Hillary Clinton’s Secret Weapon Is Bernie Sanders’ Colleagues

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<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/hillaryclinton/24861441685/">Hillary Clinton</a>/Flickr

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Sen Al Franken (D-Minn.) opened for Hillary Clinton Saturday night in Portsmouth with one very important message: she’s good enough, she’s smart enough, and doggone it, she’s a Paul Wellstone progressive.

Clinton’s final pitch to New Hampshire voters is as much about the people she surrounds herself with as it is the former secretary of state herself. On Friday, four woman senators were there to co-opt Bernie Sanders by arguing that the “revolution” America needs is electing the first woman. Stefany Shaheen, daughter of the New Hampshire senator, warmed up the crowd in Portsmouth by name-dropping celebrity backers Lena Dunham, Gloria Steinem, Abby Wambach—proof she’s not only experienced, but maybe cool. Franken was there to follow-up on a subject of intense debate over the last week—what it means to be a progressive.

“Let my clarify something: why they let a guy up here,” Franken began, flanked by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, Gov. Maggie Hassan, and the former secretary of state. He didn’t waste any time invoking the legacy of the late Minnesota senator, a progressive icon who died in a plane crash in 2002 shortly before the midterm elections:

I’m Al Franken, I’m a Senator from Minnesota, and I hold the seat that Paul Wellstone once held. And I can point to someone on this stage whom I wouldn’t be senator from Minnesota [without], and that is Hillary Clinton. My first election was kind of close. I won by 312 votes. Hillary Clinton came twice for me, once in October and then I got a call from her the Sunday before the election, she said “I’m coming out.” And we did a big rally in Duluth and got more than 312 votes at that rally, I gotta tell you. I’m a Paul Wellstone progressive. And let me tell you what that means: Paul said, “We all do better when we all do better.” Now if I knew what a haiku was, I’d say that was a haiku. But evidently I’m told it isn’t. But Paul knew that we all do better when we all do better.

He launched into a personal story of growing up middle-class in Minnesota. And then he returned again to why they let the guy up there.

“Sen. Shaheen, my colleague, and I, like the only other [Senate] Democrats who have endorsed in this race, have endorsed Hillary Clinton for a reason,” he said. “Because this is serious stuff. This is serious stuff. This is Sherrod Brown. This is Cory Booker. This is Tammy Baldwin. We are progressives. And we know what it takes to get things done.”

None of these endorsers will shift many votes on their own (notwithstanding Franken’s claims of Clinton in Duluth), but it’s a death by a thousand cuts strategy. And with Sanders boasting just two members of Congress on his side, Clinton is all too happy to tell voters that the candidates they’ve worked so hard to get elected in the past—the Baldwins and Frankens of the world—are with her.