How Bernie lost New York ~ long Politico article

NEW YORK — Bernie Sanders had just arrived at the rally, and missed the incendiary remark entirely. Many on the senator’s campaign had never even heard of Dr. Paul Song, the speaker who had just commandeered news coverage of a massive Washington Square rally in New York by referring to “corporate Democratic whores.”
Nevertheless, by the next morning, the campaign was forced into full scramble mode. Cable coverage of the 27,000-person rally was eclipsed by reporting on the furor surrounding the comment, requiring a Sanders response. After first resisting an apology, the campaign settled on disavowing the remark with a tweet.
Story Continued Below
Another day, another lost news cycle.
In New York, Sanders finally hit the wall, his winning streak halted by a daily pummeling that forced him on the defensive and stopped his momentum cold. The tabloids dealt him punishing hit after punishing hit. The Democratic establishment, most of it in Hillary Clinton’s camp, piled on harder than the Sanders campaign expected. Caught up in one distraction after another – a quarrel over debate details, a back and forth with Clinton over her qualifications, a trip to the Vatican in the run-up to the election – Sanders never gained his footing or even came close to pulling off the upset victory he once predicted with frequency.
Just two weeks before, on the night of his victory in Wisconsin, everything seemed to be going Sanders’ way. He was flush with cash thanks to his energized small donors and he was riding a wave of momentum after posting six wins in the seven previous contests. His aides had just agreed to the finishing touches of a debate in New York — something Sanders himself wanted after the campaigns had initially agreed to hold it in Pennsylvania. His top staff viewed the increasingly sharp timbre and pitch of the race as confirmation that Clinton herself was frustrated with the direction of things.
But even then, trouble was brewing. As Wisconsin voters went to the polls, a transcript of a halting Sanders’ interview with the New York Daily News editorial board earlier that week was beginning to generate online chatter, raising questions about Sanders’ solutions on his wheelhouse topics like breaking up the biggest banks. The Clinton campaign quickly seized on the transcript, sending it to millions of its backers as part of a fundraising email making the case that Sanders hadn’t thought through how to accomplish his biggest goals.

The next day, fresh off his victory, Sanders received another hit: his advisers read in disbelief a Washington Post headline that they took to mean Clinton had questioned Sanders’ qualifications for the presidency during a "Morning Joe" interview. It was one step too far, they thought – and Sanders himself agreed