Bernie Sanders' Downside. Irascibility, Latinos, NRA

An irritated Bernie Sanders tries to speak as he is shouted down by minority protesters Saturday at a Netroots Nation town hall meeting in Phoenix.  THE BIG IDEA: PHOENIX—Bernie Sanders is unaccustomed to being heckled by protesters. The self-identified democratic socialist was caught off guard here Saturday when African-American and Latino activists jeered him at Netroots Nation. Sanders’ inability to control the audience – he tried to shut them up and then he tried to yell over them – underscores his broader struggle to expand his appeal and highlights why his summer surge is unlikely to last. The huge crowds Sanders draws are overwhelmingly white, and polling consistently shows that virtually all of his support comes from whites. After Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two contests on the calendar, Latinos and African-Americans represent a massive share of the Democratic primary electorate in the next two: Nevada and South Carolina. The senator’s standard stump speech – a call for political revolution – does not include much specifically aimed at Latino or African-American voters. Asked specifically what he’s done for black Americans Saturday, he cited his vote for Obamacare. Asked to offer concrete proposals on what he’d do to help blacks if elected, he initially responded: “We’re going to transform the economic system so we create millions of new jobs.” The generalities only made the protesters angrier. “I want Bernie Sanders to say my name,” they chanted as the senator tried to speak. The event went so off the rails that the moderator abruptly ended it 15 minutes early. “Okay, good,” said a peeved Sanders. He then skipped a scheduled meeting with black activists. Sanders aides’ point out that he attended the March on Washington, endorsed Jesse Jackson Jr.’s 1988 presidential campaign and has a 100 percent rating from the NAACP. “Black lives, of course, matter,” Sanders told the crowd here. But if Sanders cannot bring African-Americans into his coalition, his support in the nominating contest will be decidedly limited. STRUGGLING TO SCALE UP—Will the Summer of Sanders be followed by the Fall of Sanders? One of his own strategists mused on that question to a Boston Globe reporter. “Already the Sanders campaign infrastructure is creaking under the weight of the unexpected interest in his candidacy,” reports Annie Linskey, who traveled with the senator on his weekend campaign swing. “Tens of thousands of bumper stickers were on back order. Venues for rallies need to be changed multiple times as the RSVPs pile high … He revels in this relative lack of professional help. To make his point, he briefly commandeered an interview with a reporter last week in Washington. ‘Ask me who my campaign finance director is,’ he said over coffee in a Senate cafeteria. ‘We don’t have one. Ask me who my pollster is,’ he said. ‘We don’t have one.’ He said he writes his own direct mail.”  Watch a 13-minute clip of Sanders’ give-and-take with the hecklers in Phoenix on YouTube: WEAK ON IMMIGRATION—Sanders helped kill comprehensive reform in 2007, siding with labor over Latinos. Some Latino activists have complained that Sanders does not talk about the issue as much as Hillary Clinton, something else that will prevent him from forming an enduring and viable bulwark of support. At the town hall, moderator Jose Antonio Vargas (an undocumented immigrant who formerly wrote for The Washington Post) pressed Sanders on his vote opposing the 2007 immigration bill, which Clinton supported. Sanders explained that, while he backs a pathway to citizenship, he worries about a flood of cheap labor entering the country and taking  jobs from blue-collar Americans. Back then, he spoke about his “strong support” for “securing our borders” and “to hold employers accountable for hiring illegal immigrants.” But he voted for the 2013 immigration bill that passed the Senate after getting money to help affected workers. SOFT ON GUNS—The National Rifle Association played a pivotal role getting Sanders elected to the House. David A. Fahrenthold reports on the front page of today’s Post that the NRA actively opposed the reelection of a Republican incumbent after he sponsored an assault weapons ban: “As a candidate in 1990, Sanders won over gun rights groups by promising to oppose one bill they hated — a measure that would establish a waiting period for handgun sales. In Congress, he kept that promise. The dynamic served as an early demonstration that, despite his pure-leftist persona, Sanders was at his core a pragmatic politician, calculating that he couldn’t win in rural Vermont without doing something for gun owners.” Amazing quote: “Bernie Sanders is a more honorable choice for Vermont sportsmen than Peter Smith,” Wayne LaPierre, who was — and still is — a top official at the national NRA wrote members that year. Sanders supporters see him as a modern-day Robin Hood.