Yes, Bernie Should Run
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
20 December 18
You have to be crazy to take on the donors who run Washington. Bernie
Sanders doesn't care
It had the vibe of a campaign event, even if it wasn't one.
A few hundred of America's highest-profile liberal politicians, academics
and journalists, many of them old friends - a "progressive Bar Mitzvah," as
one friend jokingly put it - met on a crisp Thursday night in late November
in Burlington, Vermont, at an event hosted by Jane Sanders.
The wife of the Vermont Senator shows an excitement, even ebullience, about
the possibilities of politics that her relentlessly on-message husband often
does not. Jane beamed as the likes of Cornel West and Danny Glover filed
into a lakefront museum to kick off a three-day event hosted by her Sanders
Institute, bearing the Game of Thrones-style title, "The Gathering."
Simon Sinek, a British-American motivational speaker, was the first to
address the crowd.
Sinek's presence threw me a little. Ten years ago I could never have
imagined a TED Talker and Bernie Sanders sharing the same stage. Frankly,
having any planned introduction at all was sort of not-Bernie.
The way he announced for president the last time - impromptu, on a random
strip of grass a dozen yards from the Capitol, after having a request for a
bit of space in the dusty DNC headquarters rejected - was pure Sanders. This
politician does not have a comfortable relationship with fanfare.
Sinek led off with a war metaphor. He asked the crowd why America lost in
Vietnam, despite winning almost every battle and suffering a fraction of the
casualties.
"Because the Americans were fighting to win," Sinek said. "The Vietnamese
were fighting for their lives."
This line drew cheers. This turned into a theme of the conference, that in
the age of Trump, with climate change just one of a dozen dire emergencies
spiraling out of control, there's no more "next time."
"I have two kids, and they're going to fucking die if we don't fix all this.
That's how I look at it," is how Heidi Harmon, the colorful mayor of San
Luis Obispo, put it.
The core argument of progressives who recently elected the likes of
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib to Congress is that canonical
modern-Democrat precepts like the Third Way, "transactional politics" and
triangulation - which focus narrowly on the how of winning elections - no
longer work, in addition to being wrong.
They instead believe they must win the battles and the war, on issues like
global warming, health care and economic inequality, not later but now. For
a hundred reasons, it has to be now.
The latest iteration of the progressive movement is young (data suggested
last time around that more young people voted for Sanders in the primary
than for Trump and Clinton combined), but its leader is not.
Right after the midterms, there were whispers that Sanders might announce
anytime, perhaps even there in Vermont. Maybe even that night?
He was introduced by West.
"My love for this brother runs deep, even when I think he's wrong," West
said, adding that Sanders was "still bearing witness to poor and working
people."
He motioned for Bernie to come onstage. The two embraced with the mother of
all awkward Bern hugs, then Sanders faced the crowd. It was a Mrs. Robinson
moment: look around and all you see are sympathetic eyes. Bernie paused,
gathered himself, and said - exactly the same things he's been saying, for
as long as anyone here could remember.
He blasted the "corporate-owned Congress." He took a shot at the media (he
was doing this long before Trump) for ignoring "a word that is never heard
on TV - It's called poverty."
My notes indicate he uttered to cheers the phrase, "handful of corrupt
companies," which could have come from any Sanders speech at any time in the
last 30 years.
I exhaled in relief. The one thing you can never know about a politician is
how they'll respond to increased attention. Sanders as recently as 2015 was
such an unknown that 76 percent of American voters had no opinion of him. He
seemed comfortable in that role.
That number is down to 9 percent today. After seizing 43 percent of the
Democratic vote in the 2016 primaries and winning high-profile battles
against companies like Amazon and Disney to raise their workers' minimum
wages to $15 an hour, Sanders in some circles is something it would have
been hard to imagine him being years ago: a celebrity.
But if Sanders himself has processed this, it's not obvious. What's both
maddening and endearing about him as a politician is that he never changes.
There are slight stylistic compromises he could probably make to sell
himself a little better by traditional metrics, but he doesn't do it. Which,
frankly, is funny.
It's also what makes him interesting, and a virtual lock to lead, as perhaps
the last major act of his unusual career, a battle for the soul of the
Democratic Party in 2020. The only question is, will he do it as a
presidential candidate, or in some other capacity?
The Democratic political establishment has made its views on this subject
very clear. The Washington Post last year basically ran an article calling
Sanders the Kremlin candidate. Other op-eds in major outlets keep warning
that a repeat Sanders run would somehow drive the Democratic Party into an
unelectability ditch at the exact moment it needs to be unified to oust
Donald Trump.
Even someone I know and like, Hamilton Nolan at Splinter, recently ran a
BERNIE DON'T RUN article. Nolan noted Sanders was "old as hell" and could
shave off enough progressive votes to push the Democrats toward a "nightmare
candidate" like Mike Bloomberg or Mark Cuban if he ran.
I disagree. We've been so trained to think about how other people might vote
down the line that we forget: Our long-term thinking about elections is
often wrong. Even Sanders himself didn't see the last election coming.
IN BURLINGTON, where Sanders has become a larger than life figure - both
revered and much groused about, like a State Dad - almost everyone seems to
know him. A shockingly high percentage of people you meet can do expert
Sanders impersonations. I met a kid who did a whole routine imagining Bernie
gesticulating his way through a complex order at an Arby's drive-thru.
Many Vermonters are personally familiar with the Bern Stare, that
disapproving look you get when you ask Bernie a question he considers
frivolous. In off years, the presidential question summons the Stare faster
than any other. He's spent the past two years going full Belichick on any
reporter who even hinted about 2020.
He still hasn't said anything concrete, not even, seemingly, to those close
to him. Although the New York Times reported last week that he and
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren met and both are "probably" running,
there's been no announcement.
As Rolling Stone reported, a draft movement led by 2016 campaign staffers
has been set up, but Sanders himself hasn't acknowledged it.
Still, Sanders almost has to decide soon. Neither he nor his wife (the
Gathering "was a launch for Jane, too," is how one attendee put it) can
escape the fact that they've become not only synonymous with a larger
movement, but one that likely preceded them.
When Sanders launched his longshot "send-a-message" campaign in 2015, he and
his skeleton staff were stunned in early visits to places like Denver,
Madison and Portland, Maine, to be met by overflowing crowds, in some cases
so big they had to quickly rebook bigger arenas.
They had to adjust on the fly to the realization that something significant
was going on with voters across the political spectrum. The self-proclaimed
socialist from a tiny dairy state who railed against corporate excess and
money in politics in relative obscurity for decades was about to be carried
to national prominence by a surprise wave of outrage and impatience.
Sanders was benefiting from the same electoral shifts that prompted the
Great Punditry Miss of the last election. High priests of conventional
wisdom spent much of 2015 prepping for another Bush-Clinton general
election, blowing off - to catastrophic effect - clear evidence of voter
revolts in both parties.
The oversights were more graphic on the Republican side. Nate Silver's
fivethirtyeight.com swore Donald Trump would play in the NBA finals before
winning the nomination. Dana Milbank of the Washington Post similarly
promised to (and later did) physically eat his own column if Trump became
the nominee.
What they missed was that the electorate in America had transformed in a
fundamental way. By 2016, the worst thing to be in the eyes of a huge
plurality of voters was a representative of the political establishment,
meaning especially the two major parties, corporate donors and the national
media.
Being on the wrong side of those groups, which Sanders was, was suddenly an
electoral plus.
The phenomenon was tied to decades of voter frustration over everything from
war to trade to health care to the role of money in politics, and remains
poorly understood by politicians, business leaders and editorialists at
major daily newspapers, who have never been able to come to terms with the
roots of their own unpopularity.
It's possible the Democratic brand has been rehabilitated in the public's
eyes since 2016, and a combination of a new candidate, better tactics and
voter experience of two years of a Trump presidency would spell victory for
any Democrat in 2020.
It's also possible this is not the case, however, and the absence of someone
like Sanders in the race would mean surrendering all that populist anger out
there into Trump's cynical hands, again.
Campaign reporters constantly make the mistake of thinking politicians are
causes, not effects. They've been trained to think of candidates as consumer
creations that succeed or fail on the strength of concept (and if not the
concept, the execution).
Bill Clinton is the sui generis of Third-Way-ism, a southerner who offered a
mix of aw-shucks stump charisma, fiscal conservatism and a whiff of
post-Sixties social liberalism. His 1992 run perfectly executed the plan for
victory that folks in the Democratic Leadership Council dreamed might work,
after the catastrophe of Walter Mondale in 1984. Offer voters the right
political product, they thought, and they will buy.
But in the real world, these things can work backwards. The 2016 electorate
was so profoundly dissatisfied with the usual choices that when Donald Trump
slipped in the polls briefly in late October and early November of 2015, the
immediate beneficiaries were two other non-politicians, Ben Carson and Carly
Fiorina.
Pundits had been predicting that a Pat Buchanan-style protest curiosity like
Trump would sooner or later fade, and he did. But he didn't stay "faded,"
among other things because 2016 Republican voters could not and would not
consider any establishment alternative, not even fringy, mean ones like Ted
Cruz.
Sometimes voters go through drastic changes of mind before parties even have
a chance to offer them choices. After years of not embracing big shifts,
they may suddenly decide they want universal health care, free college
tuition, a slashed defense budget, a national minimum wage, and other
sweeping ideas.
Other younger politicians may end up offering those same things, which would
be great. But with Sanders, voters burned by past broken promises have
probably guessed by now he's constitutionally incapable of deviating from
his platform. I don't even think Sanders would know how to betray his own
ideas for political gain.
About that: He was roundly mocked in 2016 for describing his campaign as a
revolution, but as the policy discussions at the Gathering showed, his
platform is actually revolutionary, in a specific way.
UMass-Amherst economist Robert Pollin appeared to unveil a massive plan to
cost out the Medicare-for-All proposal Sanders is likely to spend the next
years stumping.
Pollin's plan is to reduce medical costs in America from 18 percent of GDP
to between 9-11 percent, using a single-payer plan that mainly targets the
waste in the system (read: corporate profits). He addressed the "biggest
insurance companies in America," saying half-wryly, half sternly: "We're
going to put you out of business."
Sanders is no Lenin or Trotsky. He doesn't want to overthrow free enterprise
or establish a national ice cream. But the movement he and his wife are
leading has goals that are genuinely threatening to the traditional funders
of presidential campaigns of both parties in America: banks, defense
contractors, pharmaceutical and energy companies, etc.
Sanders and co. hope to plow the proceeds of these conquests into an
FDR-scaled "Green New Deal," aimed at a fundamental transformation of the
country's transportation, housing, energy and agricultural systems.
It's ambitious and drastically different from what Democratic voters have
been offered by any viable candidate for a while. If voters aren't behind
such a program, that's what primary seasons are for, finding that out. If
they are, however, it would be a huge error not to have someone in the
running backing it.
IN THE mid-2000s, then-congressman Sanders invited me to tag along to work
in the House for nearly a month. He explained he wanted national audiences
to know how money-dominated and dysfunctional our national legislature could
be.
I found him odd at first. Sanders almost never asked to go off the record,
and he seemed so indifferent to how some of his more blunt observations
about his workplace might play in print that I wondered at first if there
might be something wrong with him.
It took a while to realize that Sanders simply is who he appears to be.
There's no second-level calculation there, no chilled-out off-duty version
who stops babbling about public heating oil programs or VA coverage once you
turn off the recorder.
This makes him odd, and an abject fail according to the "candidate you want
to have a beer with" standard, but it doesn't make him dishonest, a fact
voters picked up on four years ago. It's one of the reasons why the
septuagenarian did well with young people, and why he currently polls better
with nonwhite voters than white ones, despite legends to the contrary.
This is why cynics always respond negatively to Sanders. In their world he
doesn't compute at all, so they keep inventing angles to explain him: he's
an "egomaniac," or in it for personal gain somehow ("He has three houses!"),
or a delusional bumbler out to poison the electorate with irresponsible and
unrealistic expectations.
As to that last point: Sanders in 2015-2016 went from harmless, terminally
ignored fringe-left curiosity to despised, possibly Russian-backed Hillary
Spoiler virtually overnight. He's probably second only to Trump as a target
of press and social media invective, which paints him as a racist, socialist
serpent in the fallen Eden of the should-have been Clinton presidency.
Some of this negativity is predictable, given that the Sanders platform
would massively disenfranchise the traditional financial backers of the
modern Democratic Party: Wall Street, pharmaceutical and insurance
companies, Silicon Valley, lobbyists and corporate law firms, etc.
Whether it's now or later, whoever takes on those interests is going to take
a hell of a beating. That Sanders seems willing to be that person seems
reason enough to embrace another run. Someone has to take up those fights
eventually. It might be a while before anyone else volunteers for the job.
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