The Sanders Brain Trust's Plan to Beat Hillary Clinton

The pizzas ordered in by the Bernie Sanders brain trust had just been delivered to the DoubleTree hotel near the Des Moines airport when the talk turned to Hillary Clinton. It was after midnight this past Saturday, a few hours after Sanders, at the Iowa Democratic Party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner, had used his speech to launch his most sustained and systematic critique of Clinton thus far. Without once mentioning her by name, Sanders indicted the front-runner by implication as an ideological shape-shifter, inconstant in her fealty to progressive principles, often and conveniently arriving late at liberal positions—on campaign finance reform, gay rights, the Iraq War, and Wall Street regulation—that Sanders had held consistently for many years, even when they were broadly unpopular.

Now, at the DoubleTree, three members of the Sanders high command—campaign manager Jeff Weaver, communications director Michael Briggs, and field director Phil Fiermonte—were reflecting on what Clinton's record might say about her character. All agreed that Sanders and his staff believed that Clinton had moved to the left on numerous issues, from the Trans-Pacific Partnership to the Keystone pipeline, for purely political reasons: to foreclose daylight between her and Sanders. I asked Weaver if he thought that made her, as some longtime Clinton critics argue, a craven hypocrite and opportunist?