Sanders is not a natural storyteller; his great political gift is his relentlessness.
Bernie
Sanders’s Presidential race ended a year ago, but his campaign never
did. Since the election, he has staged events in Michigan, Mississippi,
Maine, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, Ohio, Kentucky, Wisconsin,
Pennsylvania, Montana, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, and Illinois. At every
one, he speaks about the suffering of small-town Americans, and his
belief that the Democrats can help them. When I caught up with him
recently, his shirt was a little untucked, his head hung down, and he
carried a printed copy of his remarks. Sanders was catching a late-night
flight to Chicago, and was taking a moment to record a message for
Snapchat. The central illusion of a Presidential campaign is that a
candidate can, through constant motion and boundless energy, meet
countless people and, in the end, give voice to the experience of the
country. After the election, Sanders seemed to adopt the illusion as an
ethos.
Hillary Clinton’s loss gave his
efforts a new urgency. The electoral map, with its imposing swaths of
red, pointed to a crisis confronting American liberalism. Donald Trump
may have lost the popular vote, but, as he likes to point out, he won
2,626 counties to Clinton’s four hundred and eighty-seven. Many of these
counties are in states that Sanders won last year, campaigning on a
platform of economic populism—Medicare for all, tuition-free college,
and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage. Sanders told me that Trump was smart
enough to understand that the Democratic Party had turned its back on
millions of people: “He said, ‘Hey, I hear you. I’m going to do
something for you.’ And he lied.” Sanders, who is seventy-five, may be
too old to run again in 2020, but his barnstorming has a purpose—to
deepen the connection to progressive ideas in rural America, to develop
an attachment that might outlast him. At recent events, one of his
biggest applause lines was that the “Republicans did not win the
election so much as Democrats lost it.” Progressives do not have much of
a foothold in this country. What they have is Bernie Sanders.
Sanders,
who has represented Vermont in the Senate for the past decade, and
served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 2007, has always had
a complicated relationship with the Democrats. He caucuses with them
and ran for their Presidential nomination, but he is an Independent. His
insistence on separation from the Party may be partly
temperamental—though born in Brooklyn, Sanders has the demeanor of a
prickly Yankee—but it also reflects his underlying commitments. The word
“oligarchy” is important to Sanders, and it gives his statements a
messianic tone. Sanders told me, “The message has got to be that we
can’t move along towards an oligarchy. We’ve got to revitalize American
democracy.”
For decades, Sanders has
argued for a single-payer health-care system, and he is getting ready to
introduce a “Medicare for All” bill in the Senate. This summer,
however, he assigned himself the task of leading the campaign against
efforts, by Republicans in the House and the Senate, to repeal the
Affordable Care Act. On the Sunday after the Fourth of July, as Senate
Republicans prepared to release their bill, Sanders took a charter
flight from Burlington to West Virginia and Kentucky, for a pair of
hastily arranged rallies. He and his staff had chosen states whose
Republican senators were pivotal in the health-care debate. Kentucky’s
Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader, was shepherding the bill toward a
vote without any public hearings. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, and Shelley
Moore Capito, of West Virginia, were indicating that they might vote
against it.
ADVERTISEMENT
Sanders
talked about the Senate bill’s likely effects in McConnell’s home
state. “How do you throw two hundred and thirty thousand people off the
health care they have without hesitation?” he asked. “It happens because
the Democratic Party is incredibly weak in states like Kentucky. And so
he doesn’t have to face the wrath of the voters.” But it wasn’t just
the Democrats who were absent in Kentucky, he said; it was also a
balanced press. “In many of these conservative states, you get a media
that is all right wing.” One purpose of his visit, he said, was to
generate local coverage, so that he could explain to ordinary people
“what’s in the bloody legislation.”
Sanders’s
first stop was in Morgantown, West Virginia; he had been in the state
just two weeks earlier. He remembered a tattoo artist who had spoken
then, a man who’d had to fight for emergency insurance after he
developed testicular cancer, and had become an advocate for single-payer
health care. Now an aide asked Sanders backstage if he wanted to speak
with Reggie. “Rusty,” Sanders said, correcting the aide. Rusty Williams
approached, and Sanders asked him how he was doing. Williams said that
he was working less but that the cancer was in remission. Sanders put
his hands on Williams’s shoulders and gave him a pep talk: “At least you
are healthy. That’s something.”
Morgantown,
the home of West Virginia’s largest state university, is a progressive
enclave. But classes were not in session, and the room where Sanders’s
event was being held, at a Marriott, was small. Before he spoke, Sanders kept asking aides for the crowd count, and how many people were watching the live stream.
Sanders
is not a storyteller. His speeches, blunt and workmanlike, depend upon
dramatizing social statistics. Before an audience of more than seven
hundred people, Sanders said that, if the Republican bill passed, a
hundred and twenty-two thousand West Virginians would lose their
Medicaid coverage, insurance premiums would double, and seven thousand
senior citizens would be unable to pay for their care facilities. “How
many seniors now in nursing homes will get thrown out on the street or
be forced to live in their children’s basement?” Sanders said. What
would happen to the tens of thousands of West Virginians who lost health
insurance if they were to get sick? “The horrible and unspeakable
answer is that, if this legislation were to pass, many thousands of our
fellow-Americans will die.”
Death
and despair have been Sanders’s themes since he launched his
Presidential campaign. From West Virginia, he headed to Covington,
Kentucky, in an area where the opioid epidemic has been particularly
devastating. What had gone so badly in people’s lives that they were
turning to heroin and opioids? “There is something going on in West
Virginia and Kentucky which is unbelievable, which is what sociologists
call the illnesses of despair,” Sanders told me. He had been to parts of
West Virginia where there were very few jobs, “fewer that pay a living
wage,” and there was a steep psychic cost. “There is a lot of pain. And
we’ve got to understand that reality. And then tell these people that
their problems are not caused by some Mexican making eight dollars an
hour picking strawberries.”
Three
weeks earlier, a man named James Hodgkinson, who had volunteered on
Sanders’s Presidential campaign in Iowa, had tried to assassinate
Republican members of Congress as they practiced for an annual baseball
game. Sanders, who was in his Senate office that morning, rushed to the
floor to condemn the shooting. He believed that it had something to do
with what he had been seeing in his travels. “I think there is an
enormous amount of anger out there,” he told me in Kentucky. “I think
there is an enormous amount of despair. We have got to address that
issue, and if we don’t I worry about the future of this country.”
Since
the election, the Democratic Party has tried to move closer to
Sanders’s views. Last week, in a small town in northern Virginia, Chuck
Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, announced the Party’s platform for
2018, “A Better Deal,” which is aimed at winning back working-class
voters. The platform includes a fifteen-dollar minimum wage and a
trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure, plans that Sanders has
long promoted, often with little support. Many people in the Democratic
Party believe that, when it comes to policy, Sanders has prevailed.
Sanders does not see it that way. He told me, “Do not underestimate the
resistance of the Democratic establishment.”
When
the Democratic Party fractured, in the primaries, it was like a bone
cracking—the Clintonites on one side, the Sanders faction on the other,
with no obvious way to repair the break. Sanders’s supporters deeply
resented the Party’s obvious preference for Clinton; Clinton’s backers
accused them of sexism. Last July, at the Democratic National
Convention, in Philadelphia, the Sanders faithful shouted down podium
speakers, marched out of the hall and occupied a media tent, and covered
their mouths with tape, on which some of them had written the word
“Silenced.” The two camps clashed again this winter, in the contest for
the Democratic Party chair. Tom Perez, who was President Obama’s
Secretary of Labor, narrowly defeated Representative Keith Ellison, of
Minnesota, the co-chair of the Progressive Caucus and an ally of
Sanders. The insurgents had come up short again.
Sanders
asked Perez to join him for a series of rallies around the country in
April. The events had been planned as shows of support for Obamacare,
but, after some conversations, they were billed as a Unity Tour, to
demonstrate that the Party had healed. But the Party had not healed. In
Maine, Sanders supporters booed Perez. Sanders contributed to the
discord. State parties wanted access to his e-mail list, but his staff
refused to share it, telling officials to collect contact information at
events.
In Louisville, Perez and
Sanders sat for a joint interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, two bald,
bespectacled men, shoulder to shoulder, neither of them smiling. On
camera, Sanders commenced a silent, exasperated gymnastics involving his
tongue and lower lip. Hayes asked Sanders if he considered himself a
Democrat. “No, I’m an Independent,” Sanders said. Then he gave a brief
lecture about the Party’s liabilities. Democrats would continue to lose
elections “unless we have the guts to point the finger at the ruling
class of this country.” Hayes asked Perez if he shared that view, and
Perez wearily issued a talking point: “When we put hope on the ballot,
we win.” Clinton, Hayes pointed out, had put hope on the ballot. She had
not won. Whereas Perez offers the liberal abstraction of inequality,
Sanders insists on naming an enemy, the billionaire class.
Sanders’s great political gift is his relentlessness. In
1968, when Sanders was twenty-six, he moved from New York City, where
he had grown up, to an especially poor and conservative part of Vermont,
called the Northeast Kingdom. He spent a year in the town of Stannard,
which even now has unpaved roads and a population of only two hundred;
Sanders recalled seeing the “rotting teeth” of the children.
As
early as the nineteen-thirties, the historian Dona Brown writes in
“Back to the Land,” leaving the city for Vermont was a political
statement. Journalists were building blacksmith forges and reporting on
their success; there were experiments in making artisanal Cheddar
cheese. The appeal of the place lay, to some extent, in its opposition
to centralized power: Vermont rejected parts of the New Deal, and it is
one of a handful of states where local citizens conduct government
business in town meetings. The wave of counterculture migration, of
which Sanders was part, helped to secularize the state. Vermont has many
churches, but not so much religion.
In
1969, Sanders moved to Burlington, where he wrote freelance articles,
installed flooring, and produced documentary films. During the
seventies, as a member of the antiwar Liberty Union Party, he ran for
the U.S. Senate once and for Vermont governor twice, never earning more
than six per cent of the vote. Friends recall that he would arrive in
their towns for campaign events and then crash on their couches.
Sanders
ran for mayor of Burlington as an Independent in 1981. Local
Republicans were so comfortable with the Democratic incumbent that they
didn’t bother to field their own candidate. Sanders, who had spent years
building connections among activist groups, won the election by ten
votes. The Democrats, who controlled the city council, refused to
allocate money for Sanders to hire a secretary. Paul Heintz, the
political editor of Seven Days, a Vermont weekly, told me, “The story of Bernie Sanders is a story of exclusion.”
In
1988, Sanders married Burlington’s youth-services director, Jane
O’Meara Driscoll, a social worker who had grown up in Brooklyn. They had
met during Sanders’s first mayoral campaign, when she helped to
organize an event. He planned to talk about health insurance, and she, a
single mother, had none. The year they married, Sanders ran for an open
seat in the House of Representatives, and lost by nine thousand votes.
In 1990, he ran again and won, after the National Rifle Association
declined to endorse the Republican incumbent, who had co-sponsored an
assault-rifle ban. Bill Lofy, a longtime Democratic operative in
Vermont, told me that Sanders’s base included the Burlington and
Brattleboro hippies, but also another, unexpected type: “working-class,
fuck-all New England ornery, from the Northeast Kingdom,” who usually
vote Republican.
Sanders never joined
the Democratic Party. When allies and former staffers launched the
Vermont Progressive Party, in 1999, he didn’t join them, either. In
2005, after Senator Jim Jeffords announced his retirement and Sanders
decided to run for his seat, the Democrats needed Sanders more than he
needed them. Chuck Schumer, who was at that time the chair of the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, promised that they would not
run a candidate against him.
Lofy
oversaw the Democratic Party’s campaign for Sanders. In their first
meeting, Sanders asked Lofy whether the Party would work to turn out his
supporters in the Northeast Kingdom, who were likely to vote for him in
the Senate race but for Republicans in others. Sanders started calling
Lofy almost daily. “I’d be out on the road, and I’d look down at my cell
phone, and it’s Bernie fucking Sanders calling about the count again,”
Lofy said.
Sanders won the race
easily, with more than sixty-five per cent of the vote. When he says
that he understands how progressives can win in rural areas, he is
talking about his popularity among conservatives in Vermont. John
McClaughry, a longtime Republican state senator, recalled that, about a
decade ago, Sanders held a press conference with members of a V.F.W.
auxiliary, where he was “thundering on about how the veterans were being
neglected in the hinterlands without decent health care and without
sufficient pension benefits.” In Congress, Sanders has championed
veterans’ services and community health centers.
In
the decades since Sanders was elected to Congress, he has been hosting
spaghetti dinners in small towns across the state. Sometimes he’ll have
as many as four of these on a single Sunday. Volunteers cook pasta, and
Sanders gives talks on the topics that have preoccupied him since he
first took office: the importance of health care and the inequities of a
capitalist economy. They are something like sermons, and Sanders has
always liked delivering them in churches. “He wanted it to be a little
like going to church,” his longtime state director, Phil Fiermonte, told
me.
If
there is an essential image of Sanders’s Presidential campaign, it is a
minute-long ad, released just before the New Hampshire primary. As the
Simon and Garfunkel song “America” plays, the ad offers a dreamy vision
of small-town life: a couple dances in the grass, a farmer tosses a bale
of hay, a boy picks up a calf. The power of the ad comes from its
portrayal of Sanders, long identified as outside the political
mainstream, as a representative of the heartland.
An
early version included narration by Sanders, but, when Jane Sanders saw
it, she insisted on removing the voice-over. She thought the politics
interrupted the direct emotional connection with voters. Jane has long
been involved in her husband’s campaign commercials, and, when she met
Paul Simon, she asked for his permission to use the song.
I
drove up to Burlington to meet Jane Sanders in early July. She told me
that she was initially opposed to her husband’s Presidential run; she
recalled his early Senate races, and the feeling “in the pit of my
stomach” when she picked up the newspaper during those campaigns. Early
in the primaries, before Sanders was given Secret Service protection, he
received multiple threats. She grew fearful, and when she joined her
husband onstage she found herself scanning the crowd, concerned that
someone would jump up with a weapon. But, as the enthusiasm for
Sanders’s campaign grew, her perspective changed. He had been saying the
same things for years, but now he was drawing tens of thousands of
people, all across the country. During the primary campaign, he received
more than six million individual donations. Sanders was being treated,
Jane noted, “as a moral authority.” She told me, “I’m a secular person,
but during the campaign every night I would pray—just ‘Thank you, thank
you, thank you.’ ”
The Sanderses
believed they had little support outside their own movement. When I
asked Sanders whether his campaign had revealed gaps in the progressive
infrastructure, he was incredulous. “Gaps?” he said. “Gaps would be an
understatement.” Last August, Sanders and his allies founded a new
political organization, Our Revolution, to support progressive
candidates around the country, in state legislative and city-council
races where a few thousand dollars might make a difference. This June,
Jane Sanders set up the Sanders Institute, a small think tank based in
Burlington, whose first class of fellows includes Ben Jealous, the
former N.A.A.C.P. president, and Representative Tulsi Gabbard, a Hawaii
Democrat, who was an early supporter of Sanders’s Presidential bid. Jane
told me that the institute was looking for thinkers who “understand
that conventional wisdom is often, often, often wrong.”
Shortly
after I returned from Burlington, a controversy that had surrounded
Jane Sanders in Vermont drew notice in the Washington press. From 2004
until 2011, she had been the president of Burlington College, a
liberal-arts institution, which had about a hundred and forty students
and held classes in what had once been a supermarket building. In 2010,
she launched an ambitious campaign to expand the college and relocate it
to a large property, owned by the Roman Catholic Church, on the
waterfront of Lake Champlain. To help secure a $6.7-million bank loan to
buy the property, Burlington College declared that it had $2.6 million
in confirmed pledges. In 2011, Jane Sanders left the college. The bulk
of the donations never materialized. In 2016, Burlington College closed.
Early
last year, just before the primaries began, a Republican lawyer in
Vermont, Brady Toensing, filed a complaint with the U.S. Attorney’s
office, asking for an investigation into whether Jane Sanders had
committed federal loan fraud. Sometimes pledges simply don’t come
through, and so one essential question is whether the college, and
Sanders, knowingly inflated the promises. In July, the Washington Post
reported that federal prosecutors had obtained some of Burlington
College’s records, and, citing a grand-jury investigation, issued
subpoenas.
Toensing had also suggested
that the Senator’s office had intervened to pressure the bank to issue
the loan, but he has not offered compelling evidence for the allegation.
That overreach, together with Toensing’s prominence in Republican
politics, suggested that the controversy might never have become public
had Sanders not run for President. “I find it incredibly sexist that
basically he’s going after my husband by destroying my reputation,” Jane
Sanders told the Boston Globe. Toensing
told me that the episode would have been a scandal much earlier had
Sanders been from any state but Vermont. “For a progressive, Vermont is
like the Galápagos,” Toensing said. “You get to evolve without
predators.”
In
early June, Sanders flew to Britain, to promote his book about his
Presidential campaign, “Our Revolution.” The general election in the
United Kingdom was less than a week away, and the Labour Party, led by
Jeremy Corbyn—another cranky leftist with a fringe of white hair,
beloved by the grass roots and at war with his party—was unexpectedly
surging. Later, after Labour kept the Conservative Party from winning an
outright majority, Sanders called Corbyn and asked him where he had got
the ideas for his campaign. In an interview, Corbyn recalled that he
replied, “Well, you, actually.”
Staid
venues now accommodate populists. At the Sheldonian Theatre, a
seventeenth-century hall at Oxford, beneath a fresco of blue sky and
pink cherubs, Sanders was introduced as “an inspiration to us all.”
Later that day, he received a rare standing ovation from the members of
the Oxford Union. Sanders promised that most Americans do not share
Donald Trump’s beliefs about climate change, or international isolation,
or the relative virtues of the rich and the poor. He questioned U.S.
support for the hereditary monarchy of Saudi Arabia, and insisted that
many Americans were
alarmed by Trump’s attachment to Vladimir Putin. To his usual
statistics about wealth in the United States he added a global figure:
eight individuals in the world were as wealthy as 3.6 billion people,
about half of humanity. “They have the money, we have the people,”
Sanders declared at the Sheldonian. When his speech ended, the crowd let
out a happy roar.
Sanders is an old
man who often finds himself speaking to young audiences. They are not
necessarily looking for encouragement. “My wife tells me my speeches are
so bleak that they have to pass out tranquillizers at the door,” he
said at an event that evening at Brixton Academy, a music venue in South
London. Sanders does not ask his supporters to place their trust in
meritocracy, or capitalism, or even their own country, and this is part
of what gives his movement its special intensity. Sanders’s optimism
about politics is not complicated by an optimism about much of anything
else.
For
Sanders this year, there is always another stop on the tour. The week
after he returned from West Virginia and Kentucky, he spoke at the
annual convention of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH
Coalition, in Chicago, and addressed a group of progressive activists
in Iowa. On July 13th, in Silver Spring, Maryland, he offered an
endorsement of his close political ally Ben Jealous, the former
N.A.A.C.P. president, who has announced his candidacy for the
governorship of the state.
In
Washington, Sanders has been trying to build support for his
single-payer bill. His recent progress may be the clearest measure of
his influence on the Democratic Party. In the House, a majority of
Democrats now support a version of Sanders’s bill, the Medicare for All
Act (which Representative John Conyers, of Michigan, has proposed each
year since 2003). Several prominent senators have expressed their
support, including Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, and Elizabeth
Warren, of Massachusetts. Warren has said she believes that “now is the
time for the next step—and the next step is single-payer.”
Sanders,
like Warren, has ideas about progress that are utterly at odds with
those of the Republican-controlled Senate. At the end of July, the
Republicans made what appeared to be a final effort to repeal parts of
the Affordable Care Act. There had not been a single hearing on the
latest bill. Sanders appeared on CNN, said that “this whole process has
been totally bananas,” and argued for a new bipartisan effort at
health-care reform. Finally, at around 1:30 A.M.
on Friday, July 28th, Senator John McCain signalled, with a
thumbs-down, that he would cast a decisive vote against the bill,
joining two of his Republican colleagues, Susan Collins and Lisa
Murkowski, and all forty-eight members of the Democratic caucus. In the
convention halls of Middle America, Bernie Sanders is the leader of an
improbable progressive movement. On the Senate floor that night, he was a
Democrat. ♦
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment