Bernie's Campaign, Up Close

New Hampshire filing day

I have seen Bernie Sanders' campaign up close in several contexts.   I have seen him at Town Hall speeches, on the NH Capitol lawn announcing his having filed, at a NH Democratic convention.   I am on his email lists.   And I hear from his supporters, who are many in my cohort of educated baby boomer progressives.

Bernie Sanders is not attempting to destroy the Democratic Party.   He is attempting to purify it.     He is part of a tradition, the liberal ideological vein versus the broader more pragmatic governing party.

Howard Dean spoke of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" in 2004.   Eleanor Roosevelt represented the wing even when her husband FDR was compromising with southern racists to pull together a governing coalition.  George McGovern instead of Ed Muskie and Henry Jackson.

George McGovern

I have a poster of George McGovern, framed and displayed with dignity on a wall of my house.   My son asked me once, "Who is he?"   It was the guy I quit graduate school to support because I couldn't understand how the country was going to choose Nixon instead of him for president.   I decided I didn't want to be an historian.  I wanted, like McGovern, to change the world.  Via politics.

(I learned the world didn't particularly want to be changed by me.)

Bernie Sanders is not criticizing the policies of the progressive left.  Indeed, he is embracing them more wholeheartedly and unequivocally than Hillary Clinton, who represents the traditional Democratic Party method of doing progressive politics.  

Bernie is against half-measures.  He wants the full progressive agenda:
   *** Single payer health, not health insurance.  
   *** Free college tuition at public universities, not help with loans.
   *** $15 minimum wage, not just "higher minimum wage."
   *** End free trade agreements to protect American workers, not just "fairer" trade.
   *** End big donor political gifts, not just limit and control them.
   *** Very high marginal tax rates, not just higher tax rates.

Bernie is challenging the political legitimacy of the interest groups and donors who are part of the progressive Democratic donors, K Street lobbies, bipartisan corporate givers--the Washington Establishment--because these groups inevitably pull the party toward half measures.   Incumbent Democrats justify the half measures as the best possible under the political circumstances.   But progressive voters are impatient and frankly skeptical.  They think they have sold out, and they have evidence to cite.

   *** Wall Street got fined and regulated, but not prosecuted.  It looks to many like the fix was in.

   *** America is stepping back from Middle East wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but slowly and incompletely.   It looks like neo-con hawkishness still survives, especially in Hillary.

   *** Obamacare is better than nothing but it is complicated and incomplete and it leaves the health insurers in the middle of things.   It looks like the corporations won.

Bernie's campaign says no more half measures.  He wants real change.  Bernie represents, as Obama did 8 years ago, the expression of liberal progressive hope and change.  It is, once again, a hope for transformation.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Progressives learned that the glorious potential of the 2008 election faced the reality of the real world of hard-fought, incremental change.  The New Deal was created by FDR, not Eleanor.    A college classmate suggested this thought:

   The notion that Sanders will be transformative, that Mitch McConnell will quake in his shoes and be compelled to follow Sanders into the brave new world of single-payer and reordering taxes is like having real estate here in my bag.  The way to change -- at least change that requires legislation -- is slow, hard, and gradual.  The models are LBJ, Ted Kennedy, Henry Waxman, and Nancy Pelosi (the last of whom, by the way, should get the real credit for pushing ACA across the line, when the Administration thought all was lost after Scott Brown was elected).


An astute Bernie supporter--Jeff Golden, a former Democratic officeholder--who lives in the progressive college town of Ashland, Oregon suggests that Bernie's revolt against the progressive political establishment will elicit support from Trump voters doing revolution against the Republican establishment.   There is a common theme of political revolution against the elites.   Bernie can win with progressive votes plus Trump votes, he suggests.

I think not.   I did not hear Republican audiences cheering Bernie.   They called him a communist.   They cheered when Trump said he was weak in knuckling under to Black Lives Matter.  They hoot and object at the idea of higher marginal taxes on the rich.   Bernie condemns the rich.  Trump audiences think lots more of them could be rich themselves, if there weren't so many unearned privileges for minorities and the lazy.   The problem with America isn't inequality.   It is Obama-phones for the poor.   Cut those and we can balance the budget, their candidates say.  The audiences love it.   That's right!  Obama-phones: that's why the budget doesn't balance!  

The commonality of impatience and disdain for the establishment is real.   But it is a sign of greater division not unity.   Trump's voters are impatient with the influence of progressives, who insist on political correctness.   

The Sanders campaign and the Trump-Cruz campaigns reflect division within the parties and between the parties.  Both the progressive left and the nationalist right are impatient with the gradualism of practical government in a world of checks and balances and divided government.  They want very different things, and they want it now.

People voted for gridlock.  But they don't like it.