It’s silly season
Socialist noise on left Capitalist noise on right
MANCHESTER, VT. — Billy Weeks stands in the kitchen of VFW Post 6471 on Depot St. in southern Vermont, the state of Bernie Sanders, who is making the most noise right now in the Democratic Party, and creating the most excitement. It means that in the current silly season of presidential politics, the most noise is being made by a Socialist like Sanders and a capitalist like Donald Trump, running from the state of Trump Tower.
“At one end of this you’ve got that billionaire,” Weeks is saying as he makes sandwiches for his VFW’s afternoon crowd, “and at the other you’ve got a guy who wants to give away more of everything to everybody than Obama.”
Weeks, who still looks tough enough to go fight for his country if somebody asked him, was born here in Manchester and was an Army specialist in what was known as the “Iron Triangle” in Vietnam. He is his late 60s now, which means he's seen a lot in America. So on this afternoon he was as good as anybody to ask about Bernie Sanders, who is trying to throw the same scare into Hillary Clinton, yelling about income equality that Eugene McCarthy threw into Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam in the primary season of 1968, before Johnson quit on his stool.
“At first I thought it was a joke when I found out (Sanders) was running for President,” Billy Weeks says.
Suddenly, though, it is no joke, across the state line in New Hampshire or in Iowa or Wisconsin or anywhere else Bernie Sanders draws big crowds. And Trump draws big crowds of his own as he gets you thinking that he doesn’t just want to keep our border safe from Mexico, but maybe invade it one of these days with a caravan of black Escalades. But he is loud and famous, and that is all it takes these days for him to suck up all the oxygen in the Republican race.
Trump wants to talk about all the money he’s made and what he’s worth, at least before he is forced to open the books on his personal fortune. Bernie wants to talk about all the money he wants to take away from guys like Trump. For now, coming at this thing from opposite ends of ideology and maybe opposite ends of the solar system, they make up the oddest couple that Presidential politics has produced in a long time, and maybe ever.
It is actually no surprise, in a culture where celebrity has become such a popular drug, that you’re surprised somebody hasn’t found a way to sell it like weed, that Trump has made this kind of early move, just because everybody knows him, which immediately separates him from most of a crowded field of Republican candidates that looks more like some sort of weird casting call.
But it is a little different and a lot more interesting with an old lefty warhorse like Bernie Sanders, age 73, who goes right at Hillary at a time when she seems to spend so much time playing defense that you sometimes think she should be wearing a Rawlings baseball mitt.
How long and how far he goes with his message about income equality and the rest of it remains to be seen. Everybody waits to see if a guy who has somehow managed to raise $15 million lately will see his message eventually get crushed by the Clinton money machine.
But at a time when we see this phony pageant of staged town hall meetings, when the Clinton campaign produces one of the worst optics in recent history by roping off the media while she’s marching in a parade, Sanders draws crowds of 10,000 in places like Wisconsin and gets treated like an aging rock star. More than ever he makes you wish Joe Biden would get into the race with his own populist message about America; and makes you worry that Biden might wait too long the way Robert Kennedy did before he finally made his run in 1968.
“You know something?” Billy Weeks says in the back of a VFW hall in Bernie Sanders’ state. “I know it’s easy to call (Sanders) an idiot, and compare him to the other idiot from this state who ran once (Howard Dean). Or say the same thing about the rich guy. But the reason they’ve got people paying attention to them because they’re out there saying something.”
But they’ve both cracked a code in American politics, certainly in the early innings of this campaign. You don’t have to be right, or even left, in Bernie's case. Just loud. It’s easy to dismiss Sanders as somebody who seems to be running, from the far left, for President for guys like Bill de Blasio, while Trump plays at the same time to the Rush Limbaugh league of angry white guys. But they’ve both cracked a code in American politics, certainly in the early innings of this campaign. You don’t have to be right, or even left, in Bernie’s case. Just loud.