Bernie Persists

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Bernie Sanders is supposed to be introducing his campaign manager and most loyal staffer, Jeff Weaver. The Vermonter and unwavering Bernie shadow for 32 years has just published a book called How Bernie Won, a rehash of the 2016 Democratic primary with the socialist senator as revolutionary victor in the Democratic party’s war of ideas. Its titular thesis was seemingly vindicated the night before: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ben Jealous, both Berniecrats, won upset victories in their primary races.

When Sanders arrives, the party erupts into cheers. “I’ve known this young man a long time,” he says, grumbling his gratitude for Weaver as he reminisces about their first doomed campaign together. Before long, however, he slides into a version of his old stump speech—now with more than a little gloating thrown in.

“We won that one, too,” he says of the 1986 campaign that Weaver joined. In fact, they won a meager 14 percent of the vote, but Sanders means “winning” in the philosophical, post-2016 sense of the word. “Three years ago, talking about Medicare for all was a crazy idea. Now I don’t know what percentage of Democrats are running on the idea of Medicare for all,” he says. About 60 percent of the Democratic primary candidates who’ve won so far this year support some version of Sanders’s Medicare For All proposal, according to the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

“Free college!”—another new standard for 2018’s hopeful blue wave surfers—“All the ideas we talked about that were so radical and extreme are now mainstream!” Sanders says. Rejecting corporate donors and taking only small donations—that has long been part of Sanders’s platform too: “We try to make the campaign by the people and for the people. What do you see today?” A field crowded with copycats, that’s what.

“What’s not important is who wins governor of Virginia, or whatever,” Sanders says. (He might have meant Maryland, where Jealous won his gubernatorial primary the night before with help from Our Revolution, a fundraising group that grew out of Sanders’s campaign). What matters is Bernie’s way of winning: “It’s under the radar, grassroots,” he reminds the audience. “We are in the business of transforming this country.”

And Bernie Sanders’s business model—the one that’s made him the beloved socialist grandpa of the populist new left, and the bête noire of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee—may now be the Democratic party’s best bet.

It’s a model that hasn’t changed much in nearly 50 years of public life. Old friends and former staffers describe Sanders as a restless demagogue who crafted a formula for a populist, socialist political campaign born of a 1970s-era sense of justice and pursued it relentlessly. For much of that formative decade, he ran stubbornly, some might say delusionally, as the perennial longshot candidate of the far-left Liberty Union party, netting single-digit percentages in Vermont Senate and governor’s races until 1980, when he ran for mayor of Burlington as an Independent and won by just 10 votes. According to contemporaries from those days, city mayor was the first real job he ever held.

Huck Gutman, a lifelong Burlingtonian who served as then-congressman Sanders’s chief of staff from 2006 to 2012, first met the candidate in the early 1970s. Back then, winning wasn’t the point. “I don’t think it ever occurred to me,” Gutman says. But after winning mayoral, U.S. House, and U.S. Senate races and then becoming a serious contender in a presidential primary—all while running on the same set of ideas—Sanders’s socialism hasn’t softened. And his victories have deepened his long-held desire to retain control of his message and his movement’s growing electoral gains. “The sense I always have of Bernie Sanders is that he’s stayed the same,” Gutman says, paraphrasing Lillian Hellman’s letter to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. “He cannot and will not cut his conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

Sanders isn’t opposed to tailoring his message to suit contemporary communications media, however. During most of the 27 years he’s served in Congress, Sanders has cultivated an audience whom he enthusiastically and directly educates in the ideology of the far left. As Gutman explains, Sanders’s national call-in radio program, Brunch with Bernie, which first aired in 2003 as a vehicle to harness populist opposition to the invasion of Iraq, was “an hour out of his week to try to combat the domination of the airwaves by so-called conservatives.” Even then, Sanders was ahead of Democrats, “none of whom really felt the need to go on talk radio.”

Today, he hosts a streaming Facebook series, The Bernie Sanders Show, whose guests have included Bill Nye and Elizabeth Warren and where Sanders regurgitates talking points and discusses the news of the day through a socialist lens. Many episodes attract millions of viewers.

Sanders is less interested in a Firing Line format or a televised town hall-style debate. “He’s not looking to create a public forum. I wouldn’t say he’s a pluralist,” says Burlington journalist and longtime Sanders associate Greg Guma, who has known Sanders since his Liberty Union days and wrote The People’s Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution. After his mayoral election campaign in 1980, Sanders recruited Guma to help launch an early version of The Bernie Sanders Show: “He was concerned about how the media would treat him. ‘I should have a spot on the nightly news,’ he said.” Mayor Sanders wanted to communicate his ideology directly to the people. He eventually got his way: For the last two years of his decade in city hall, Sanders hosted a public-access TV show, Bernie Speaks With the Community. His preferred communication style seemed “perilously close to a state media situation,” Guma says. It also belied an arrogance and insecurity Guma knew to be typical of his friend Bernie.

Guma notes that Sanders’s desire to speak to audiences unfiltered sounds a lot like the rationale President Trump now uses to justify his destructive Twitter habit. “Being in office convinced him more of the power of the individual in history as motive force,” Guma says of Sanders. During a discussion in the late 1990s, when Guma challenged him for “selling out to the mainstream” after a photo-op of Sanders with the Clintons on the White House lawn, “he said he’d realized his power,” Guma recalls. “You could call it hubris,” he adds, “He has demagogic tendencies.”

Sanders’s everyman-socialist story, however tightly woven, has suffered snags. Two Sanders scions have recently risen to prominence in New England progressive politics: Sanders’s stepdaughter, Carina Driscoll (whose mother, Jane, met Sanders just before he won the Burlington mayor’s race and married him eight years later), lost her own bid for city hall this year. But Driscoll did win an endorsement from Our Revolution. Sanders’s son Levi, a candidate for Congress in New Hampshire, did not get Our Revolution’s backing, nor his father’s. The decision, family friend Sandy Baird says, “Seems odd to me. I know why they backed Carina—she was the most progressive candidate in a three-way race. I don’t know why they didn’t take a position in favor of Levi.”

A paternal endorsement would compromise Bernie’s longstanding disdain for “dynasty politics.” But it is Levi who was weaned on his father’s stubborn principles. Father and son barely scraped by while Sanders ran for Senate and governor under the Liberty Union mantle in the lean 1970s. They eked out a life together in bohemian squalor, dependent on the kindness of neighbors in Burlington. (Levi’s mother, Susan Campbell Mott, shared custody but wasn’t a constant presence in the boy’s life, according to friends who knew Bernie then.) Sanders “didn’t have a job job,” says then-neighbor and political ally Darcy Troville. Troville worked at IBM and attended the University of Vermont while his friend Bernie made a quasi-vocation out of running for office.

“We were all poor, but he didn’t pay his utilities,” Troville recalls. “His apartment was stark and dark. A lot of people said he was on welfare.” He’d often stop by bearing gifts of food and sundries from other hippies for Bernie and Levi. When he wasn’t campaigning for a single-digit slice of the statewide vote, Sanders was a freelancer: sometimes a writer, sometimes a carpenter, occasionally a cutter-and-paster of educational film strips about Eugene V. Debs.

Poverty informed the platform that eventually put him in power. “Taking from the one side of Burlington to give to the other, which was where we were,” as Troville describes the ethos of the day, one that, for Bernie Sanders at least, never died. “Most people outgrow it. I don’t think he has. You could turn the clock back—he was saying the same things.” He was living them as well: Before his political career, Sanders never directly participated in the capitalist system his constituents and supporters primarily serve. And yet, “Now he’s a millionaire,” Troville marvels. “That’s gotta change you, but he hasn’t changed his message.”

Sanders the unlikely socialist millionaire hasn’t accrued his fortune without controversy, and his wealth may undermine his message were he to mount another presidential campaign. An FBI investigation of Jane Sanders’s problematic money management as president of Burlington College—which closed in 2014 after her ambitious plan to transform the school from an affordable, local college into a destination for wealthy children of the suburbs failed utterly—hasn’t damaged the family’s fortunes. Sanders bought a third home in 2016, and he raked in more than $1 million two years in a row from sales of Our Revolution and its Grammy-nominated audiobook. The young adult version, Bernie Sanders’ Guide to Political Revolution, was also a bestseller.

Baird, who taught at Burlington College until its closing, has known Bernie Sanders on both sides of prosperity. “He was a socialist, he was a hippie, he was a wreck. He had an apartment that was chaotic to put it mildly. He had a car held together with tape. He was a good single parent, but without much money. And all of a sudden he was mayor.” Sanders’s ascent to the presidency in 2020 would be no less shocking than his narrow 1980 win, she says. But of one thing she’s convinced: “He’s always been the same. Always.”

“He’s running for president,” Guma assures me, when I ask about Bern-mentum for 2020, “he’s a movement and the head of a personality cult.” Jeff Weaver demurs when asked about Sanders’s plans for 2020 but says that if Sanders runs, he’s on board. A Sanders staffer I met at Weaver’s party is less circumspect, saying her money is on another Sanders presidential run. Guma agrees. “The establishment will put up various people, but he’ll announce, no doubt,” he says, adding that Jane Sanders is encouraging Bernie to run. “She’s pushing him to do this.” Yes, he would be the oldest presidential candidate in American history, and an unreconstructed socialist millionaire, “But why wouldn’t he?” Guma says. “He’s the presumptive front-runner.”

In other words, The Bernie Sanders Show must go on.

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