Last Friday, Bernie Sanders published an op-ed in the West Virginia–based Charleston Gazette-Mail laying out the argument for the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package currently before the Senate. With his trademark message discipline, Sanders made a direct, accessible, and moral case for the key items in the bill, going on to note the strong opposition from corporate interests and cataclysmic wealth disparities that form the appalling backdrop of the current wranglings in Congress.

From start to finish, every word of the intervention was true: from Sanders’s claim that a majority of Americans stand to benefit from the bill’s passage (and support its most significant provisions), to his observation that the greatest source of opposition comes not only from the Republican Party but also “drug companies, the insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry and the billionaire class” who “want to maintain the status quo in which the very rich get richer while ordinary Americans continue to struggle to make ends meet.” Given his choice of newspaper, Sanders’s ultimate objective was quite clear — though, for what it’s worth, West Virginia’s coal baron Senator Joe Manchin, who, alongside Arizona’s Krysten Sinema is currently the biggest obstacle to the reconciliation package — received only a single passing mention in the second to last paragraph.

Needless to say, the response to Sanders’s op-ed, both from parts of the media and from Manchin himself, was entirely predictable. Leading the charge was prominent Iraq War booster and #resistance member Bill Kristol, who smugly questioned the strategic wisdom of publishing the piece. “Maybe there’s some brilliant strategy I don’t get here, but this attempt by Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders to publicly pressure Joe Manchin through an op-ed in a West Virginia paper seems at best pointless, and at worst reckless and likely to backfire.”