This past weekend I talked about how Bernie Sanders has effectively surrendered his campaign to the Black Lives Matter movement and the shameful way that he allowed a handful of protesters to take over his events and boot him from his own stage. I may not have many opportunities to say something nice about Hillary Clinton, but if nothing else she was able to put on a demonstration for Bernie as to how you handle such a situation. You simply shut the troublemakers out. (Politico)

Hillary Clinton met with five Black Lives Matter activists behind closed doors following her campaign event here on Tuesday evening, after the group tried to disrupt the forum but arrived too late to get past security…

While the group was initially not let into the event — a community forum on substance abuse at Keene Middle School — the campaign let them into an overflow room, where they watched on live stream.

Reporters were not allowed into the group’s meeting with Clinton, but the activists said they had recorded the exchange and plan to publish it.

I’m still not seeing where BLM has posted the video anywhere, but it doesn’t sound like the “private meeting” went that well for Clinton.

The activists said Clinton understood their problems, but that her answers were similar to what they’ve heard from other candidates.

“It rings similar in that it is a political response, right? They’re politicians, and that it’s a conversation about, again, policy and about drafting new legislation and those things, without, I think, the deep underlying conversation around how those policies were drafted in a way that supports white supremacist violence,” Yancey said, before clarifying later that she felt good about having had the exchange.

This is one case where Clinton’s Great Wall of Silence strategy paid off for her in spades. The BLM crew was telegraphing their punches a bit too loudly and Team Clinton caught wind of it. They shut down the small, “private” event before they had the chance to get in there and try to seize the stage the way they did repeatedly with Sanders. Then, in order to get in some damage control, Clinton cancelled her planned Q&A with reporters to instead speak to the protesters. (No journalists allowed, of course.) That probably mollified them enough – at least temporarily – to get out of Dodge without it blowing up in their faces. As a bonus she got to avoid any more unpleasant questions about her email server.

The problem for Sanders is that Hillary’s tactic may be impossible for him to duplicate for two reasons. First, Clinton keeps an iron lock on her events and controls who can get in and who can’t. That frustrates the press and even some of her supporters, but it allows here to maintain image control and prevent a debacle like Sanders’ west coast events. Bernie is relying on huge, raucous, open rallies to keep drawing attention to himself in terms of earned media and to differentiate himself from Clinton. When you’re letting 20,000 screaming fans stream into the venue it’s going to be nearly impossible for a small, inexperienced team to identify and then ban the BLM leaders. And even if they managed the feat, the spectacle of the minority activists being thrown off site by the old white guy’s security team would be feast for the media which Sanders has to avoid.

Clinton has another advantage going for her also. She still has a permanent Secret Service security detail with her. If anyone tries to rush the stage they can be on hand to take them down fast citing “security concerns” rather than political embarrassment. It still wouldn’t look great, but it would work better than nothing and give them a talking point to try to gloss over the ruckus. Sanders has no such luxury. He has a few staffers and volunteers who are quick on the draw to apologize and appease but seem totally clueless when it comes to having to put some muscle into the security aspects of the job.

Still, Sanders has to do better or his campaign will remain a joke. He may want to look into hiring some full time security guards.