“'Mudslinging is not part of the campaign strategy that Sanders and his advisers have crafted'David Corn wrote last summer for Mother Jones;" "No matter how high Sanders rises in the polls, there’s still a sense that he’s in a friendly family squabble, not a bloody political street fight — and one that at some level, he appears to neither expect nor really want to win." "That strategy fits with his track record in Vermont, where he’s long eschewed negative advertising. But it also fits with a candidate who doesn’t honestly expect to win, and doesn’t want to compromise his purity and popularity in pursuit of a chimera. But can he sustain that high-mindedness if it suddenly seems as if victory, not just adulation, might be within his grasp or if his rising poll numbers inspire the Clinton campaign to turn sustained fire on him?
At www.nytimes.com
