political establishment—and had he failed to show his viability with wins among white Democrats—it’s not clear he would have overcome and reversed Clinton’s advantage with blacks....
This truth gets to a broader fact about where we are in the Democratic presidential primary. Clinton is a transactional politician who operates from the center of the Democratic Party. Sanders is an ideological politician who has worked, for his entire career, to push the Democratic Party to the left.
Clinton is struggling to build enthusiasm for her campaign because it’s hard to build excitement over a transaction. She can promise to fight for Democrats, she can promise to represent them, but she can’t bring a “political revolution.” But Sanders, as a possible nominee for the presidency, has the opposite problem. It is hard to transition from protesting the party establishment to trying to lead it. Whether he can do so—whether, in effect, he can become more transactional—will play a big part in his electoral success. If he can break or subvert Clinton’s relationship with black Democrats, he can win. If he can’t, he won’t."
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