The Bernie Sanders personality test
>>Bernie Sanders was several takes into a video delivering a message he desperately needed to convey last fall — that he was healthy enough to soldier on after his heart attack — when his team realised something was not clicking.
You have to tell people how you really feel, one aide chimed in, according to a person who worked on the shoot. The heart attack not only deepened your commitment to health reform, the aide said; it was personal.
Public introspection is not Mr Sanders’ go-to move. But he gave it a shot. Near the end of the seven-minute video posted on his Instagram account in October, after swipes at “corporate media” and a pitch for “Medicare for All,” the candidate haltingly admitted that his hospitalisation had indeed prompted him to take stock.
“Look, I go around once, I have one life to live,” an ever-so-slightly choked-up Mr Sanders said into the camera, standing in a red-walled room at his house in Burlington, Vermont. “What role do I want to play?”
Mr Sanders had always known what role he wanted to play: himself.
“How’d he handle it?” a top political aide, Jeff Weaver, said when asked how his friend had dealt with the health crisis. “He’s Bernie.”
Presidential candidates have often tried to soften their image as they gain traction, in hopes that appearing likable, relatable, even ordinary, will broaden their appeal. Mr Sanders, who during a campaign event in September ordered a crying baby to “keep that down,” not so much.
His critics — and a lot of the voters who flocked to former vice-president Joe Biden on Super Tuesday — may see his unreconstructed personality as an extension of his deeply uncompromising politics. But this seal of authenticity is the key to the Bernie brand, the idea that what the public sees — the crotchety impatience; the refusal to moderate or change; the dandruff-flecked-sportcoat-crooked-specs-flyaway-hair blur of the man — is the genuine, unmediated Bernie.
But is there a deeper layer, a “real” Bernie the public does not get to see?
People who have known Mr Sanders for years say that, if anything, he is more intense and can be insensitive to people who encounter his moods — in other words, even more Bernie than Bernie. Being around Mr Sanders, they say, is to watch him endlessly wind himself up and back down, long periods of tension punctuated by brief, welcome intervals of calm.
That intensity can sometimes cross the line. He has a history of angry outbursts, especially when he believes people are not working hard enough or are exposing him to political risk.
A ‘Lone Ranger’ finds allies
In January, Hillary Clinton, who believes Mr Sanders’ refusal to quickly exit the 2016 primaries damaged her cause, made news with her comment that “nobody likes” Mr Sanders in the Senate — ushering in a debate over whether he was simply too abrasive to get elected.
The claim was not entirely baseless. Mr Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, was deeply unpopular for many of his 16 years in the House of Representatives, where he bucked his own leadership and pelted bills with amendments, many of the gadfly variety.
“He was like a lone ranger,” Rep Anna Eshoo, D-Calif, who is one of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s closest allies, said in an interview last summer. She called his record “thin”.
But the Senate has a higher threshold for grandstanding and eccentricity, so Mr Sanders, who forged an alliance with former majority leader Harry Reid, found a more forgiving crowd. He is less disliked than seen as a loner prone to delivering irritating sermons, fellow senators said.
“No, people don’t hate Bernie,” said a Democratic senator who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “I’d say the feeling is closer to resentment, because some of us have to take the tough votes on things so he can keep his brand pure.”
Creature comforts
Though he can be difficult, with a stubborn streak that can exasperate, close friends and allies have learned to adjust. Perhaps that is why his innermost circle is so small, made up of his wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders; Mr Weaver, his 2016 campaign manager; Warren Gunnels, his Senate policy director; and a pair of Burlington buddies, Huck Gutman and Richard Sugarman.
The candidate’s need to control his surroundings also extends to the physical environment. He hates the cramped hassle of flying commercial, aides say, even if going private doesn’t entirely comport with his brand.
For years, Mr Sanders’ staff members have compiled hotel do’s and don’ts for a man who rises early but sometimes finds it hard to fall asleep. The list, distributed to aides in his entourage and shared with hotel employees, stipulates that his room must be kept at an arctic 60 degrees. That he needs an oscillating fan. Other wish lists have requested that written materials be removed.
Friends emphasise that Mr Sanders does not demand star treatment (he routinely rejects upgrades from singles to suites, aides said). It is just that he craves peace and solitude, often to collect his thoughts and catalogue them on his ever-present yellow legal pad.
Unwinding is not easy for Mr Sanders under any circumstances, but he seems most likely to let his guard down around children.
Mr Sanders’ own childhood in stoop-ball-era Brooklyn was, by his own accounts, a painful one, and he has been candid in his memoirs about the lingering impact of the turbulence. He grew up with his brother, Larry, in a household chronically short of money, riven by fighting between his father, Eli, a paint salesman, and his mother, Dorothy, who died when he was 18.
Those experiences are never far from his mind, friends say. During a trip to New York in 2013, before he was a national celebrity, Mr Sanders headed to Midwood to check out his old apartment building on East 26th Street, according to an aide who accompanied him.
Like any self-respecting Brooklynite, he defeated the buzzer lock by politely holding the door open for someone who was exiting the building. But once he got upstairs, he could not persuade the tenant to let him in.
Mr Sanders would not be stopped. With a dart, he stuck his head inside the doorway, peered around, absorbed it all, thanked the woman and headed back downstairs.