The non-Hillary hope of U.S. progressives
Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, hasn’t ruled out a 2016 presidential run
WASHINGTON— Angry speech complete, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is giving “serious thought” to running for president, sat down to take questions from the Brookings Institution audience.
“No one would accuse you of being ‘Morning in America’ with your presentation today,” pundit Mark Shields began, referring to the sunny Ronald Reagan campaign ad.
“My wife often tells me that after I speak we have to pass out the tranquilizers and the anti-suicide kits,” Sanders said. “I’ve been trying to be more cheerful!”
White hair askew, suit jacket creased, Sanders, a 73-year-old whose Brooklyn accent occasionally turns Obama into “Obamer,” looks and sounds the part of doomsday prophet. On Monday, he said that America is either on the road to “oligarchy” or already there, that the conservative Koch brothers might have successfully purchased the country with campaign donations, and that resistance to “the billionaire class” from a grassroots candidate like him might be futile.
“If you had two million people, a phenomenal response, putting in $100 bucks, that’s $200 million. That is 20 per cent of what the Koch brothers themselves are prepared to spend. Can we take that on? I don’t know the answer,” he said. “Maybe the game is over. Maybe they have bought the United States government. Maybe there is no turning back. Maybe we’ve gone over the edge. I don’t know. I surely hope not.”
This man could be progressive Democrats’ last great 2016 hope.
Sanders is not even a registered Democrat: Though he caucuses with the party, he has sat as an independent since he was elected to Congress in 1990. He self-identifies as a democratic socialist. In an Iowa church basement in December, he called for “a political revolution in this country.”
Not the stuff of major-party nominees. But no one else with sterling progressive credentials appears to possess the martyrdom instinct to stand in front of the Hillary Clinton express.
A small but vocal effort to draft Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the most formidable left-leaning Democrat, has shown no sign of accomplishing anything.
Warren would be a long-shot. Sanders may be a no-shot. But his presence in the debate could at least drag Clinton to the left on economic policy. And some activists believe his candour on the gap between rich and poor, which he described Monday as “grotesque and growing,” would keep him afloat.
“Any candidate who speaks up as aggressively and as forthrightly as Sen. Sanders has on the growing in- come inequality in this country is a viable candidate. Income inequality will be the defining issue of the 2016 election,” said Neil Sroka, communications director for Democracy for America, a political action committee founded by former candidate Howard Dean.
Democracy for America is trying to convince Warren to enter the race. She keeps saying no. Sroka said the group is supportive of a Sanders candidacy even if Warren gets to yes.
“I think having more candidates in the 2016 Democratic primary talking about income inequality issues ensures that every single candidate has to talk about those issues,” he said.
Much of the recession-era country has come around to Sanders’s anti-elite fury. He said Monday that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud and deception,” demonstrat- ing a populist frankness resonant with the segment of the Democratic base uneasy with Clinton’s coziness with big donors.
Sanders offered a12-point prescription for change. He called for a doubling of the federal minimum wage to “at least” $15 per hour, $1trillion in infrastructure spending, repealing NAFTA, Europe-like free university tuition, and a Canada-like singlepayer health-care system that insures everyone. Obamacare, he said, has been only a “modest success.”
He said he has seen “a lot of sentiment that enough is enough, that we need fundamental changes.” Lest anyone get too excited, he added a caveat.
“On the other hand, I also understand political realities,” he said. “And that is: When you take on the billionaire class, it ain’t easy.”