It’s so lucky for you that the candidate you already didn’t support turns out to have a scandal that disqualifies him from office. Thanks, George Will!
Looking at this “scandal” in isolation is a mistake. Everyone who watches politics knows that the Republican Spin Industry has made an art form out of ginning up scandal out of anything they can get their paws on. The question shouldn’t be, will they turn this into a scandal? The question should be, how will the scandals they try to pin on Sanders compare to the scandals they’ll try to pin on Clinton?
For Sanders, they’ll paint him as a socialist. He’ll say, “Yeah, and?” and make it his job to convince voters that his proposals work for them. Sanders is pretty unlikely to spend much time talking about this trip. It may hurt him.
For Clinton, they’ll talk about emails, Bengazi, emails, Watergate, her husband’s affairs, emails, Vince Foster, Travelgate, fantasy snipers, Foggy Bottom, emails, Sidney Blumenthal, and electronic message servers. Clinton is likely to give snide dismissals of claims, falling back on what was strictly legal rather than discussing whether her behavior was ethical.
For the OP to make sense, you’d need to argue that Sanders’s trips and letters from the eighties are somehow more scandalfodder than Clinton’s behavior from the last decade, let alone her behavior from the last quarter century.
Is that really an argument anyone thinks they can make?
Yeah, of course it is, for one simple reason: few people are judging Hillary for the first time in 2016 while many are judging Bernie for the first time. Ergo, Bernie’s “scandals” matter a lot more than Hillary’s.
I’m missing your “ergo.” Why would a “new” scandal matter more than an old one, or an ongoing one?
Edit: to be clear, the scandal is new only in the sense that it’s the latest thing dug up by a Republican spin doctor and gleefully bandied about by Democrats who oppose Sanders, not that it’s dealing with anything from the last quarter century.
Because of the way people form opinions about people. We are Bayesians. I’ve known you for years now as a poster on this message board. If someone comes along and reveals your secret text messages showing you to have used some racial slurs, it is not going to cause me to radically revise my view of you because I’m incorporating that piece of evidence into a much larger body of evidence. By contrast, if a February 2016 join date posts some crypto-racist rant, I’m going to conclude pretty quickly that the dude’s not worth listening to.
Bernie effectively has a February 2016 join date for most of the country. Hillary is a '99er.
I dunno. The scandals Clinton has feed into the narrative that she’s untrustworthy, dishonest, and in it only for selfish reasons. The scandals that Sanders has feed into the narrative that he’s a socialist. Sanders might be a relative latecomer to the scene, but he comes with a strong brand.
If someone joins the messageboard with the username RushisRight, and they post a screed about how evil liberals are, it’s not like that screed is going to change my opinion of them; the brand is already established.
Even if you’re right, though, that folks don’t know much about Sanders, I’m still unconvinced. It’s probably true that this honeymoon nonsense will be processed differently from the Benghazi nonsense: the former will be an attempt to convince people of something they didn’t believe before (because they didn’t know Sanders much), whereas the latter will remind people of something they already believed (because they’ve been hearing these bad things for years).
I don’t see that the established nature of Clinton’s “scandals” is a boon for her. Indeed, I see an attempt by some Clinton supporters to turn her decades of scandal into a feature, not a bug, and I think it’s a bit of a stretch.
I agree that the match between scandal and narrative is important. Scandals that resonate with narratives are much more dangerous than others. In this case, I think both sets of scandals resonate with the narrative, but I think you characterize the anti-Sanders narrative overly charitably. davida03801’s post is a better example of it.
I think that factor is independent from the other factor I was discussing, which is the amount of evidence the individual already has about the person’s character.
I’m not arguing it’s a feature. I am making one specific argument: all else being equal, new scandals affect Bernie more than Hillary because people know less about him.
As you say, that’s not the only factor. Other factors include the extent to which the scandal resonates with the narrative, and of course the merits of the scandal. The scandal addressed in the OP has very low merit and medium-level resonance, in my view. But as compared to a low merit, medium-resonance scandal concerning Clinton, the OP scandal will have more impact.