Will Bernie Run?
Sanders and the progressive left just might be ready for a 2020 presidential win.
It had the vibe of a campaign event, even if it wasn’t one, at least not yet. A few hundred of America’s highest-profile liberal politicians, academics and journalists, many of them old friends — a “progressive bar mitzvah,” as one attendee 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 Bernie Sanders shows an excitement about the possibilities of politics that her husband does not. Jane beamed as the likes of Cornel West and Danny Glover filed into a museum to kick off a three-day event hosted by her Sanders Institute, bearing the Game of Thronesstyle title “The Gathering.”
The conference had the feeling of a war council: In the time of Trump, with climate change just one of many dire emergencies approaching, there’s no longer time for the electoral failures and policy catastrophes of the Democratic Party establishment. The core argument of the movement that elected the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib to Congress is that they are done with canonical modern-Democrat precepts like the Third Way, “transactional politics” and triangulation.
They instead believe they must win the battles and the war on issues like climate, health care and economic inequality, not later but now. The latest iteration of the progressive movement is young — data suggest more young people voted for Sanders in the 2016 primaries than for Trump and Clinton combined — but its leader is not. It came before any announcement, but the near-universal belief here was that Sanders would run for president again. The only reason to think he wouldn’t was his age. Sanders is 77, and would be 79 upon election.
At the Gathering, Sanders blasted the “corporately-owned Congress,” an old standby. He took a shot at the media — he was doing this long before Trump — for ignoring “a word that is never seen on TV . . . and it’s called ‘poverty.’ ”
He pronounced “called” in his famed Brooklynese, i.e., cawled. At some point, he uttered the truncated phrase “handful of corrupt companies,” which could have come from any Sanders speech at any time in the past 30 years.
At all this, I exhaled a bit in relief. The one thing you can never know about any politician is how they’ll respond to celebrity. Sanders as recently as 2015 was so unknown that 76 percent of American voters had no opinion of him. That number is down to nine percent today.
After seizing 43 percent of the Democratic vote in 2016 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 I’d never imagined he could be: chic. Maybe this crowd of TED Talkers and Hollywood stars would turn his head?
I should have known better. What’s both maddening and endearing about Sanders is that he never changes. It’s what makes him a virtual lock to lead, as perhaps the last grand act of his career, an unprecedented battle for the soul of the Democratic Party in 2020.
In the mid-2000s, then-Congressman Sanders invited me to tag along with him in the House for nearly a month. He explained that he wanted people to know how money-dominated and dysfunctional our legislature could be. At first I found him eccentric. He never asked to go off the record, and he seemed so indifferent to how his cutting observations about his workplace and his colleagues might play that I wondered if there was something wrong with him.
It took a while to realize that Sanders simply is who he appears to be. There’s no chilled-out off-duty version who stops worrying about public heating-oil programs or VA coverage once you turn off the recorder. This makes him an abject failure according to the old “candidate you want to have a beer with” standard — I couldn’t imagine watching a football game with Sanders (he’d be grumbling about the NFL pension plan during key plays) — but it doesn’t make him dishonest, a fact voters picked up in 2016.
National reporters have forever been frustrated by the one-note-ness of Sanders. They want him to be Bill Clinton, to turn the charm on at barbecues and fundraisers. Then and now, conventional wisdom failed to grasp that a protest candidate with an enthusiastic and insoluble base benefits from a field stocked with too many party-approved contenders. Sanders would be the beneficiary if Democrats replicate the 2016 Republican-clown-car-style mistake of an overcrowded field.
And if he wins the nomination, who knows? Sanders was roundly mocked by the press in 2016 for describing his campaign as a revolution, but as the policy discussions at the Gathering showed, his platform is revolutionary.
UMASS-AMHERST economist Robert Pollin appeared here to unveil a massive plan to cost out the Medicare for All proposal Sanders is likely to stump for over the next couple of years. Pollin’s plan is to reduce medical costs from 18 percent of GDP to between nine and 11 percent, using a single-payer plan that targets the waste in the system (corporate profits). Pollin addressed the “biggest insurance companies,” saying, “We’re putting you out of business.”
But Sanders is no Lenin or Trotsky. He doesn’t want to overthrow free enterprise or establish one national ice cream. Yet the movement he’s leading has goals that are genuinely threatening to the traditional funders of presidential campaigns of both parties: banks, defense contractors, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, lobbyists, tech companies, etc.
His movement is ambitious; if its members win, they plan to plow the proceeds of such conquests into an FDR-scale “Green New Deal,” aimed at a fundamental transformation of the country’s transportation, housing, energy and agricultural systems. In the past, the best one could hope for a candidate like Sanders would be that the process not humiliate them too much. This cycle, who knows? American politics may have gotten weird enough for even a decent person to succeed.