From Boston magazine, Bernie Sanders is cold as ice: He’s chilly with staff, frosty with fans, and regularly ices out reporters — so how is the socialist firebrand from Vermont suddenly torching Hillary Clinton in the race for president? Kathleen Geier on Bernie’s greatest weakness: Race and gender issues frequently seem like an afterthought to him, and he doesn’t embrace them with anywhere near the fervor he devotes to economic inequality. Bernie Sanders is feeling the heat — can he handle the burn? Dissecting Paul Krugman’s Bernie backlash: Elias Isquith on how being a Sanders skeptic doesn’t make you a hack. Radical politics for grown-ups: Jedediah Purdy on Bernie Sanders and the theory of change. Would Bernie Sanders be a “nightmare” for red state Democrats? Alex Seitz-Wald and Leigh Ann Caldwell investigate. It’s time for Democratic primary voters to focus on what they're hiring a president to do.
Can Democrats channel America’s discontent? The party has moved left in response to hard times; that should help it at the polls, but will it? The pugnacious, relentless progressive party that wants to remake America: Molly Ball on how the Working Families Party has pushed the political debate to the left in the states where it’s already active; now — in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders — it’s ready to take that fight nationwide. The Right and Left both want radical change — guess who is a lot closer to getting it?
