Why is the Democratic establishment shocked at Bernie Sanders' status in the primary contest?

In a few days, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary will have given us a better picture of the Presidential field.

But for today, I want to mention the analysis by David Dayen and Alexander Sammon (They Forgot About Bern The American Prospect 01/28/2020) of how the Democratic political establishment more-or-less pretended that Bernie Sanders' campaign didn't exist until around the first of this year:

Sanders has been in the race since last February [of ], which means he’s spent some 350 days shattering donation records, building a committed fan base of millions, and never exiting the top three in polling, while spending the majority of the race in second place. Meanwhile, he’s run up a long list of high-profile endorsements from prominent politicians and celebrities. This is not someone who snuck up on the field.

Of course, Sanders was a close runner-up during the last presidential cycle, who never really stopped running once Donald Trump was elected. His years of building political infrastructure and track record of appealing to young voters was evident four years ago. He came close to taking out Hillary Clinton, an overwhelming favorite with massive institutional advantages that no 2020 candidate matches. It’s somewhat unfair to say that the political powers that be should’ve seen Sanders coming from a year off; they’ve had the entire latter half of the decade to apprehend his candidacy. [my emphasis]

Dayen and Sammon basically mock the Democratic establishment for being so negligent, even from the standpoint of their own sectarian, inner-party interests. "These are the strategic geniuses we should trust, not only with a general-election campaign against Donald Trump, but with running the country? The people who couldn’t see a Jupiter-sized asteroid headed straight for them?"

I'm a little more fascinated by the mystery of why they took this approach. Some of it was probably plain miscalculation and wishful thinking, i.e., if we ignore him and his annoying supporters, they will go away.

The laziness and groupthink among the major media probably had a lot to do with it, too. They didn't take Sanders seriously as a candidate because none of the people they talk to on a daily basis took him seriously. He and his proposals may be popular. But to cable TV stars earning hundreds of thousands or even millions a year, he just sounds like a crank.

For hardcore Hillary loyalists, it's likely that some of them are still irritated that he challenged her in 2016. Even calculating politicians and political activists can let resentment get the best of them.

And I do think that mainstream Democratic rhetoric about the Trump win contributes to fuzzy thinking about the current race. The self-styled Democratic "resistance" hasn't been able to focus on who to blame for 2016 outcome: Vladimir Putin, Jill Stein, Julian Assange and Wikileaks, James Comey, Bernie Sanders, and so on. Depending on who you're listening to at any one moment, any one of those is clearly to blame. Fuzzy thinking about the 2016 campaign that bounces freely from one scapegoat to the other is not necessarily conducive to thinking clearly about the current race.

As Dayen and Sammon put it, "The blind rage towards Sanders, evinced by the corporate wing of the party, seems to have manifested itself as literal blindness toward an enduring front-runner who could only charitably be described as hiding in plain sight."