Many years ago I
pitched a magazine editor on a story about Bernie Sanders, then a congressman
from Vermont, who'd agreed to something extraordinary - he agreed to let me, a
reporter, stick
next to him without restrictions over the course of a month in congress.
"People need
to know how this place works. It's absurd," he'd said. (Bernie often uses
the word absurd, his Brooklyn roots coming through in his pronunciation
– ob-zert.)
Bernie wasn't quite
so famous at the time and the editor scratched his head. "Bernie
Sanders," he said. "That's the one who cares, right?"
"Right, that's
the guy," I said.
I got the go-ahead
and the resulting story was a wild journey through the tortuous bureaucratic
maze of our national legislature. I didn't write this at the time, but I was
struck every day by what a strange and interesting figure Sanders was.
Many of the battles
he brought me along to witness, he lost. And no normal politician would be
comfortable with the optics of bringing a Rolling Stone reporter to a
Rules Committee hearing.
But Sanders
genuinely, sincerely, does not care about optics. He is the rarest of
Washington animals, a completely honest person. If he's motivated by anything
other than a desire to use his influence to protect people who can't protect
themselves, I've never seen it. Bernie Sanders is the kind of person who goes
to bed at night thinking about how to increase the heating-oil
aid program for the poor.
This is why his entrance
into the 2016 presidential race is a great thing and not a mere footnote to
the inevitable coronation of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. If the
press is smart enough to grasp it, his entrance into the race makes for a
profound storyline that could force all of us to ask some very uncomfortable
questions.
Here's the thing:
Sanders is a politician whose power base is derived almost entirely from the people
of the state of Vermont, where he is personally known to a surprisingly
enormous percentage of voters.
His chief opponents
in the race to the White House, meanwhile, derive their power primarily from
corporate and financial interests. That doesn't make them bad people or even
bad candidates necessarily, but it's a fact that the Beltway-media cognoscenti
who decide these things make access to money the primary factor in
determining whether or not a presidential aspirant is "viable" or
"credible." Here's how the Wall Street Journal put it in their
story about Sanders (emphasis mine):
It is
unclear how much money Mr. Sanders expects to raise, or what he thinks he needs
to run a credible race. Mr. Sanders raised about $7 million for his last
re-election in Vermont, a small state. Sums needed to run nationally are far
larger.
The Washington/national
press has trained all of us to worry about these questions of financing on
behalf of candidates even at such an early stage of a race as this.
In this manner
we're conditioned to believe that the candidate who has the early assent of a
handful of executives on Wall Street and in Hollywood and Silicon Valley is the
"serious" politician, while the one who is merely the favorite of
large numbers of human beings is an irritating novelty act whose only possible
goal could be to cut into the numbers of the real players.
Sanders offers an
implicit challenge to the current system of national electoral politics. With
rare exceptions, campaign season is a time when the backroom favorites of
financial interests are marketed to the population. Weighed down by highly
regressive policy intentions, these candidates need huge laboratories of focus
groups and image consultants to guide them as they grope around for a few lines
they can use to sell themselves to regular working people.
Sanders on the
other hand has no constituency among the monied crowd. "Billionaires do
not flock to my campaign," he quipped. So what his race is about is
the reverse of the usual process: he'll be marketing the interests of regular
people to the gatekeeping Washington press, in the hope that they will give his
ideas a fair shot.
It's a little-known
fact, but we reporters could successfully sell Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or
any other populist candidate as a serious contender for the White House if we
wanted to. Hell, we told Americans it was okay to vote for George Bush, a man
who moves his lips when he reads.
But the lapdog
mentality is deeply ingrained and most Beltway scribes prefer to wait for a
signal from above before they agree to take anyone not sitting atop a mountain
of cash seriously.
Thus this whole
question of "seriousness" - which will dominate coverage of the
Sanders campaign - should really be read as a profound indictment of our
political system, which is now so openly an oligarchy that any politician who
doesn't have the blessing of the bosses is marginalized before he or she steps
into the ring.
I remember the
first time I was sold on Bernie Sanders as a politician. He was in his
congressional office and he was ranting about the fact that many of the
manufacturing and financial companies who asked him and other members of
congress for tax breaks and aid were also in the business of moving American
jobs overseas to places like China.
Sanders spent years
trying to drum up support for a simple measure that would force any company
that came to Washington asking for handouts to promise they wouldn't turn
around and ship jobs to China or India.
That didn't seem
like a lot to ask, but his fellow members treated him like he was asking for a
repeal of the free enterprise system. This issue drove Sanders crazy. Again
showing his Brooklyn roots, Bernie gets genuinely mad about these things. While
some pols are kept
up at night worrying about the future profitability of gazillionaire banks,
Sanders seethes over the many obvious wrongs that get smoothed over and covered
up at his place of work.
That saltiness, I'm
almost sure of it, is what drove him into this race. He just can't sit by and
watch the things that go on, go on. That's not who he is.
When I first met
Bernie Sanders, I'd just spent over a decade living in formerly communist
Russia. The word "socialist" therefore had highly negative
connotations for me, to the point where I didn't even like to say it out loud.
But Bernie Sanders
is not Bukharin or Trotsky. His concept of "Democratic Socialism" as
I've come to understand it over the years is that an elected government should
occasionally step in and offer an objection or two toward our progress to
undisguised oligarchy. Or, as in the case of not giving tax breaks to companies
who move factories overseas, our government should at least not finance the
disappearance of the middle class.
Maybe that does
qualify as radical and unserious politics in our day and age. If that's the
case, we should at least admit how much trouble we're in.
Congratulations,
Bernie. Good luck and give 'em hell.